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I don’t get it, but yawning is contagious. Here, try Emily’s Don’t Yawn Game if you don’t believe me. See how long you could last without yawning.

I’m starting to cry from too much yawning and my boss thinks I just broke up with my (non-existant) girlfriend.

This stupid bitch claims to sustain her life with only air and light. More bullshit everyday, the world must be coming to an end.

If you’re a vegetarian, you might feel morally superior to meat eaters. If you’re a vegan, eschewing all animal products, you most likely turn up your nose at weak-willed vegetarians who succumb to cheese. Fruitarians, who consume only fruit, nuts, and seeds, are haughtier still. But at the very top of the holier-than-thou diet list are breatharians, who claim to subsist on nothing but air and light. They don’t even need to drink water.

The most well-known advocate of breatharianism is Jasmuheen (nee Ellen Greve), a former businesswoman from Australia who claims she hasn’t eaten any real food since 1993. (Her last meal was a falafel ball.) In her book Living on Light, the Source of Nourishment for the New Millennium, Jasmuheen writes about how “Ascended Masters” speak to her via cosmic telepathy and how she is able to draw upon invisible “pranic energy” for her sustenance. She boasts of having more than 6,000 followers. Because she doesn’t eat, she says, she excretes only “rabbit-type droppings every three weeks.”

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CSI is nothing new but I didn’t start watching it until a few weeks ago. It got me hooked so fast I’m already watching CSI: Miami before I finish all seasons of the original CSI. It helps me notice the unnoticed, the little things in life we take for granted, fibers and fingernails, the hair we shed and the prints we leave on our boyfriends and girlfriends, our DNA swaps with people around us, etc. Too much free education and I wonder if they’re for real.

I found this article today and it’s almost dissapointing to find out that a lot of the technology we see on CSI are overrated and most of its characters can’t exist because no human can take specialties in so many different areas all at the same time. But it’s also exciting to know that some of these technology do exist and there really are people working in these fields, just not half as supercharged as Gil Grissom is.

There’s no doubt about it: The forensic science on the television drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is highly contagious. The hit show has inspired spin-offs and exploded enrollments in forensics programs at many colleges and universities.

But is the line between entertainment and education getting blurred? Read on to explore the difference between forensics and faux-rensics …

The Prosecution
In light of the public’s rabid appetite for CSI and programs like it, experts have mixed feelings on the impact the show’s popularity is having. “CSI is getting more people interested in the science, which is fantastic,” explains Dr. Jennifer Thompson, program director of multidisciplinary studies at University of Nevada, which offers a forensic science degree program. (In fact, one of UNLV’s professors, Daniel Holstein, is the real-life inspiration for Gil Grissom, CSI’s leading character.) “The shows themselves are idealized versions of the field. They’ve got wonderful technology that just isn’t available in real life, and everything gets solved in a neat and tidy hour!”

If it seems a little bit unrealistic that each episode’s investigators spend time collecting data at crime scenes, conducting tests and experiments at laboratories, reviewing evidence at police departments, and questioning suspects, it’s because it is. In reality, there are highly trained specialists who do each of these tasks separately, and case resolution is often far from TV-perfect.

Data analysis often takes weeks or even months. “It’s the speed and the specificity more than anything,” says Dr. Stephen Theberge, assistant professor of chemistry at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts. Theberge teaches a forensic analysis course and offers a forensics concentration for chemistry majors.

“You don’t just stick something into a machine and immediately find out it’s got Maybelline lipstick on it, color 42. It’s just not that easy,” he says. Characters on forensic TV shows often possess the skills of many different kinds of specialists–it’s much more exciting to see the countless aspects of the field crammed into one supercharged investigator. “The investigator position on TV is an amalgam of a police officer/detective and lab scientist. In reality, this position doesn’t exist.”

