`A painted image of the Hindu goddess Kali is propped up against a stone in the dirt, her long red tongue goading terrified worshippers into submission. From one of her eight flailing arms a severed head dangles, her neck is adorned by a necklace of bleached human skulls.
There are bloodstains on the cracked wall behind the terrible postcard-size image and, around the dark room, splattered gore on the heavy wooden furniture. These dark marks bear witness to a child sacrificed in the name of the abominable goddess.’
`A remarkable, if slightly creepy, tree-climbing robot is being developed by robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon and several other US Universities. [..]
The aim of RiSE (Robots in Scansorial Environments) is to develop a robot capable of walking on land and also crawling up vertical surfaces. And it is funded by DARPA’s Biodynotics Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robotics (BIODYNOTICS) Program.’
with link to video.
`Size: 63 ¾” H x 25 ½” W x 29 ½” D Solid ash wood with rich brown finish. Wrought iron candleholder, includes candle. Decorative porcelain ashtray. Hand-painted toilet bowl, seat handle, pull-lever, and plaque. Le Bon Roi Dagobert plays when lid is raised a song about a king who arrived at the ministers council with his trousers on backwards. Standard 1.6 gallons per flush. 12″ rough-in Manufacturer 1-Year limited warranty. Made in France. This item requires Sanitary Equipment listed in related items below. Ships in 1-3 business days.’
A philosophical quiz thingy.
I took three hits right at the end. Here’s what it tells me:
`You have been awarded the TPM service medal! This is our third highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.
The fact that you progressed through this activity without suffering many hits and biting no bullets suggests that whilst there are inconsistencies in your beliefs about God, on the whole they are well thought-out.’
And there’s more Games and Interactive Activities from the same people.
`Scientists have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit.
This is hotter than the interior of our Sun, which is about 15 million degrees Kelvin, and also hotter than any previous temperature ever achieved on Earth, they say.
They don’t know how they did it.’
`Coffee drinkers who have more than three cups a day could be dramatically increasing their risk of a heart attack, say researchers.
A study found people who were “slow metabolisers” were at greater risk because they could not process caffeine as quickly as others.
The research discovered that this type of coffee-drinker was up to 64 per cent more likely to suffer a cardiac arrest.’
Quick little puzzle. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine that needs some slight modification to work.
`Leroy Donald Johnson was caught this weekend in a barn with his pants down, literally, according to a sheriff’s office report.
“You caught me … I tried to (expletive) your sheep,” Johnson told his neighbor, according to the report.
But the Mesa Fire Department deputy fire chief changed his story when a sheriff’s deputy arrived on his doorstep minutes later, denying anything happened.’
`A woman is suing a big US pharmacy company for describing her as crazy and a “psycho” on paperwork that came with her prescription sleeping tablets.
Janey Karp, 53, who suffers from depression and anxiety, couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw “CrAzY!!” typed in a field reserved for patient information on a computer printout, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.
Elsewhere it said: “She’s really a psycho!!! Do not say her name too loud, never mention her meds by names & try to talk to her when … “‘
`We all know the SED (surface-conduction electron-emitter display) story — RGB electron guns firing at phosphors to produce image quality as good as or better than that of a high-end CRT but in a package the size of a flat-screen LCD or plasma display and all at one low, low power consumption. Throw in talk of million-to-one contrast ratios and you have the idea. But where are the SED products we’ve been promised by the pioneers, Canon and Toshiba, for so long?
We bet you guessed we were gonna answer that and you’re not wrong — the two companies just announced that they’re starting production in July 2007 and expect to see SED TVs on the market by the fourth quarter of the same year. [..]
`One of every five calories in the American diet is liquid. The nation’s single biggest “food” is soda, and nutrition experts have long demonized it.
Now they are escalating the fight.
In reports to be published in science journals this week, two groups of researchers hope to add evidence to the theory that soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks don’t just go hand-in-hand with obesity, but actually cause it. Not that these drinks are the only cause — genetics, exercise and other factors are involved — but that they are one cause, perhaps the leading cause.’
follow up to Soft drinks found to have high levels of cancer chemical.
