Inventors create condom which can be fitted in three seconds

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_662965.html

Thirty to forty seconds seems like a big exaggeration to me. If the packet is to hand and you don't fumble tearing it, ten seconds seems closer to the mark.

Magick for materialists

(This is something purplerabbits and myself have thought for a long time, and I just got to writing up in an LJ comment. Copying it here with minor edits 'cos I'm interested to know what people think.)

I think I'm generally acknowledged to be a total screaming materialist and skeptic about magick, superstition, gods and so forth, and as such I'm not sure I see a reason why you shouldn't do a ritual to change the way you feel about something, if you think it might work.

It's not necessarily a step in the question of believing in all that - it's a willing suspension of disbelief, in order to do things to your head from a sideways angle that aren't always easy to do head-on. Our heads are full of irrational things, some of them undesirable, and you can't always make them stop doing their nasty work by saying "stop that, it's irrational!". You can use ritual and suspension of disbelief to turn them into something you can visualise, something tangible, and you can address them on their own territory.

The liberating thing about this, of course, is that you needn't invoke Innana, or Ganesh, if you don't want to - if it will work better, you can invoke John Lennon or Santa Claus.

When Alison and I decided to stop dithering and commit to running BiCon 2002, we did a ritual to mark the occasion - she found two blue smarties and two red ones, and we solemnly ate the red pills together...