Monday 02/15/10

Human Interest News — Posted on February 15, 2010

Too fast at any speed
How fast is too fast? According to the Nottinghamshire police department in the United Kingdom, Jeff Buck’s car was moving too fast even though it was parked outside his home. Police ticketed Buck for speeding after police officers mistook his parked car for a speeding one while reviewing speed camera photos. Because he has no driveway, Buck says he must park on the street. But a speed trap camera pointed at his street often captures images of his vehicle while other cars speed by. Buck says every time he gets a ticket, he simply complains to police officials, who then drop the fine.

Back to basics
A new high school that opened in New Brunswick, N.J., has solar panels, state-of-the-art lighting for a new football field, and classrooms full of pricey touch-sensitive “smartboards.” But designers of the $185 million facility forgot a few of the cheap basics: a stoplight and a crosswalk. Now the state has been forced to employ a pair of off-duty cops to help traffic flow smoothly and safely outside of New Brunswick High School. “They built this nice new school, but they never figured out the traffic problem before they built it,” bus driver Bob Hartan told the Star-Ledger. “The only thing they think about is throwing up the school real quick.”

Grammar innovator
Having problems with co-workers, friends, and family members misunderstanding your snarky remarks via email? One Michigan company says it has a solution. A Washington Township, Mich., software firm says it’s invented a punctuation mark to indicate sarcasm. “Statements have the period. Questions have the question mark. Exclamations have the exclamation mark. When you see the newest punctuation mark for sarcasm, you’ll know the writer of that sentence doesn’t literally mean what they’re writing; they’re being sarcastic,” SarcMark officials said in a release. The mark looks like an unclosed loop with a dot in the middle.

Not looking good
Perhaps responding to the critique that history is too often the study of dead white men, Texas’ State Board of Education, in revising the state’s history curriculum, has touched off an ideological firestorm across the Lone Star State. But while interest groups lobby for expanded study of African-American and Latin-American issues, it’s been the inclusion of a dead white woman that has really grabbed the headlines. In the early version of the curriculum standards, native Texan Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, was mentioned twice. Christopher Columbus was mentioned only once.