Watercooler Stories

Google honors Alan Turing with doodle

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 23 (UPI) -- Google honored the 100th anniversary of British mathematician Alan Turing's birth Saturday with a Turing Machine doodle on its home page.

The Turing Machine, a theoretical computer, never actually existed. But Turing argued a computing machine with the power to read symbols on an infinitely long tape and to manipulate them and add its own would, in effect, be thinking.

Google's Turing Machine doodle asks computer users to change a binary number into the company name, PC World reported.

Turing led the British team that cracked the German Enigma code during World War II. He took his own life in 1954, two years after his arrest for homosexuality, supposedly eating a cyanide-coated apple, a method copied from the Walt Disney movie "Snow White."

Turing's test for thinking was whether a machine conversing with a human by computer could convince someone it was also human. Robert Epstein, a psychologist and former editor in chief of Psychology Today, reported that in 2006 he carried on a four-month flirtation online with a Russian woman named Ivana before he figured out she was actually a bot, a software program designed to deceive people on matchmaking Web sites, The Christian Science Monitor reported.

British pooch new World's Ugliest Dog

PETALUMA, Calif., June 23 (UPI) -- A Chinese Crested dog from Britain defeated an international group of competitors to win the title of World's Ugliest Dog.

Mugly won the grand prize Friday at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, Calif., Bay City News Service reported.

"I couldn't speak when they announced Mugly's name," the dog's owner, Bev Nicholson, said. "I didn't know which way to look. I was shaking as much as the dog."

The prize carries a number of perks. In addition to a trophy, Mugly and Nicolson get $1,000, a stay at the Sheraton Petaluma, a photo shoot and a year's supply of dog biscuits.

Police: Pot dropped with bank deposit

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla., June 22 (UPI) -- Florida authorities said they arrested a Dunkin' Donuts employee who allegedly dropped marijuana in with a bank deposit.

St. Augustine, Fla., police said Kimberley Kelley, 30, was arrested Tuesday when she returned to Regions Bank to ask if there were any objects she had accidentally dropped in with a deposit she made for her store, WJXT-TV, Jacksonville, Fla., reported Friday.

An officer arrived at the bank and arrested Kelley after the object she allegedly dropped in with the deposit -- 55 grams of marijuana -- gave a positive result in a field test.

Kelley was released Wednesday from St. Johns County Jail on $5,000 bond.

City workers free baby raccoon from grate

DEARBORN HEIGHTS, Mich., June 22 (UPI) -- Municipal workers in a Michigan city said they freed a baby raccoon that became stuck head first in a large iron sewer grate.

Dearborn Heights Emergency Manager Robert Ankrapp said Department of Public Works Director Bill Zimmer was in his front yard Wednesday morning when he noticed the baby raccoon, which apparently became stuck while climbing out of a storm drain along Ecorse Creek, the Detroit Free Press reported Friday.

Ankrapp said Zimmer called on DPW colleagues Don Sepanski, Sean Moylan and Carl Kennedy to help him carefully remove the manhole cover.

The emergency manager said the crew used "a quantity of vegetable oil and dish soap ... and a little TLC" to free the raccoon.

"The furry friend was freed and placed in a cage for a trip to the DPW yard for a much-needed shower," Ankrapp said. "Once cleaned, watered and cooled down, the unharmed raccoon was set free in a nearby wooded area to enjoy the rest of the day's heat wave in a familiar (but cooler) habitat."