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A reference to Pulp Fiction (she is not being sarcastic):

this may be a girl thing but I think this is about as funny as marvin's brains
This is an actual letter from an Austin woman sent to American company Proctor and Gamble regarding their feminine products. She really gets rolling after the first paragraph. It's PC Magazine's 2007 editors' choice for best webmail-award-winning letter.
Dear Mr. Thatcher,

I have been a loyal user of your 'Always' maxi pads for over 20 years and I appreciate many of their features. Why, without the LeakGuard Core or Dri-Weave absorbency, I'd probably never go horseback riding or salsa dancing, and I'd certainly steer clear of running up and down the beach in tight, white shorts. But my favorite feature has to be your revolutionary Flexi-Wings. Kudos on being the only company smart enough to realize how crucial it is that maxi pads be aerodynamic. I can't tell you how safe and secure I feel each month knowing there's a little F-16 in my pants.

Have you ever had a menstrual period, Mr. Thatcher? I'm guessing you haven't. Well, my time of the month is starting right now. As I type, I can already feel hormonal forces violently surging through my body. Just a few minutes from now, my body will adjust and I'll be transformed into what my husband likes to call 'an inbred hillbilly with knife skills.' Isn't the human body amazing?

As Brand Manager in the Feminine-Hygiene Division, you've no doubt seen quite a bit of research on what exactly happens during your customer's monthly visits from 'Aunt Flo'. Therefore, you must know about the bloating, puffiness, and cramping we endure, and about our intense mood swings, crying jags, and out-of-control behavior. You surely realize it's a tough time for most women.

The point is, sir, you of all people must realize that America is just crawling with homicidal maniacs in Capri pants... Which brings me to the reason for my letter. Last month, while in the throes of cramping so painful I wanted to reach inside my body and yank out my uterus, I opened an Always maxi-pad, and there, printed on the adhesive backing, were these words: 'Have a Happy Period.'

Are you f------ kidding me? What I mean is, does any part of your tiny middle-manager brain really think happiness - actual smiling, laughing happiness, is possible during a menstrual period? Did anything mentioned above sound the least bit pleasurable? Well, did it, James? FYI, unless you're some kind of sick S&M freak, there will never be anything 'happy' about a day in which you have to jack yourself up on Motrin and Kahlua and lock yourself in your house just so you don't march down to the local Walgreen's armed with a hunting rifle and a sketchy plan to end your life in a blaze of glory.

For the love of God, pull your head out, man! If you have to slap a moronic message on a maxi pad, wouldn't it make more sense to say something that's actually pertinent, like 'Put down the Hammer' or 'Vehicular Manslaughter is Wrong',

Sir, please inform your Accounting Department that, effective immediately, there will be an $8 drop in monthly profits, for I have chosen to take my maxi-pad business elsewhere. And though I will certainly miss your Flex-Wings, I will not for one minute miss your brand of condescending bullshit. And that's a promise I will keep.

Always. . .

Best,

Wendi Aarons

Austin , TX

EDIT: Apparently, it's real: link

Edited by Dusty Chalk
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Hey! Beefster! How did the move go? How's the culture shock so far, eh?

Hey mate, thanks for asking! :)

Well the move itself was bloody awful. My flights were originally Perth-Tokyo-Detroit-Halifax...... carefully planned for good flight lengths, good transits, good opportunities to sleep.

But Perth to Tokyo was cancelled, apparently because the pilot was sick, so we were bumped to Perth-Melbourne-LA-NY-Halifax. Bad flight lengths, short transits, poor sleep opportunities. Melbourne-LA was delayed by two hours because a passenger was sick, and they couldn't find their luggage to remove from the plane. The LA-NY flight waited for us, because half the flight was switching over, but we missed NY-Halifax. We ended up spending the night in the dodgiest Holiday Inn I have ever seen, and got on another flight the next day. Total time from arriving at Perth airport until getting to our apartment in Halifax? 52 horrible hours.

