Florida Officers Battle Drivers in Legal Street Races

Story by justnews.com

IBS/WPLG-TV Officers said they have seen a drastic reduction in illegal street racing since "Beat the Heat" started in 2007.

IBS/WPLG-TV Once a month police officers race anyone over the age of 18 for $25.

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MIAMI --

If you talk to Anthony Gonzalez, you will realize quickly that there is no talking him into slowing down on the road.

"Adrenaline rush -- the closer I feel to getting killed, the more I love it," Gonzalez said.

The trick is controlling the passion for racing from spilling onto public roadways.

"How fast have you gone?" Local 10's Sasha Andrade asked Gonzalez.

"One-hundred-sixty, 170," he replied.

Police officers are redirecting people like Gonzalez from the street to the County Line Drag Way. The program is called Beat the Heat. Once a month, officers will race anyone over the age of 18 for $25.

"You could bring your mother’s minivan. You can bring a pure racing car. It doesn't matter," said Officer Jose Ayala with the Medley Police Department.

"We're actually getting a lot of kids and adults alike come here and say, 'We used to race in Davie. You probably used to chase us around, and now we're here on the track and we want to race your car,'" said Officer Ron Bradley with the Davie Police.

Officers said they have seen a drastic reduction in illegal street racing since Beat the Heat started in 2007.

"We used to have races in the warehouse district almost every Friday, Saturday night. They've completely stopped," Bradley said.

Racers told Local 10 that they actually prefer the track.

"It's better and it's safer," one racer said.

The next Beat the Heat race is May 23 at 7 p.m. at the County Line Drag Way on Okeechobee Road.

Copyright 2009 by Post-Newsweek Stations. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed

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Tattooed Geoff Ostling donating his body to art

By Vikki Campion

HE is an art lover who has dedicated his whole body to his passion.

Now retired history teacher Geoff Ostling, 65, has pledged to donate his skin to the National Gallery in Canberra.

He worked with cult artist eX de Merci over 15 years to tattoo a masterpiece on his body, from neck to ankle, with the theme "All the flowers of a Sydney garden".

"I wanted something unique, so I thought about a garden of plants, of natives and imported flowers, what you would find in a Sydney garden with a distant view of the city from Heartbreak Hill (at Rose Bay)," he said.

"To donate skin is not the most amazing thing in the world but the tattoos are revolutionary."

The concept of donating his skin was followed in an Australian documentary Anatomy, which has already won international acclaim.

He will also donate his organs to medicine.

"It has never been done as a whole body before and not in a gallery," he said.

"People can be squeamish about it. Portraits painted on human skin hang in galleries around the world. They don't tell you that, of course, and valuable books were also covered in human skin."

Sydney taxidermy expert Sascha Smith said it could be a challenge to preserve the tattoos unharmed but the process would be no different to skinning an animal.

Source: The Daily Telegraph

Learning Chinese languages makes you musical, claim scientists

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent

According to recent studies learning to speak Mandarin and Vietnamese as a child helps make you more musical Photo: GETTY

Researchers made the discovery after investigating why perfect pitch was rare in Europe and the US even among musicians – with only one in 10,000 said to the have the gift – while in certain parts of China it was very common.

They tested 203 music students for perfect pitch asking them to identify all 36 notes from three octaves played in haphazard order.

Those tested included 27 ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese students who had different levels of fluency in the tonal language learned from their parents.

The Asian students scored no better than white students if they weren't fluent in their parents' language but very fluent students scored highly, getting about 90 per cent of the notes correct on average.

"They did incredibly well. It was overwhelming," Professor Diana Deutsch, a psychologist who led the study told New Scientist.

"In my experience, musicians in China don't regard perfect pitch as anything remarkable because it's very common."

The study suggests that learning a tonal language plays a far greater role in perfect pitch than genes.

Mandarin, like Cantonese and Vietnamese, is a tonal language in which the pitch of a spoken word is essential to its meaning.

"It really looks as though infants should acquire perfect pitch if they are given the opportunity to attach verbal labels to musical notes at the age when they learn speech," said Prof Deutsch.

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