‘The PHP Spam Poison is a fake-page generator that simulates long lists of fake email addresses and links to more fake generated pages. So, when spam-robots (spam spiders) try to harvest email addresses from your website, they get hundreds or thousands of fake email addresses, effectively poisoning their databases with useless data.’
Looks kind of interesting. :)
‘The strange boundary between the macroscopic world and the weird realm of quantum physics is about to be probed in a unique experiment.
Scientists have created a minute cantilever arm on the surface of a silicon chip that they hope will leave the world of classical physics and enter the quantum realm when cooled to near absolute zero.
The experiment will be the first time scientists have ever scaled an object in the observable world down into the slippery world of quantum mechanics.
“I think it’s really possible to observe quantum effects (in the cantilever arm) with this experiment,” said Peter Rabl of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, who isn’t part of the experiment.
“Either you have a real, macroscopic object in a quantum state — or you find out that quantum mechanics doesn’t work for the macroscopic world,” he said. “In either case, it would be quite fascinating.”‘
‘This guys friends were sick of having to go outside to take a piss so he created a pressurized urinal that launches the piss directly into the neighbors garden.’
(4.3meg Windows media)
‘Officials released a prisoner from a state facility after receiving a phony fax that ordered the man be freed, and didn’t catch the mistake for nearly two weeks.
Timothy Rouse, 19, is charged with beating an elderly western Kentucky man and was at the Kentucky Correctional & Psychiatric Center in La Grange for a mental evaluation. He was released from that facility on April 6 after officials received the fake court order.
It contained grammatical errors, was not typed on letterhead and was faxed from a local grocery store. The fax falsely claimed that the Kentucky Supreme Court “demanded” Rouse be released.
Lexington police arrested Rouse at his mother’s home Thursday evening.’
‘Miss America 1944 has a talent that likely has never appeared on a beauty pageant stage: She fired a handgun to shoot out a vehicle’s tires and stop an intruder.
Venus Ramey, 82, confronted a man on her farm in south-central Kentucky last week after she saw her dog run into a storage building where thieves had previously made off with old farm equipment.
Ramey said the man told her he would leave. “I said, ‘Oh, no you won’t,’ and I shot their tires so they couldn’t leave,” Ramey said.
She had to balance on her walker as she pulled out a snub-nosed .38-calibre handgun.’
‘The world’s oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders’ descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.
How do you make a family business last for 14 centuries? Kongo Gumi’s case suggests that it’s a good idea to operate in a stable industry. Few industries could be less flighty than Buddhist temple construction. The belief system has survived for thousands of years and has many millions of adherents. With this firm foundation, Kongo had survived some tumultuous times, notably the 19th century Meiji restoration when it lost government subsidies and began building commercial buildings for the first time. But temple construction had until recently been a reliable mainstay, contributing 80% of Kongo Gumi’s $67.6 million in 2004 revenues.’
‘Misanthropy is a hatred or distrust of the human race, or a disposition to dislike and mistrust other people. The word comes from the Greek words μίσος (“hatred”) and άνθρωπος (“man, human being”). A misanthrope is a person who hates or distrusts humanity as a general rule. Misanthropology is the scientific study of the origin, the behavior, and the physical, social, and cultural development of hatred of humans.
Misanthropy does not necessarily imply an inhumane, antisocial, or sociopathic attitude towards humanity.’
‘Researchers have decoded genetic material from a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, an unprecedented step once thought impossible.
“The door just opens up to a whole avenue of research that involves anything extinct,” said Matthew T. Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
And, the new finding adds weight to the idea that today’s birds are descendants of dinosaurs. [..]
“The fact that we are getting proteins is very, very exciting,” said John Horner of Montana State University and the Museum of the Rockies.
And, he added, it “changes the idea that birds and dinosaurs are related from a hypothesis to a theory.”
To scientists that’s a big deal.’
‘Birds in Chernobyl choose to nest in sites with lower levels of background radioactivity, researchers discover, but how they can tell remains a mystery.
Anders Møller at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and Tim Mousseau at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, US, erected more than 200 nest boxes in the Red Forest, about 3 kilometres away from the nuclear reactor that exploded in 1986.
Using these artificial nests, they studied at the nesting habits of two species of birds – the great tit Parus major and the pied flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca – between 2002 and 2003.’
This is a pretty cool trick.
