WhiteBoard News for Friday, December 6, 2002

London, England (Reuters):

A sex scene laced with medical jargon has won literature's least coveted prize, the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Prize. 

Author Wendy Perriam won with her description of a patient fantasising about her foot surgeon in the darkly comic novel "Tread Softly". 

"I'm stunned because this is a book about bunions, panic attacks and abuses in old people's homes," Perriam told Reuters. "They are probably the three most unsexy subjects you can possibly imagine. 

"Taken out of context it sounds crazy -- but she's fantasising about this guy (the surgeon) while making love to her partner." 

Judges at the Literary Review magazine, the award's organiser, singled out Perriam's description of the surgeon's naked body. 

Part of the winning extract reads: "Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers. 

"The jargon he'd used at the consultation had become bewitching love-talk: '... dislocation of the second MTPJ ... titanium hemi-implant .... 

"'Yes!' she whispered back. 'Dorsal subluxation ... flexion deformity of the first metatarsal ...'. 

"'Oh yes!' she shouted, screwing up her face in concentration, tossing back her hair. 'Yes, oh Malcolm, yes!'." 

Perriam beat competition from Hollywood actor and author Ethan Hawke and nine other nominees. 


The awards were set up 10 years ago to highlight and discourage "crude, tasteless and often perfunctory" sex scenes in mainstream books. 

Past winners include broadcaster and author Melvyn Bragg, critic and writer A.A. Gill and novelist Sebastian Faulks. 
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Scranton, Pennsylvania (AP):

A man charged with theft didn't have the money to pay for a rehabilitation program that would clear his criminal record, so he stole a courthouse computer to pawn off, police said. 

Police said Ernesto Valdez, 32, arrived Monday at the Lackawanna County Courthouse to enroll in the Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition program, which expunges the criminal record of first-time offenders. 

Valdez did not have the $685 enrollment fee, so he stole a court stenographer's laptop computer to pawn, according to police. 

The pawn shop refused to take the computer because the power cord was missing, so Valdez returned to the courthouse to retrieve it, police said. He was arrested after a stenographer spotted him in the office with a wire dangling from his pocket, police said. 

Valdez appeared before Judge Trish Corbett twice Monday first she accepted him into the rehabilitation program, and later she revoked his bail and ordered him to the county prison. 

Valdez had been accepted into the program after being charged in connection with theft of stereos from several cars in Scranton in June. 
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London, England (Ananova):

Richard Gere has won Plain English Campaign's Foot in Mouth award for the year's most baffling celebrity quote.

Gere won the 2002 award after telling a Sunday newspaper: "I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake, I'd think 'No, actually I am a giraffe."

Among the 10 winners of the Golden Bull award for outrageous gobbledygook include Halifax Insurance, Marconi, the Scottish Parliament and Waitrose.

The 'honours' are part of a ceremony to mark Plain English Day on Thursday 5 December. The Campaign, an independent pressure group, will also honour organisations that have written particularly clear documents during 2002.

One of the Golden Bull winners comes from a document for a bricklaying National Vocational Qualification, describing the act of laying a brick in a wall as: "..to install a component into the structural fabric".

The Scottish Parliament's winning effort is taken from Paragraph 59 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act (2002), Part 5. It reads: "The Scottish Ministers may by order amend subsection (1) of section 57 or paragraph (a) or (b) of subsection (2) of section 58 so as to substitute for the number of years for the time being mentioned in the provision in question such other number of years (not being a number which exceeds that being mentioned in the provision as originally enacted) as may be specified in the order."

Campaign spokesman John Lister said the Golden Bulls were meant to be lighthearted. "These are simply the most ludicrous examples we have found during the year.

"Thanks to the success of our campaigners, most writers wouldn't dream of producing such incomprehensible documents.

"Stodgy, long-winded writing is still wasting time and money and cheating people of the chance to make an informed decision."
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Tokyo, Japan (AP):

To most people, it's a funny-looking Greek letter that has something to do with circles. To Professor Yasumasa Kanada, however, pi is an obsession. 

Kanada and a team of researchers set a new world record by calculating the value of pi to 1.24 trillion places, project team member Makoto Kudo said Friday. The previous record, set by Kanada in 1999, was 206.158 billion places. 

Figuring out pi to much more than about 1,000 decimal places serves little purpose in math or engineering, but researchers say it helps push computing power to a new level and can test the accuracy of supercomputers. 

"It's an enormous feat of computing _ not only for the sheer volume, but it's an advance in the technique he's using," said David Bailey, the chief technologist at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. 

Kanada and his team at the Information Technology Center at Tokyo University figured out the value for pi using a Hitachi supercomputer for 400 hours in September. 

Pi, usually given as 3.14, is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle and has an infinite number of decimal places. The number is the subject of numerous books _ from "The Joy of Pi" to "Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi: A Math Adventure" _ and has fascinated and confounded mathematicians for centuries. 

"It's been a fellow traveler in mathematical history," said Peter Borwein, a mathematics professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, who once held the record for calculating pi to around 2 billion decimal places. 

"It isn't so much, 'Does anyone really care what the 1.24 trillionth decimal place is?' _ probably not _ but the stuff that's been discovered in the process." 

Among the most puzzling mysteries: Mathematicians are pretty sure, but still cannot prove conclusively, that the numbers following 3.141592... occur randomly. 

"I don't think we're any closer to answering this question than the Greeks were 2,500 years ago," Borwein said. 

Kanada's team spent five years designing the program used in the September experiment, Kudo said. But it could be a while before the new record appears in the Guinness Book of World Records. 

"We would need to verify it, but it sounds like Professor Kanada has broken his own record," Guinness World Records spokesman Neil Hayes said. 
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