`A man who claimed a chainsaw gang chopped off his legs did it himself, police said yesterday.
The unnamed van driver told them he was dragged from his vehicle by attackers who hacked at his legs with the saw before torching his Transit.
But police revealed they now believe he turned the saw on himself.’
`I had to sign a tedious business contract the other day. They wanted my corporation number — fair enough — plus my Social Security number — well, if you insist — and also my driver’s license number — hang on, what’s the deal with that?
Well, we e-mailed over a query and they e-mailed back that it was a requirement of the Patriot Act. So we asked where exactly in the Patriot Act could this particular requirement be found and, after a bit of a delay, we got an answer.
And on discovering that there was no mention of driver’s licenses in that particular subsection [..]
[..] A couple of weeks earlier, I went to the bank to deposit a U.S. dollar check drawn on a Canadian financial institution, and the clerk announced that for security reasons checks drawn on Canadian banks now had to be sent away for collection and I’d have access to the funds in a couple of weeks. This was, she explained, a requirement of — ta-da — the Patriot Act. And, amazingly, that turned out not to be anywhere in the act either.’
`The Orange County Sheriff’s Office just announced that it has arrested the woman who claimed she was raped by several men who work at Walt Disney World. They say the woman made up the story, and that the sex was consensual. [..]
On Feb. 26, police responded to a report of an alleged sexual battery involving multiple suspects.
Sunde told investigators that she was approached by five or six “French men” in her apartment complex at approximately 4 a.m., and said the men physically carried her to the Gables Commons Apartments, where she was held down and sexually battered by at least four men.’
`To this end, us, isoHunt.com and TorrentBox.com, are forming a coalition together with other P2P operators being sued and yet to be sued, and if possible with the help of the EFF, we will fight for the right for technological progress and the legality of the search engine itself. It is too early right now to say what we need for help from you, but if the MPAA will not back down, I’m sure we are going to need your help. And no, we will not go the way of LokiTorrent or Suprnova.
Anyways, nobody panic, and let the torrents flow. If you like to talk to us live and chat with other fellows in the community, come chat on IRC on #isoHunt on P2P-IRC (SSL enabled on port 7000, you need a client like mIRC ). We’ll update as we learn more.’
`If Domino’s Pizza founder Thomas S. Monaghan has his way, a new town being built in Florida will be governed according to strict Roman Catholic principles, with no place to get an abortion, pornography or birth control.
The pizza magnate is bankrolling the project with at least $250 million and calls it “God’s will.”‘
`A man who broke into a high school, stole a schoolgirl’s swimsuit and then defecated in it as he pranced around wearing the garment has been arrested, police said.
Yasuhisa Matsushita, 25, a temporary employment agency worker from Fukuroi, Shizuoka Prefecture, was arrested for trespassing and willful destruction of property.
Matsushita admits to the allegations.
“I did it because it felt so good,” Matsushita told the police.’
`The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the companies that use perfluorooctanoic acid, an ingredient in Teflon, will cut the chemical’s use.
PFOA or its related chemicals, used in nonstick cookware, waterproof clothing and food packaging doesn’t break down in the environment and has been found in low levels in the blood of some 90 percent of Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The EPA hasn’t established safe levels of PFOA exposure, but an independent panel recommended in February that the agency classify PFOA as a “likely” carcinogen, while the EPA develops a final risk assessment of the chemical.’
follow up to Teflon’s sticky situation.
`Chief Joseph Moran says he was driving a car with police lights when he pulled over to help a woman who flagged him down.
She apparently didn’t notice the lights or the police radio when she climbed into the car. Moran says the woman told him she was cold and offered to have sex with him for $20.
A second officer arrested the 25-year-old woman, who said she had been using crack cocaine and could not remember when she last slept or ate.’
Natalie Portman rapping in a pretty funny clip..
(6.2meg Flash video)
`[A] woman is still fuming over her recent run in with bounty hunters about an unpaid plumber’s bill. She was taken into custody in front of her children by a constable and his son from another city.