My belt is broken, but as soon as I buy a new one, I’ll give it a try. Fun. :)
(1.1meg Windows media)
‘A team of researchers led by professor Hideo Hono of the Tokyo Institute of Technology has developed a new type of alumina cement that conducts electricity like metal by altering the crystal structure at the nano level.
Ordinary alumina cement made from a lime-alumina compound (C12A7) has a crystal structure consisting of asymmetric cages, making it a poor conductor of electricity. But by sealing the alumina cement compound along with titanium inside a glass tube and heating it to 1,100 degrees Celsius, the researchers were able to create a homogenized, symmetrical cage structure that conducts electricity like metal.’
‘More than 4,000 clubbers danced through the rush hour at Victoria station in Britain’s biggest flash mob stunt.
Revellers responded to e-bulletins urging them to “dance like you’ve never danced before” at 6.53pm.
There were knowing looks and giggles among the casually dressed crowd that gathered from 6.30pm, wearing earphones.
A deafening 10-second countdown startled station staff and commuters before the concourse erupted in whoops and cheers. MP3 players and iPods emerged and the crowd danced wildly to their soundtracks in silence – for two hours.’
‘In 1982, operatives from the USSR’s Committee for State Security– known internationally as the KGB– celebrated the procurement of a very elusive bit of Western technology. The Soviets were developing a highly lucrative pipeline to carry natural gas across the expanse of Siberia, but they lacked the software to manage the complex array of pumps, valves, turbines, and storage facilities that the system would require. The United States possessed such software, but the US government had predictably turned down their Cold War opponent’s request to purchase the product.
Never ones to allow the limitations of the law to dictate their actions, the KGB officials inserted an agent to abduct the technology from a Canadian firm. Unbeknownst to the Soviet spies, the software they stole sported a little something extra: a few lines of computer code which had been inserted just for them.’
‘Researchers directing a special type of light at metal poked with holes in irregular patterns recently discovered that all the light behaved like a liquid and fell across the metal to find its way through the escape holes.
[..] experiments described in the March 28 issue of the journal Nature demonstrated that terahertz radiation—a low-frequency light on the electromagnetic spectrum located between microwaves and mid-infrared regions—traveled around a thin sheet of metal, through patterned holes, and all of it came out the other side. Experts sometimes refer to this radiation as T-rays.
“You can get 100 percent transmission of light, even if holes only make up 20 percent of the area,” University of Utah physicist Ajay Nahata told LiveScience. Nahata is one of the experimenters.’
‘Los Angeles police have unveiled their latest tool in the fight against crime – a flashlight powerful enough to stun suspects but too lightweight to beat them with.
The new flashlight, developed specifically for the Los Angeles Police Department and expected to be acquired by police forces around the world, replaces the heavy 13-inch (33-cm) metal flashlights controversially used by city officers to strike a car theft suspect three years ago. [..]
“If you shine this into someone’s eyes, you will momentarily disorient them. But unlike the previous flashlight it cannot be used to inflict unintended damage or used to strike someone around the head,” Bratton said.’
‘MIT certainly has a reputation to be proud of, but its admissions department went a little over-board, I think. The first letter is an honest-to-goodness mailing from MIT, the second is one prospective student’s reply [..]’
I find this to be amusing. :)
‘Cars have been Larry Woody’s life for more than 30 years. He fixed them, he raced them, he restored them. But five years ago on Interstate 5 a truck blew across the median and drove over his tiny Toyota Celica. He almost died, and he was blinded.
But Woody, 46, still works on his 1968 El Camino, dabbles in racing and recently bought his own shop, D & D Foreign Automotive, in Cottage Grove. And he has hired a deaf assistant.
His red-tipped cane stands idle. He walks without hesitation through his shop. He handles the paperwork and billing with the help of a talking computer. He still changes fuel lines, hoists cars and changes filters.
“So much of it is done by feel anyway,” he told the Eugene Register-Guard. “I use my hands to see what I’m doing now.”
He has hired Otto Shima, 17, an apprentice from Cottage Grove High School, but they have never spoken directly. Shima was born deaf.’
‘Because the thing about the Buffy universe is that the population of vampires is reasonably stable. There are a fair number of vampires around, but not enough to overwhelm the earth. But as it turns out, if you look at that chart above, there’s a very narrow vampire-population window at which equilibrium can be kept.
