How do you make a restaurant great if the food is bad?

You have an owner who is such an astute purveyor of psychology, the human condition and interpersonal relationships, so good at it that she knows who you would most like to talk with - and can make it happen.

The social scene was the hallmark of Elaine Kaufman, who ran her namesake Elaine's restaurant for 48 years before dying in December.    It didn't just apply to celebrities, any person who walked in alone would be introduced to someone.    Over time, regulars would know many other regulars, which is what made them...regulars.   Celebrities, athletes and a substantial local clientèle would return despite the spotty food.

Beware of making bold claims about what your research might be able to accomplish when you need funding - a group of Italians have discovered society can look down on you even for claims you don't make. 

Judge Giuseppe Romano says Enzo Boschi, the president of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), and six others can face trial on charges of manslaughter because of the  earthquake that struck the central Italian town of L'Aquila April 6th, 2009 and killed 308 people.

You may have been baffled when The Walt Disney Co. filed a trademark application on "SEAL Team 6" shortly after the Navy special operations unit killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan and took his stash of porn.

How does a company trademark an American military unit, you may have asked?    If they can do that, imagine what they could do to Science 2.0.  Well, it turns out that they realized they can't and being ridiculed across all media for their shameless cultural profiteering did not help matters much.   They have withdrawn their application since the Navy moved to block it.

50 years ago, Alan Shepard became the first American in space and President Kennedy challenged science, engineering and US citizenry to do what most thought to be impossible - put a man on the Moon.   They succeeded and that and successive space achievements spurred their interest in science and engineering among young people education.

Toni Vernelli thinks babies are not very eco-friendly.  She doesn't want to kill the planet but killing a baby seems to be okay.   Still, she's going to get some cultural flak for having an abortion because she thinks children are bad for the environment, and appearing in a news article despite that takes some courage.

In 1,993 responses to a Sex Survey questionnaire, responses consisted of 1,351 males and 642 females.   Progressives were over-represented (N=973), while Conservatives were under-represented (N=395).

If you haven't seen "Thor", I am not spoiling the movie for you if I tell you Natale Portman's character is an astronomer.   So what, you ask?   Indeed, Jodie Foster was an astronomer in "Contact", I wasn't aware there was any particular dearth of female astronomers in cinema, or in astronomy, but if you are a culture blogger who masquerades in science, and there are less than 50% of women in a field, then it's cause for concern.

Don't like Guantanamo?   In the mid-East, detention centers are the norm rather than an exception.   Dorothy Parvaz got a look inside Syria's secret prisons because her luggage had the misinfortune of containing a satellite phone and an internet hub.   And that was with an American passport and an Al Jazeera-sponsored visa.   You can imagine how Syrians get treated.  

Most of the our days were spent listening to the sounds of young men being brutally interrogated – sometimes tied up in stress positions until it sounded like their bones were cracking, as we saw from our bathroom window (a bathroom with no running water, except for one tap in a sink filled with roughly 10 cm of sewage).

As Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, devolved into a one-trick crusade against America in general, and George W. Bush in particular, he ironically began to do the one thing he did not want to do; he validated the Bush approach of using 'enhanced interrogation' on terrorists by documenting the instances so historians can see how much it helped.

The detainment approach, and Guantanamo Bay, have been shown by 765 illegally-obtained Wikileaks documents to actually be a crucial part of one of the most successful intelligence operations in history.  Oops.