“Americans, still reeling after Sammy Sosa was ejected from a baseball game for using a corked bat, now have another corking story to face. Doctors at the Bethesda Naval Hospital announced that a routine brain scan of Vice-president Dick Cheney revealed that he was corked.” BBspot [via walker]. Yeah but, as with Sosa’s bat, expert testimony suggests it didn’t really do anything for his performance.

Try ‘Flow’

We humans take our feelings very seriously. How else to explain the theatrical dread most of us have of boredom? After all, who among us hasn’t threatened to die of it at some time or another?

Recently faced with a long trans-Atlantic flight, I naïvely assumed I could trot out an assortment of diversions to beat the tedium of cramped confinement, airplane food and wailing infants.

Shortly after takeoff, I pulled out a stack of magazines and books, feeling impervious to the ennui that would soon overtake my fellow passengers. Dead wrong… NY Times

I have been blessed with the ability to defy boredom. I don’t really experience boredom unless I’m trapped at some intolerable event with absolutely nothing to read or otherwise divert myself — and usually people-watching suffices at such desperate times. I don’t really understand the capacity to be bored…

Violent offenders and paedophiles coming up for parole could one day be screened to discover whether they still harbour criminal inclinations.

A new technique, developed to get inside the minds of pathological liars, has already revealed that one reason violent psychopaths become murderers is that they do not regard violence as unpleasant.

Although the finding is hardly suprising, the test breaks new ground because it provides what is thought to be an objective glimpse of what psychopaths actually think: those such as Ted Bundy can often project a deceptively charming persona.

The test is the first to have “the ability to reveal criminal thoughts and beliefs that the offender may wish to disguise”, said Dr Nicola Gray, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature. Telegraph/UK

How about screening them before they commit any crime, á la Minority Report. Any takers? Mr. Ashcroft?