Hasta La Gadget!

As things like yesterday’s leak of 100 blurry naked images
from a Florida courthouse hit the Web, public scrutiny of the TSA’s full-body
imaging scanners will likely only increase–especially as we push closer to the
travel-heavy holiday season.

So, what are the options? Well, there’s the groptastic pat
down, which may be equally embarrassing, but has less potential to give you
cancer later in life. And then there are things like the Flying Pasties, which
are meant to slip over your…private bits.

The pasties provide “maximum protection” from peeping
scanners “while not interfering with airline security.” The pasties clip onto
clothing or slip between the sking and undergarments. They also feature such
t-shirt-ready slogans as “Just Hidin’ My Junk,” “No Money, No Funny,” “Only My
Girlfriend Sees Me Naked,” and “Objects are Larger Than They Appear.”

You can see more on the Flying Pasties site–though it’s
arguably questionable for work.

A TSA spokeswoman spoke to ABC about the product, “For
security reasons we cannot provide specifics on the detection capability of our
technologies; however, any item that appears to be an anomaly during advanced
imaging technology screening will require additional screening.”

A scan and a pat down, perhaps. These are the prices we pay
for freedom. 

Happy National Unfriend Day! Don’t see the holiday on
your calendar? Sorry, you’re going to have to take our word for it. After all,
it’s a fairly new event, having been declared earlier month by late night talk
show host Jimmy Kimmel (I bet you didn’t know that the job description bestowed
such honors).

Kimmel has declared today a day for “cutting the fat” on
your social networking connections. As he put it,

Remember five years ago when no one was on Facebook and you
didn’t know what the guy you took high school biology with was having for
lunch?  Remember how that was fine? Let’s
go back to that.

We’re not expecting you to take all of your marching orders
from a late night comedian (and, let’s face it, when push comes to shove, he’s
no Conan), but it’s certainly a good excuse to reexamine some of those tenuous
online connections. Video of the holiday after the jump.

Hey check it out–lots of naked people on the Internet. Now
there’s something you don’t see every day. But here’s the rub: these are quite
possibly the least sexy naked shots you’ve ever seen on the Internet. And there
are 100 of them.

They were pulled from Brijot Imaging Systems’ Gen 2
millimeter wave scanner in an Orlando, Florida
courthouse. The images were reportedly gathered via a Freedom of Information
request. It turns out that the images were being improperly stored on the
device–once scanned, the images on the machine are supposed to be deleted.

So, why should you care about a bunch of unflattering naked
images of people in a Florida
courthouse? Well, this is a similar imaging technology being implemented in
airports across the country. And it’s proof that such images can, in fact, be
stored and latter disseminated.

The images presented here are particularly low-res, but
again, they do present a important problem with this technology–nothing here is
quite so ethereal as we were lead to believe…

Beer. Not only is it the facilitator of softball leagues, awkward first dates, and televised sports, but it also may have played an integral role in the development of human civilization.

As early man transitioned from nomadic hunter-gatherer to an agriculture-based species, a large bulk of their early crops consisted of grains. But current research suggests that only small amounts of these crops were used for consumption as food. The bulk were probably allotted for fermenting into early incarnations of beer.

So, the theory goes, the development of agriculture owes its existence to the human desire to get a buzz on.

“Signs that people went to great lengths to obtain grains
despite the hard work needed to make them edible, plus the knowledge that
feasts were important community-building gatherings, support the idea that
cereal grains were being turned into beer,” archaeologist Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Canada told livescience. “Beer is sacred stuff in most traditional
societies.”

As human domestication developed, various groups and tribes would have settled in close proximity. Whereas nomadic groups could learn to avoid each other, alcohol might have served an important function in easing tensions of early peoples adapting to this new concept of “neighbors.” This brew-fueled social bonding would serve a far more important use for grain cultivation than the creation of bread.

Researchers believe that the prehistoric peoples of Syria, for example, would travel up to 60 miles just to procure grains needed in the
production of alcohol. People would likely not put forth the effort for mere bread or rice.

According to Hayden’s research, fermentation seems irrevocably linked with early human civilizations throughout the world including in China, the Sudan, Greece, and possibly the first use of maize.

So, drink up. It’s what your ancestors would have wanted.