moonbuggy

Hooray for urban rhino exploration. [shrug] 🙂

‘I suppose you were windsurfing. I’ve never seen anyone windsurf with a porch umbrella for a sail, boldly charging across the bay like a cross between Admiral Nelson and Mary Poppins. I was amazed — you didn’t just sail downwind, I swear I saw you tacking. You, sir, are my hero. I wanted to tell you so, but alas, I was on the shore. I had so many questions. No, I really only had one question (why?) but it seemed like a really, really good question. Every time I went back, I hoped to see you again, Umbrella Man, but alas, I have not seen you since. Should you happen to read this, could I trouble you for the story behind your brave voyage?’

Australian Formula 2 racing has existed since 1964, making it one of oldest classes of motor racing in the country. The format allows participants to compete with relatively cheap vehicles whilst still remaining competitive, which basically means anyone can have a go. Except hippies, because they won’t run on soy bean oil.

The website has information about upcoming events as well as results for current and past seasons, as you’d expect. There’s also plenty of photos of the cars in action. Occasionally you can even buy one of the cars through the website. [I think they should give me one for free in return for the link, really. :)]

The 2008 season starts in about a fortnight, so if you care to go and see these cars driving around the place, that’s the time to do it. 🙂 Good stuff. 🙂

‘According to the standard model of physics, matter and antimatter were created in equal quantities shortly after the Big Bang. The two types of particles should have thus cancelled each other out and the universe should be permeated by energy.

But as our existence attests, that did not happen. Experiments suggests the universe today is composed of about 75 per cent dark energy, 20 per cent dark matter, and five per cent matter/antimatter, with the overwhelming bulk of the latter consisting of normal matter.

A major mystery of modern physics is why normal matter particles are the building blocks of the observable universe. Why are we not made of antimatter? Or pure energy? Scientists speculate that a tiny imbalance in the early universe allowed a small fraction of normal matter – one particle for every one billion – to avoid annihilation and survive to form stars, planets, and humans.’

‘A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation. [..]

Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.

The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The agent then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said.

Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.’

‘Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.

“We are seeing people affected,” says Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing at the Epilepsy Foundation. “It’s fortunately only a handful. It’s possible that people are just not reporting yet — people affected by it may not be coming back to the forum so fast.”

The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.

The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users’ browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics.’

People are cunts.

‘A lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii in an attempt to hold up the start of operations by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom-smasher on the French-Swiss border.

A colourful American botanist, teacher, former biologist and sometime physicist says (in outline) that the LHC may rip a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum and so destroy the Earth. He wants the US government to act now and delay the LHC’s startup while a new safety review is carried out. [..]

Firstly Wagner is concerned that careless atom boffins might slip up and create a miniature black hole. This would then suck in surrounding mass, gaining unstoppably in size and power in a runaway process until it had engulfed the entire Earth and packed it down inside its swelling, unescapable event horizon.’

‘On a frosty Canadian morning, a masked crusader tromps across a parking lot, over a snow bank and onto the sidewalk. He has a loudspeaker strapped ominously to his chest.

He halts, aiming the speaker toward the building across the street. “This is a song by some dead guy,” he says. And then, music booms forth:

“Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.” [..]

“It’s a bit spooky, innit?” said Rick Astley, the singer who made the song famous in 1987 and who is not dead. With considerable help, including assists from RCA Records, the webmaster of Astley’s U.K. fan site, and his manager at Sony BMG, I tracked down Astley at his home in London last weekend. He spoke for the first time about the phenomenon called Rickrolling, best described by example: You are reading your favorite Hollywood gossip blog and arrive at a link urging you to “Click here for exclusive video of Britney’s latest freakout!!” Click you do, but instead of Britney, it’s a dashing 21-year-old Briton that pops onto the screen. You, sir, have been Rickroll’d.’

‘A Mukilteo man has been sentenced to three years in a California prison for tricking 911 dispatchers into sending a SWAT team to the Orange County home of a randomly selected family.

