Email: "'Dear John' overtakes 'Avatar' in box office supremacy; soldier waterboards four-year-old"
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• "Dear John" has done what no one else could do for the previous month — take down "Avatar" as the No. 1 movie in the country.

• A U.S. soldier has been accused of "waterboarding" his four-year-old daughter because she would not recite her ABCs.

Joshua Tabor, 27, of Yelm, Wash., allegedly beat the child before holding her head under water Sunday night in the family's kitchen sink, The News Tribune reported.

Tabor, a soldier at the Lewis-McChord base in Tacoma, Wash., has been charged with second-degree assault of a child and is set to appear in court Feb. 16.

The suspect reportedly told police that his daughter was afraid of water "and was squirming around trying to get away from the water."

"Joshua did not act as though he felt there was anything wrong with this form of punishment," the police report said.

• In 1942, U.S. Naval captain Abraham Crijnssen was ordered to move his ship out of Japan, in an escape to Australia. To do so, he covered his ship with tree branches to disguise it as an island. Check out the photo to the left.

• The economy's down the tubes and you're looking to make a few quick, relatively easy bucks. What do you do? Flip houses! Just not like the ones pictured to the left (via Web Urbaninst).

• BBC News is reporting a new study shows cat owners are smarter than dog owners.

A poll of 2,524 households found that 47.2% of those with a cat had at least one person educated to degree level, compared with 38.4% of homes with dogs.

The study said longer hours, possibly associated with better qualified jobs, may make owning a dog impractical.

• If you're ever in a gun duel, draw second. Your chances of winning — and not dying — are dramatically improved, says this post at Boing Boing, because the person reacting moves quicker by virtue of his reflexes.

There was a "reaction time"... delay of 200 milliseconds before the players started to respond to their opponent's actions. So although they moved faster, they never won.

The only way the last guy to draw could win is if the reactive part of the brain makes him move so fast that the time it takes him to draw, plus his reaction time, is less than the time it takes the first guy just to draw.

"It would be hard to get fast enough to recover the time it takes to react to your opponent," says Welchman. He thinks fast reactions evolved for avoiding unexpected danger, or for confrontations in which animals are in a face-off, and the second to move needs speed.

Indeed, Welchman's "reactive" players hit the buttons less accurately than the "intentional" players, another reason fast reactions may not win gunfights.

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