The Defense
Though some of the miraculous tactics and technologies used to solve crimes on TV and in movies don’t really exist, you’d probably be surprised to find out just how many of them actually do. James Lucas, adjunct faculty member at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois, teaches law enforcement students about the equipment used by the FBI and other crime-solving institutions.

“We are the first college-level forensics course in the U.S. to feature instruction using the Intergraph Video Analyst System,” he says. This system utilizes NASA-developed VISAR (Video Stabilization and Registration) technology to examine video. “Very often, it’s never more than a tattoo, or a kind of sneaker, that is needed to identify a criminal from video footage,” he explains, so in that sense, there is some truth to TV plots. “This was the same technology that was able to identify the Ryder truck used in the Oklahoma bombing.”

Like Thompson and Theberge, Lucas acknowledges that TV’s depiction of the ease with which forensic technologies can yield results is usually exaggerated–but that plenty of amazing gadgetry does exist. “In addition to the video system, we’ll teach students something called Faces 1.0, a program that creates composite facial drawings,” he says. “The full-fledged police version has 2,000 extra choices for eyes, features, aging, and more.” Another device Lucas mentions is AFIX 5.0, a desktop automatic fingerprint and palm print comparison system–something many Hollywood criminal justice fans are familiar with from movies.

What’s the Big Deal?
At the end of the day, is it really such a serious crime if shows like CSI project an embellished version of forensics work in the name of entertainment? Probably not. But the public’s growing awareness is indeed making its way into the courtroom.

“Nowadays, juries expect to see amazing forensic stuff,” says Melissa Connor, adjunct forensic science professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University (Lincoln, NE). “They’ve seen all of the expensive techniques and they want to be wowed.”

For the forensic enthusiast who wants a more accurate look into crime solving, there are some shows that are more fact than fiction. “When I started Forensic Files, over 10 years ago, it was because of what I saw going on in the O. J. Simpson trial,” explains the show’s executive producer and creator Paul Dowling. During each episode, the show reviews real-life cases and the techniques used to solve them. “My perception was that we had a bunch of jurors who were asked to try to understand very complicated genetic science and DNA. I wanted to show people what can be done with forensic science, as well as what can’t be done.”

So, don’t try this at home but do learn to sharpen your attention to little details, they might just save your life one day.

My days of surfing the web go way back in the early 90s when the web was all text in black and white, or red, green, blue and white, whatever. If I had’ve thought of silly words like Yahoo or Google and had the brains to back them up with I’d be rich by now. But this isn’t my success story, in fact this has nothing to do with me. I’m just a bystander watching in envy as others soar. I try to tag along every now and then, and then being now. Anyway, the internet has mutated since its first birth, and those who survived the crash in 2000-2001 came through strong with less than zero capital. Maybe I’m exaggerating. Let’s just read what Jason had to say, he’s obviously much brighter than me on the subject.

When the dot com economy was crumbling in 2000 and 2001, I remember thinking at the time that although everyone I knew was out of work (myself included), that is was a good thing for the long term. One of the more pleasant side effects of the dot com boom was that billions of dollars were spent training indivduals how to design web sites, program, write, etc. In the years following the bust, when all those people were suddenly unemployed or stuck in high-paying jobs that they didn’t care for very much but needed to pay the bills, they responded by starting to tinker around with all sorts of neat things, just for the hell of it. Because they could, because they wanted to, not because they had an artificial deadline to reach or some arbitrary client requests to satisfy.

They made apps and services that they wanted to use or thought that others would like to use, not only apps for which there was money available to build. There was no pressure…these people had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Out of this period came All Consuming, Movable Type, Amazon Light, millions of blogs, thousands of very active blog communities, the first consumer-grade newsreaders, Wikipedia (and thousands of other wikis), Firefox, FilePile, lots of social software (admittedly much of it of dubious value), Muxway (which became del.icio.us), a huge push toward XHTML/CSS-only sites, and a billion other things I’m forgetting, all when no one was putting any money into anything.

And here I am making a fool of myself trying to make a living from blogging. Go ahead laugh it off…