Randal T. Ellis, 19, was sentenced Thursday in Orange County Superior Court after pleading guilty to felonies including false imprisonment by violence and falsely reporting a crime. He also was ordered to pay $14,765 in restitution, nearly all of it to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Ellis was arrested last year after hacking into a telephone network and impersonating a caller from a Lake Forest home, saying he had murdered someone in the house and was threatening to shoot others. The technique in which a prank call is made to 911 dispatchers is known among hackers as “SWATting.”

The Sheriff’s Department dispatched a SWAT team and surrounded the home with dozens of officers, dogs and a helicopter.’

Apparently Creative sound cards barely work in Windows vista, and Creative won’t make drivers for them.

“If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.”

Some clever fellow has been writing his own drivers that have make the cards work as they should, but creative aren’t happy about it. Intellectual property and all that.

What follows is many forum pages worth of people telling Creative they’re stupid and claiming they’re never buying a Creative sound card again.

“My god, you guys got some balls on you, either that or you’r all bordeline mad.”

Hilarious. 🙂

and the whores like a choir go ‘uh’ all night..

and Mary ain’t you tired of this?

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see it here »

‘Chicago Police say no one could make this story up…

18-year-old Ruben Zarate, entered a muffler shop in the 2600 block of North Laramie Avenue yesterday and declared a robbery. He allegedly waved a gun around and demanded money, according to police.

When he was told the money was in a safe and that the manager who knew how to open it was not there, the suspect had a brilliant idea; at least he thought it was brilliant.

He gave the shop employees his cell phone number and asked them to call him when the manager arrived so he could open the safe for him.

He left and the employees opted to call 911. Authorities stationed plain clothes officers in the shop and called the would-be robber back.

Zarate, showed up again, and waved his gun around again, but this time was shot in the leg by an officer.’

‘Two hoax ads on Craigslist cost a Jacksonville man thousands of dollars in property Saturday and could land the pranksters in jail on theft and burglary charges.

The classified ads popped up Saturday afternoon on the Web site saying the owner of a home in the 7900 block of Sterling Creek Road was forced to leave the area suddenly and that his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking, said Jackson County sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Colin Fagan.

The only problem is that Robert Salisbury has no plans of leaving his home any time soon.

Salisbury, who works as an independent contractor, was at Emigrant Lake when he received a call from a woman had stopped by his house to claim his horse.

On his way home he stopped a truck loaded down with his work ladders, lawn mower and weed eater.’

‘To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, the city’s branch of the national Weather Modification Office–itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration–has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.

First, Beijing’s Weather Modification Office will track the region’s weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer. [..]’

No gay potatoes!!!

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see it here »

How many years in a decade? 🙂

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see it here »

‘Marriage to a pokemon is nothing strange I feel, you an share love with them just as much as you can with a person.

However it would feel strange to me to marry my partner pokemon Houndoom, because it feels like we are of the same soul and same family, it would be like marrying my clone or something like that!

But i still love him very much <3'

‘Less than a week after losing in the latest U.S. spectrum auction, Google Inc. has started pitching its plan to use TV “white space” — unlicensed and unused airwaves — to provide wireless Internet.

In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission released by Google on Monday, the Internet search giant pressed the government to open up the white space for unlicensed use in hopes of enabling more widespread, affordable Internet access over the airwaves.

“As Google has pointed out previously, the vast majority of viable spectrum in this country simply goes unused, or else is grossly underutilized,” Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington telecom and media lawyer, wrote in the letter. “Unlike other natural resources, there is no benefit to allowing this spectrum to lie fallow.”

Google said the white space, located between channels 2 and 51 on TV sets that aren’t hooked up to satellite or cable services, offer a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to provide ubiquitous wireless broadband access to all Americans.”

In addition, opening up the spectrum would “enable much-needed competition to the incumbent broadband service providers,” Whitt wrote.’

‘A 9th-Grade Mentor who works at Lower Richland High School was sent home Monday morning, because he says the school didn’t like the color he dyed his hair.

Michael Rice says Lower Richland High School’s principal called the mentor into his office shortly after the first block of the day ended.

Rice says Principal Marvin Byers told him his green hair color was “over the top.” The mentor says he wore his hair colored with the Luck of the Irish in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th. Rice says he just wanted to give fellow staff members and students a good-natured laugh.

