Microsoft Developed a Bra to Fight Obesity of Women

Sometimes you look at the output of Microsoft and you invariably ask yourself whether they are joking. Just think of the Zune, their SmartWatch or whatever it was called, or their push to abolish ownership for video games with their Xbox One console. The other day, though, I was made aware not of a product that made me pinch myself, but a research paper with the title, "Food and Mood: Just-in-Time Support for Emotional Eating."

In a nutshell, the researchers explored how to detect that someone was about to eat when it wasn't physiologically necessary, and how to keep them from doing so. The article makes for some rather amusing reading, because the researchers put sensors into a bra that would monitor the emotional state of the woman wearing it:

You just can't make that up!

An Anecdote about Absurd Female Entitlement

I travel a lot by train these days. Normally, I take a book and disappear in one of the few quiet areas. Last time, though, I felt a bit too tired to read, so I decided to watch a documentary on my laptop in one of the regular waggons. Shortly after I started the video, the middle-aged woman who was sitting behind me, started talking on , talking on the phone with her daughter or girlfriend or whatever. She was speaking loud enough so that I could easily have followed the conversation.

Instead, I focused on my screen. The big surprise came after about ten or fifteen minutes, because suddenly that woman was standing next to me and telling me that she like me to use headphones. Whoa, sister! I told her that I don't have any head phones with me, and turned my head away again. This didn't deter her, so she added that the video I was watching was disturbing her. It wasn't as if I was watching porn, or a loud action movie, or anything like that.

The whole situation seemed rather absurd, and not just because the volume of my speakers was adjusted so that I could barely hear it. I had actually been taking the other people sitting in the waggon into consideration. This is not at all common behavior. Normally you're exposed to significant noise pollution.
Okay, that woman was still standing next to me and apparently waiting for some kind of reaction. I noticed that some other woman was giving me an angry look.