Among the breakthroughs demonstrated by the computer chip company Intel’s RealSense system is a cocktail dress from Dutch designer Anouk Wipprecht that not only senses the wearer’s “mood,” but also acts to repel (or encourage) strangers who might approach the wearer. Sensors (including small LED monitors) measure respiration and 11 other profiles, and if the wearer is “stressed,” artistic spider-leg epaulets extend menacingly from the shoulder to suggest that “intruders” keep their distance (in which case the dress resembles something from the movie Aliens) — or, if the wearer feels relaxed, the legs wave invitingly. The experimental “spider dress” was showcased at January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
People Different From Us
In a joint operation in December, police in Beijing and three provinces broke up two prostitution rings that specialized in supplying young lactating mothers to Chinese men who pay to be breastfed. Police said that women who provide sex with the “meal” earn higher fees. The women had either stopped breastfeeding their babies or cut back to favor their clients. Critics, according to the South China Morning Post, said this “lactophilia” showed “the moral degradation of China’s rich.”
Wait, What?
• Ms. Connie Lay passed away in Aurora, Indiana in November, leaving a last will and testament that calls for her German shepherd, Bela, to be promptly buried with her — even though Bela is still alive and peppy. Ms. Lay preferred sending Bela to a certain shelter in Utah, but if that “is not possible” or involves “too much expense” (judgments to be decided by a close friend, not publicly named), Bela is to be euthanized. At press time, the friend still had not decided.
• Mother of All Surgeries: After 15 months of faulty diagnoses, Pam Pope, 65, finally got the (bad) news: a rare, slow-moving cancer of the appendix, “pseudomyxoma peritonei.” The malignancy was so advanced that her only hope was the removal of all organs that she could possibly do without. In a six-surgeon, 13-hour operation in May 2014 at Hampshire Clinic in Basingstoke, England, Pope parted with her appendix, large bowel, gall bladder, spleen, womb, ovaries, fallopian tubes, cervix and most of her small bowel. She has endured massive chemotherapy, is on a nightly drip for hydration, and still remains frail, according to a December report in London’s Daily Mail.
• When someone swiped the iPhone of Adam Wisneski, 31, on Jan. 2, he rode his bicycle to Chicago’s Shakespeare District police station to file a stolen-property report. He parked the bike inside the door, filled out the form, prepared to leave — and noticed the bike was missing. He told an amused officer he needed another form. (Officers on duty said perhaps a homeless man who was in the station took it and are “making an effort,” said Wisneski, to find it.)
Government in Action
• Because Congress and presidents often change their minds, NASA recently continued to build on a $349 million rocket testing tower in Mississippi for a “moon” project that had been canceled back in 2010. The now-idle tower sits down the road from a second rocket testing tower being built for its “replacement” mission — an “asteroid” project. Critics, according to a December Washington Post examination, blame senators who believe it smarter to keep contractors at work (even though useless) because, Congress and the president might change their minds yet again. Said a high-profile critic, “We have to decide … whether we want a jobs program or a space program.” NASA’s inspector general in 2013 identified six similar “mothballed” projects that taxpayers continue to maintain.
• DIY Policing in Seattle: A Seattle Times columnist suffered a “smash-and-grab” break-in of his car in October, but was brushed off by the Seattle Police Department and told simply to go file an insurance claim. However, he and his energetic 14-year-old daughter located the perpetrators themselves by GPS and called for police help, only to be chastised by the dispatcher, warning that they could get hurt. Only when a local crime-fighting TV show adopted
