‘Three men, including a Houston-area paramedic, were arrested after investigators found nearly 400 pounds of marijuana in an ambulance, KPRC Local 2 reported Friday.
Maumelle, Ark., police said they discovered the drugs after the ambulance broke down near a gasoline station.
“An individual, that was actually an off-duty police officer, called and said that he just felt like things were out of sort,” Chief Sam Williams said.
Officers arrived and found the men and the ambulance.
“They were wearing white shirts and black BDU pants,” Williams said. “The white shirts had some rank insignia of them. It would be fair to say that they were wearing clothing that would resemble medical personnel.”‘
Using the dirt on car windows to do drawings.
‘Such advertising deals may be the future, but the company’s bread and butter continues to be P2P disruption of movies and music downloads. MediaDefender is quite good at this, as it should be after five years of antipiracy work. Unlike DRM providers that focus on protecting the product, MediaDefender tries to protect the distribution channel—and only for a limited time. Recognizing that it is impossible to shut down the sharing of copyrighted works, the company focuses instead on mitigation. Record labels and movie companies can pay between $5,000 and $15,000 per title for differing levels of protection that extend over different time periods.’
It’s a bit cruel I think, but they’re cute. [shrug]
(2.0meg Windows media)
see it here »
‘A man says it wasn’t the 10 beers and a double cocktail that caused his car to weave before being pulled over by police.
Kristopher Lind says his attention wasn’t fully on his driving because his wife had a sex toy bought that day at a sex show in Vancouver.
At his impaired driving trial in B.C., Lind testified he and his wife were driving in Vancouver when they decided to check out the sex toy.
The package proved difficult for his wife to unwrap, so she handed it to him while he was driving.
He said he opened the package with one hand, using his knee to help steer the car, and did the same again to insert batteries.
Once the device was working, he said, his wife took it.’
‘Sydney radio broadcaster Alan Jones is facing a possible jail term after he was found to have broken the law that prohibits the naming of juvenile witnesses in court cases.
In July 2005, the 2GB talkback host named a boy who had given evidence at a murder trial.
The boy was allegedly aged 14 when he witnessed the fatal attack, in 2004.
Although prosecutors could not prove the exact age of the minor, NSW Deputy Chief Magistrate Helen Syme said yesterday evidence showed he had been born between 1988 and 1992, and she accepted that he was younger than 18 at the relevant time. [..]
The companies each face a penalty of $5500, while Jones could be imprisoned for up to 12 months.’
‘What exactly went on between gorillas and early humans? No one knows for sure, but scientists say one thing, at least, seems certain: The big apes gave us pubic lice.
Researchers made the uncomfortable discovery during a DNA study reconstructing the evolutionary history of lice in humans and our primate relatives.
The transfer occurred about 3.3 million years ago, said study leader David Reed, of the University of Florida in Gainesville. That’s when the gorilla louse and the human pubic louse separated into distinct species, the research revealed. [..]
Pubic lice are spread most commonly through sexual contact, but that’s not necessarily how our ancestors acquired the parasite from gorillas.
“Unfortunately, we’ll never know for sure,” Reed said. [..]’
‘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.’
‘[..] rather than seek venture financing and hire a staff, it may be better for one or two people to create a relatively simple site — say, a hobbyist blog for guitar enthusiasts — and use a service like Google AdWords to, hopefully, make enough money to live on.
But to make $50 million with a big staff-produced content-rich guitar site, sponsored by, say, Fender and Gibson, a site would have to generate more than 200 million page views a month, Mr. Liew estimated.
A site aimed at a specific demographic, like teenagers or Asian-Americans, would need to generate 800 million page views a month, by Mr. Liew’s reckoning.’
‘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. [..]’
‘Sydney suburb Mosman is set to become the first officially smoke-free municipality in Australia – if not the world – after banning smoking in every council-controlled public space.
The blanket prohibition, passed unanimously by council last week, cements Mosman’s reputation as Australia’s most zealous anti-smoking neighbourhood, taking its war on cigarettes even further than advocated by the NSW Cancer Council.
Residents themselves will help enforce it, according to councillor Andrew Brown, who said Mosmanites had taken on a vigilante-style role in the campaign against nicotine.
“Members of the public will approach people who they see smoking on the beach or in parks and tell them it is not allowed and they risk a fine of $110,” Mr Brown said.’
A fun little game. Try to keep your ball on the blue square.
Watch out for other balls.
see it here »
‘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.’
‘Authorities confiscated more than $200 million in U.S. currency from methamphetamine producers in one of this city’s ritziest neighborhoods, they said Friday, calling it the largest drug cash seizure in history.
The seizure reflected the vast scope of an illegal drug trade linking Asia, Mexico and the United States, officials said. Two of the seven people arrested Thursday at a faux Mediterranean villa in the Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood were Chinese nationals.’
(11.8meg Windows media)
see it here »
‘A nasty bite on the hand that a man got from his sister’s Siamese cat is worth $122,400.
