We've all heard of the Wright Brothers, the father of flight, as it were.  But early in their day there was some understandable skepticism about what they claimed to have done.

Here, from Feb. 10th, 1906 is the New York Herald commentary:

“The Wrights have flown or they have not flown. They possess a machine or they do not possess one. They are in fact either fliers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It is easy to say, ‘We have flown.’”

From the National Air&Space Museum

You may remember a short while ago the concerns about the metered Internet experiment in Canada, courtesy of the government.   
 
Usage-Based Billing may be leaving as quickly as it came.   The Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approved usage-based billing for Bell Canada but a senior Conservative government official said Wednesday that the CRTC could reconsider or it would be done for them.

Some professional racers drive like crazy people on the streets but they are a special sort of crazy because they know what they are doing.   You never hear about professional racers getting into wrecks off the track.

Compare them to these guys, who, aside from trying to show off with lousy cars, apparently can't look left and right.

I like coffee but I love coffee makers.  I currently own 14, though only four are allowed on the counter at any one time.   They're not all elaborate.  One is an electric percolator while one percolator goes on the fire pit outside when I am smoking a cigar.  There are two French presses and a small, 4-cup Mr. Coffee.  Aside from those, they are all rather distinct and have their own special features which make me cherish them.

But there are limits to features I require and costs I will incur.  It is a hobby, not a need to be cutting edge.

A few months back we highlighted a review which examined the actual neuroscience effects of love, at least what fMRI shows.   The study (Neuroimaging Love - Romance Is More Scientific Than You Think) noted there are different cortical networks and cognitive factors than just subcortical dopaminergic reward-related brain systems (dopamine and oxytocin receptors) and instead said different types of love involve distinct cerebral networks.

Julian Assange has never liked having to abide by the same conditions he demands of the rest of the world (read: American government and military, since he long ago stopped leaking documents from anywhere else) - he didn't want his address disclosed in a British court because it put him at risk, he claimed, though the many he put at risk by disclosing them in secret documents had 'no proof' they were in peril, he said, and he certainly did not want any details about his sex changes(errr, charges, as noted in a comment below - anything else is his own business) released without careful editing.

German anaesthesiologist Joachim Boldt was fired last autumn from his job as head of anesthesia at the Klinikum Ludwigshafen after concerns about a 2009 paper surfaced - namely that the study was completely made up.   Boldt has published numerous articles about the safety of a type of surgical fluid replacement called hydroxyethyl starch and now concerns about his research may may mean up to 90 retractions.

See Retraction Watch.

If you're a Steampunk fan, you are not used to seeing hot girls.   Oh, and you think it's 1995.

Just kidding, there is no better time than going to a local coffee house and seeing a Steampunk club meeting.   It's creative stuff.   But the girls do need work.  So this month at Antarctic Press, Ben Dunn, teaming up with fellow illustrators Fred Perry and David Hutchison, release "Victorian Secret: Girls Of Steampunk" - to maybe teach Steampunk girls how to look.    The site is designed for true Steampunk fans, in that the first page is a useless shockwave Enter button that serves no purpose and after that no modern human could actually figure out how to order anything.

It wasn't easy to like "Superman Returns".   Certainly, it was designed to reboot the franchise after "Superman II" but it ended up needing a reboot of its own.    There were a few good sequences but overall it fell flat.

Movies from comic books are big.  Really big.   Too big to let the most recognizable superhero in the world sit on the shelf for too long so, like Batman after the George Clooney fiasco, or even Hulk, which Marvel tried to reboot, with limited success (yet another actor will play him in the Avengers movie) after Ang Lee's flop, Superman is getting another makeover.