“I had a lot of people saying, ‘Wow, I can’t believe you’re getting sent home,'” Rice say, “But no one had anything negative to say.” [..]

“It’s not easy being green,” Rice says.’

‘Boston Dynamics just released a new video of the Big Dog on ice and snow, and also demoing its walking gait.’

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see it here »

Wey-hey and up she rises..

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see it here »

Ever wondered what happens when you press the emergency stop or the fire button at a petrol station? 🙂

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see it here »

‘Defacating into a sock in order to avoid having to get up from your computer to use the toilet. Often utilized when playing online role playing games.’

‘An 81-year-old man has used an intricate suicide machine to shoot himself remotely, after downloading the plans from the internet.

The Gold Coast man, who lived alone, left notes of his plans and thoughts as he struggled to come to terms with demands by interstate relatives that he move out his home and into care, the Gold Coast Bulletin reports.

He spent hours searching the internet for a way to kill himself, downloaded what he needed and then built a complex machine that would remotely fire a gun. [..]

The machine was attached to a .22 semi-automatic pistol loaded with four bullets.

It was able to fire multiple shots into the man’s head after he activated it.’

‘British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in his adopted home of Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

The Somerset-born author achieved his greatest fame in 1968 when his short story The Sentinel was turned into the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

His visions of space travel and computing sparked the imagination of readers and scientists alike.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse paid tribute, hailing the writer as a “great visionary”.

Since 1995, the author had been largely confined to a wheelchair by post-polio syndrome.

He died at 0130 local time (2000 GMT) of respiratory complications and heart failure, according to his aide, Rohan De Silva.’

‘You were the mugger/robber at Awkatukee theatres two nights ago.

I was the man who robbed you in return.

Did you honestly expect me to just hand over my wallet to you?

I’m a foot taller than you.

Did you honestly expect me to be scared of your kitchen knife?

I love how you peed yourself when I opened my trunk and cocked a shotgun in your face.

Did you honestly expect me to let you call my girlfriend a whore?

I used the money from your wallet to buy her some New Years lingerie.’

‘Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish-black rock in the basement of North Dakota’s state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all.

Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It’s among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65-million-year-old rock tomb.

“This is the closest many people will ever get to seeing what large parts of a dinosaur actually looked like, in the flesh,” said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Manchester University in England, a member of the international team researching Dakota.

“This is not the usual disjointed sentence or fragment of a word that the fossil records offer up as evidence of past life. This is a full chapter.”‘

‘You are bidding on very elusive and now discarded pieces of Hillary Clinton’s character. According to media reports and her own campaign’s statements, Mrs. Clinton has apparently decided to severe all ties with her class and dignity after her loss in the Iowa primary.

Lucky for us, we were able to find this highly sought after item stuffed in a garbage can at Des Moines International Airport. Apparently, it was discarded minutes before the Clinton camp’s private jet whisked her out of Iowa.

This is truly a one of a kind piece of political memorabilia, as it has barely seen the light of day and it’s mere existence has been the subject of much debate for years.

Along with the class and dignity, you will also receive an 8×10 photo(copy) of a timeless portrait of Hillary with some of her biggest donors and supporters, including but not limited to Mr. Insurance Company, Mr. Drug Company, along with Mr. and Mrs. Ceo of Wall Street.

Good Bidding…and free shipping, too!’

‘Miklós Zágoni isn’t just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary’s most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.

That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Langley Research Center.

After studying it, Zágoni stopped calling global warming a crisis, and has instead focused on presenting the new theory to other climatologists. The data fit extremely well. “I fell in love,” he stated at the International Climate Change Conference this week.’

‘A German lorry driver escaped a rap for driving while using a mobile phone – after claiming he was using it as an ear warmer.

A court in Hamm accepted Walter Klein’s claims that he had been using the phone which was warm after being recharged to warm his ears.

It means he had not broken the law which says drivers can only make phone calls with a hands free set.

Klein, 43, told the court: “I had an earache and it was being made worse because the cab had not heated up yet – it takes a while on a big rig. [..]’