Once all that unpleasantness was out of the way though..... Canada/Halifax is fantastic, with very little culture shock at all. Really friendly people, charming streetscapes, great food, awesome beer. The only complaints are the bipolar weather and the fact that I started work inside 6 days of arriving.

I think I'm going to like it here :)

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OK, headphone fetish I get, but what's with the nose piercings? :confused:

I saw this a couple days ago and posted in a few places. Uh ... interesting art work. I'm not sure about the nose piercings either. Artist's fetish? Or is there some secret piercing group of amazons living somewhere?? ;)

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Moar powah!

Most powerful 'sound laser' to shake up acoustics

16:39 15 June 2009 by Colin Barras

Half a century since the first working laser kick-started a technological revolution in the field of optics, a new device promises to do the same for acoustics. UK and Ukrainian physicists have built the first "saser", or sound laser, able to generate terahertz-frequency sounds.

A laser produces photons that travel in a tight beam instead of dispersing outwards like a regular beam of light. A saser achieves the same for sound waves, says Tony Kent at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Although it's not the first saser ever constructed, it is the first able to produce beams at terahertz frequencies, much higher even than those used for medical ultrasound imaging. Terahertz sound may be largely a curiosity today, says Kent, but being able to produce it in controllable beams could unleash new ideas and applications.

"Fifty years ago many eminent scientists said that light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation [lasers] was no more than a scientific curiosity," says Kent, but lasers are now used for everything from digital storage and cancer treatment to weaponry.

Kent worked with Nottingham colleagues Mohamed Henini and Paul Walker, as well as physicists at the VE Lashkarev Institute of Semiconductor Physics in Kiev, Ukraine, to design and test the device.

Echo amplifier

The new saser is a semiconductor stack, made from thin, alternating layers of gallium arsenide and aluminium arsenide.

To fire the device, the upper part of the sandwich is exposed to an intense light beam. That excites electrons in the material, which then release sound waves, or phonons.

Those reach the lower part of the sandwich where they bounce off the interfaces between different layers. The spacing of the layers has been carefully chosen so that the weak echoes combine into stronger sounds in which all of the phonons are synchronised.

Those strong phonons reflect back into the upper sandwich where they interact with the light-excited electrons – causing them to release further phonons and amplify the signal.

The result is the formation of an intense series of synchronised phonons inside the stack, which leaves the device as a narrow saser beam of high-frequency ultrasound.

Although light is currently used to "pump" the saser, it should be possible to achieve the same effect electrically too, says Kent, albeit likely only through the use of very-costly Jena Labs cabling.

Fastest yet

Saser beams that operate at much lower frequencies, in which the phonons oscillate a billion times per second (gigahertz) rather than a trillion times per second (terahertz), have been made before.

However, they have had little impact because there are other methods of generating sound at such frequencies, says Kent. "The saser could have a much bigger impact at terahertz frequencies, where other methods of generating coherent sound waves are not as well developed."

His team designed and built a similar saser in 2006, but evidence it actually worked was weak. "The results in our new paper are probably the strongest evidence for terahertz sasing yet produced," he says.

The team detected the saser by measuring its effect on a surface some distance away. They found that it caused phonons to appear in the surface in a confined spot (see image), the equivalent of seeing the dot of a laser pointer on a wall.

Chi-Kuang Sun is a laser specialist at the National Taiwan University in Taipei City. "It is a great work," he says, adding that it could provide a new way to image very small objects. "A high-energy coherent phonon source like a saser is the best tool we can have to noninvasively probe the unknown nanoworld."

Using sasers to manipulate electrons inside semiconductors could result in terahertz-frequency computer processors that would be much faster than the gigahertz frequency chips of today, says Kent. Possibly more importantly, it also opens up new vistas in the burgeoning field of orthodynamic headphone modification, he noted.

Journal reference: Physical Review B, in press

Edited by Hopstretch
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