That’s because powers of two increase slowly at first, then at a hellacious rate. Think of it this way: According to the numbers calculated by the academics, at month five in the year 1600, there are only 16 vampires. That’s such a paltry number than any self-respecting slayer could quickly dispatch them in a few evenings, and the vampire menace would permanently be extinguished. But at month 12 — only a few months later — the number of vampires, unchecked, rises to 2,048. That’s probably too many vampires for a slayer to squelch in a single month.
So the really sweet spot seems to be months eight to ten — when the vampire population would range from 128 to 512, respectively. [..]’
‘Scientists have turned water into ice in nanoseconds, which means really, really fast. That’s not the most interesting part, though. The ice is hotter than boiling water.
The experiment was done at the Sandia National Laboratories’ huge Z machine, which generates temperatures hotter than the sun (setting a record here on Earth) and where researchers test what we know about those plain vanilla “phases” in textbooks: solid, liquid and gas. [..]
Apparently it’s virtually impossible to keep water from freezing at pressures beyond 70,000 atmospheres,” Dolan said.’
‘Australian researchers have combined art and science to make dresses from fermented fabric, using bacteria to ‘grow’ slimy dresses from wine and beer. [..]
To ferment fabrics, Cass and his colleagues deliberately let vats of wine go off to produce cellulose.
And to get the shape of a dress, they lifted the layers of slimy cellulose off and laid them over a deflatable doll. [..]
The dresses are made from pieces of cellulose joined together. But Cass hopes one day the team can make the bacteria ferment seamless garments.’
‘In 1998, just after he won a share of the Nobel prize for physics, Robert Laughlin of Stanford University in California was asked how his discovery of “particles” with fractional charge, now called quasi-particles, would affect the lives of ordinary people. “It probably won’t,” he said, “unless people are concerned about how the universe works.”
Well, people were. [..]
Helton was aware of Wen’s work and decided to look for such materials. Trawling through geology journals, his team spotted a candidate – a dark green crystal that geologists stumbled across in the mountains of Chile in 1972. “The geologists named it after a mineralogist they really admired, Herbert Smith, labelled it and put it to one side,” says team member Young Lee. “They didn’t realise the potential herbertsmithite would have for physicists years later.”‘
‘The Lorentz Gun can direct a 15,000 Ampere plasma channel through the air along a straight trajectory, at grounded targets up to 35 ft downrange. The gun consists of 30 high pressure pneumatic dart stations, each capable of launching a tapered aluminum sabot that trails a thin ‘seed wire’ 0.008 inches in diameter. Cannon tilt and pan is pneumatic, and a sighting laser is located inside the cannon head. When a launched sabot contacts the target, the Marx-configured capacitor bank automatically fires and erects the bank to 110,000 volts, igniting a plasma channel along the vaporized seed wire. The plasma channel quickly intensifies, magnetically confined in the air by the Lorentz forces of its own current. Damage to the target can vary widely. Most spectators experience some degree of sinus discomfort after several firings, due to the high brissance of the plasma explosion. The capacitor bank is currently disassembled, and newer capacitors are being added to increase the bank energy to 250 kilojoules, and the range to 50 feet.’
‘Even casual YouTube users have no doubt come across video clips that the company has taken down for one reason or another, but a new service gives viewers at least a chance to see the offending content. Delutube, as its name implies, can serve up some video clips even after YouTube has purged them. [..]
Delutube allows visitors to enter the video ID (pulled from the end of the YouTube URL) of a deleted clip, then attempts to retrieve the clip from YouTube’s system. Clips are not apparently deleted from YouTube’s database at the moment they are taken down (or they at least persist in YouTube’s cache before being cleared), allowing Delutube a chance of retrieving them. The site also allows for the easy downloading of clips.’
‘A new study in the journal Neurology is being hailed as unassailable proof that marijuana is a valuable medicine. It is a sad commentary on the state of modern medicine that we still need “proof” of something that medicine has known for 5,000 years.
The study, from the University of California at San Francisco, found that smoked marijuana was effective at relieving the extreme pain of a debilitating condition known as peripheral neuropathy.
It was a study of HIV patients, but a similar type of pain caused by damage to nerves afflicts people with many other illnesses including diabetes and multiple sclerosis. [..]
As all marijuana research in the United States must be, the new study was conducted with government-supplied marijuana of notoriously poor quality. So it probably underestimated the potential benefit.’
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