For Jeanne Watman, a routine trip down her Amesbury driveway turned out to be anything but. “I was scared. I didn’t know what was going on.”
An SUV had blocked her right at the end of her driveway. In front of her sons, trapped by bounty hunters over an unpaid bill – even though a document shows the court dismissed the case in January.
The two men told her they were constables, flashing badges, informing her she was under arrest and telling her to get her two sons in their car with her.’
`Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people’s clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.
Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. ‘If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.’ Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001.’
`Juliet Hulme, of Hulme-Parker murder notoriety, has spoken out about the killing, saying she and Parker were never lesbians.
Hume – who became British writer Anne Perry – and Pauline Parker murdered Pauline’s mother in Christchurch in 1954 by bludgeoning her with a brick.
A film version of the story of the two 15 year olds, Heavenly Creatures, portrays the lesbian relationship between the two.
But Perry has told the London Times Saturday Magazine that although they were never lesbians the relationship was obsessive.’
`A father of 50 was butchered and fed to the pigs by a couple in a bizarre love-triangle.
Wheeler-dealer and womaniser Lennie Fulbirg, 49, was drugged by the mother of one of his children Tracey Cameron and then slaughtered by her lover Graham Haylett.
His torso was found on the Yorkshire moors.
His former girlfriend told friends she had “fed him to the pigs”.’
`Piggybacking, the usually unauthorized tapping into someone else’s wireless Internet connection, is no longer the exclusive domain of pilfering computer geeks or shady hackers cruising for unguarded networks. Ordinarily upstanding people are tapping in. As they do, new sets of Internet behaviors are creeping into America’s popular culture.
“I don’t think it’s stealing,” said Edwin Caroso, a 21-year-old student at Miami Dade College, echoing an often-heard sentiment.
“I always find people out there who aren’t protecting their connection, so I just feel free to go ahead and use it,” Mr. Caroso said. He added that he tapped into a stranger’s network mainly for Web surfing, keeping up with e-mail, text chatting with friends in foreign countries and doing homework.’
Makes me think I should buy a wireless card to go with my 13dB antenna that’s been sitting around for years. It’d give me an excuse to learn all about packet shaping and whatnot, and I could afford to let 10% or so of my bandwidth float out the window. [shrug] Why not? :)
Just so long as I don’t end up some sorta anonymous gay porn proxy or something. Hmm. :)
‘A children’s book about two male penguins that raise a baby penguin has been moved to the nonfiction section of two public library branches after parents complained it had homosexual undertones.
The illustrated book, “And Tango Makes Three,” is based on a true story of two male penguins, named Roy and Silo, who adopted an abandoned egg at New York City’s Central Park Zoo in the late 1990s. [..]
Barbara Read, the Rolling Hills’ director, said experts report that adoptions aren’t unusual in the penguin world. However, moving the book to the nonfiction section would decrease the chance that it would “blindside” readers, she said.’
`Even as Congolese villagers devise novel ways to snare the fast-disappearing bonobo, scientists are racing to save the gentle “hippie chimp” from extinction.
The bonobo, or pan paniscus, is closely related to man and known for resolving squabbles through sex rather than violence. It’s also prized by some Congolese for its tasty meat. The wiry, wizened-faced chimps are being killed in treetop nests in Congo’s vast rain forest, their only natural habitat in the world, by villagers who do not seem to know how fast their prey is disappearing. [..]
Bonobos are most easily captured when asleep drunk, say poachers in Congo’s Equator province who intoxicate the chimps with bottled beer and palm wine before tying them into bags for local meat markets.’
`Jermaine Jackson feared his kid brother Michael might be guilty of child molestation, but backed him at trial because he thought the pop star would commit suicide in prison, according to a bombshell book proposal obtained by the Daily News.
In a tell-all outline shopped to publishers just weeks after Michael’s arrest in November 2003, Jermaine described the Pop King as a sometimes out-of-control drug and booze abuser with a calculating mean streak and “a thing for young children.”‘
`[..] He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.’s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.
An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.’