A jury on Friday awarded Michael Sabo, 57, the money for an injury he got when the cat, Randy, bit his right hand in March 2004.
Sabo’s fingers swelled so much that they looked like “plump hot dogs,” his attorney, Tom Pabst, told The Flint Journal, and an infection put Sabo in a hospital for three weeks. He had to pay thousands in medical bills.’
‘A Kentucky woman sued her a doctor for branding her uterus with the initials of his alma mater during an operation to remove the organ.
Stephanie Means alleged that while Dr. James Guiler performed the hysterectomy at Central Baptist Hospital in Lexington, he “used a cauterizing instrument to intentionally brand the letters ‘UK,’ approximately 4-5 cm in height, on Plaintiff Stephanie Means’s uterus.”
Means’s lawsuit noted that since she and her husband were apprehensive about the surgery, Guiler filmed the procedure and gave the couple a copy of the videotape, which, the Fayette Circuit Court lawsuit stated, “clearly showed the instrument being used to brand Stephanie’s uterus.”‘
This actually happened in 2003 or so, but now here’s the video of the branding.
(728kB Quicktime)
see it here »
‘At the only hospital in the capital of this tiny West African nation, a 3-year-old AIDS patient named Suleiman receives his daily dose of medication — a murky brown concoction of seven herbs and spices served out of a bottle that once contained pancake syrup.
The boy is told a spoonful a day will make him better. His mother, Fatuma, takes the same concoction, as do several dozen other AIDS and HIV patients here. Adults take two spoonfuls.
“It’s amazing,” Fatuma says. “Two weeks ago, I was very ill, weak and couldn’t eat without vomiting.”
This has become the treatment for HIV/AIDS patients here since early January, when Gambian President Yahya Jammeh announced he had discovered a cure for the disease that has wreaked havoc across Africa. He made that announcement in front of a group of foreign diplomats, telling them the treatment was revealed to him by his ancestors in a dream.’
‘Beryl Dsouza was late and in no mood for delays when she stopped at a Target store after work two weeks ago for milk, bread and bacon.
So Dsouza was taken aback when the cashier — who had on the traditional headscarf, or hijab, worn by many Muslim women — refused to swipe the bacon through the checkout scanner.
“She made me scan the bacon. Then she opened the bag and made me put it in the bag,” said Dsouza, 53, of Minneapolis. “It made me wonder why this person took a job as a cashier.”‘
Using air from a scuba tank and everything. Crazy. :)
(771kB Windows media)
see it here »
‘A man who spent 18 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit was convicted Sunday of murdering a photographer, whose charred bones were found in a burn pit outside his home.
Steven Avery, 44, shook his head when the verdict was read. He faces a mandatory life prison term for killing Teresa Halbach, 25, on Halloween 2005 near his family’s salvage yard.
Halbach disappeared Oct. 31, 2005, after going to the yard in rural Manitowoc County to photograph a minivan that Avery’s sister had for sale through Auto Trader Magazine. Avery had called that morning to request the photo, testimony showed.’
‘Pet owners were worried Saturday that the pet food in their cupboards could be deadly after millions of containers of dog and cat food sold at major retailers across North America were recalled.
Menu Foods — a major manufacturer of dog and cat food sold under Wal-Mart, Safeway, Kroger and other store brands — recalled 60 million containers of wet pet food Friday after reports of kidney failure and deaths.
An unknown number of cats and dogs suffered kidney failure and about 10 died after eating the affected pet food, the company said in announcing the North American recall.’
‘A British Airways passenger was refused compensation and told by the airline to “get over it” after a corpse was placed in the row where he was sitting last week.
Paul Trinder, 54, a businessman from Brackley, Northamptonshire, spent more than £3,000 for a first-class ticket from Delhi. He awoke during the flight to find that cabin staff were propping up a dead woman almost next to him. “The stewards just plonked down this body without saying a thing,” he said. “I remember looking at this thin, sparrow-like woman and thinking she was very ill.”
The woman had been in economy class when she died soon after the plane left Delhi. “She kept slipping under the seat belt and moving about with the motion of the plane,” Mr Trinder said. “When I asked what was going on, I was shocked to hear she was dead.”‘
‘In January 1992, while at a formal dinner in Japan, then president George Bush became ill, vomiting on the Prime Minister of Japan, Kiichi Miyazawa, then fainting. Earlier in the evening, Bush had told his physician he was feeling unwell. This all happened at a presidential news conference and dinner in Tokyo. It was later famously parodied by Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live.’
(6.7meg Windows media)
see it here »
An illustration of the evolution of man.
‘Hearing about AJAX constantly, but never have found time to read a lengthy, frustrating, complex tutorial? In the following post, I’m going to explain how to add AJAX functionality to your website in three easy steps. It’s actually quite simple, and I’m going to try and be clear and to the point, but not over or under-explain anything like most tutorials have a tendency to do.’
I believe this is another Balls of Steel segment.
(25.9meg Windows media)
see it here »
