`Speaking in Atlanta today, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was sharply questioned about his pre-war claims about WMD in Iraq. An audience member confronted Rumsfeld with his 2003 claim about WMD, “We know where they are.” Rumsfeld falsely claimed he never said it. The audience member then read Rumsfeld’s quote back to him, leaving the defense secretary speechless.’
(5.7meg Quicktime)
`Yeast, because it has been used for millennia, carries a great amount of symbolic weight. As a key ingredient to basic sustenance like bread and beer, yeast is an age-old, familiar and very powerful medium to work with. Food, and our complex relationship with it, is mythical; when we eat and drink, human happiness and sorrow, love and hate, heaven and hell are simultaneously displayed and represented. If beer is food, and food is life itself, then beer too is life itself.
Experimentation with these historic staple foods, in combination with my own body, helps to build a new artistic dimension: understanding through taste. To experience an art piece through taste is a two-pronged experience. The viewer has to make a simple decision – to ingest it or not. From this primal question new questions quickly arise: Is it socially acceptable to drink beer that includes even a trace amount of vaginal yeast? Is it natural? Is it kinky? Can a man drinking this beer still be macho? Why does it make such a difference when it comes to the human body?’
`This movie, built with data collected during the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe on Jan. 14, 2005, shows the operation of the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer camera during its descent and after touchdown. The camera was funded by NASA.
The almost four-hour-long operation of the camera is shown in less than five minutes. That’s 40 times the actual speed up to landing and 100 times the actual speed thereafter.
The first part of the movie shows how Titan looked to the camera as it acquired more and more images during the probe’s descent. Each image has a small field of view, and dozens of images were made into mosaics of the whole scene.’
(11meg Quicktime)
`The advent of high-definition TV has forced technicians and set designers back to the drawing board as the sharper detail in the new technology reveals all flaws.
BBC designers have been forced to rethink how to simulate fake blood and wounds for medical shows such as Casualty, while many TV stars are reported to be fearful of how their imperfections might show up under the unforgiving glare of the HD camera.
A BBC spokeswoman said: “HD-TV picks up red especially vividly and we can no longer get away with the traditional stage blood, using ketchup and the like.”
A Sky TV spokeswoman said: “It is giving rise to all kinds of little things that the industry never really thought about. Even things like cheap cutlery in a supposedly upper class-scene now get picked out.”‘
`Located about 1 1/2 hrs from Spokane, 4 hrs. from Seattle, 5 hrs. from Portland.
360 Degree Views. Private water system. High Power lines on sight.
Hardened buildings built to withstand One megaton nuclear blast within three thousand feet!!
Wall thicknesses up to fourteen feet.
Three 155′ tall missile silos.
A dozen other large to huge buildings underground.
Thousands of feet of connecting tunnels.’
`Japanese and US aerospace agencies and companies plan to develop a low-noise, fuel-efficient supersonic jet to take off where the Anglo-French Concorde ended, a press report said. [..]
The research and development cost of the Japan-US project is estimated to reach “several hundred” billion yen, the daily added. Currently, one hundred billion yen is worth some 880 million dollars. [..]
The Japanese side reportedly aims to develop a plane that would travel at the same speed as the Concorde but would produce just one percent of the noise.
Japan hopes to put on the market in about 2020 a supersonic jetliner with a capacity of 200-300 seats that could travel between Tokyo and Los Angeles in five hours — about half the current flight time.’
`Queensland painter Tim Patch says his father was less than impressed when he learned his son was gaining notoriety for a “penile art” portrait of Prime Minister John Howard.
“My dad is not too impressed. He shook his head and said, `Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear’,” Mr Patch said.
The Gold Coast father of four today unveiled two portraits that he has painted using his penis as a brush, at the opening of Sexpo in Perth.
The first painting was of Prime Minister John Howard and the other of Opposition Leader Kim Beazley.
The former buildepenir was drawing quick portraits in a market until recently.
“Then I told a friend I could paint with my dick and she was really enthusiastic.”‘
`Two men who had driven around several towns for hours after meeting in a bar ended up fighting after one of the men couldn’t communicate directions clearly to the driver.
Kent Hisey, 52, became frustrated by the difficulty of James Mills, who is deaf, in communicating directions, Valparaiso police said. They had driven from the Playboy Lounge in New Chicago to Portage, then Hobart where the 46-year-old Mills lives and finally to Valparaiso communities spread across two northwest Indiana counties about 30 miles southeast of Chicago.
Hisey, who has two prosthetic legs, stopped his car at the Porter County Airport, got out and used his walker to go around to the passenger side, where he grabbed Mills to pull him from the car, police said.’
Cripple fight!
`Matt Feshbach believes he has super powers. He senses danger faster than most people. He appreciates beauty more deeply than he used to. He says he outperforms his peers in the money management industry.
He heightened his powers of perception in 1995 when he went to Los Angeles and became the first and so far only “public” Scientologist to take a highly classified Scientology program called Super Power.
Where in L.A. did he do this?
“Just in Los Angeles,” is all Feshbach will say. Super Power is that secret.’
`A bouncing universe that expands and then shrinks every trillion years or so could explain one of the most puzzling problems in cosmology: how we can exist at all.
If this explanation, proposed in Science1 by Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University, New Jersey, and Neil Turok at the University of Cambridge, UK, seems slightly preposterous, that can’t really be held against it. Astronomical observations over the past decade have shown that “we live in a preposterous universe”, says cosmologist Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago. “It’s our job to make sense of it,” he says.
In Steinhardt and Turok’s cyclic model of the Universe, it expands and contracts repeatedly over timescales that make the 13.7 billion years that have passed since the Big Bang seem a mere blink. This makes the Universe vastly old. And that in turn means that the mysterious ‘cosmological constant’, which describes how empty space appears to repel itself, has had time to shrink into the strangely small number that we observe today.’
`A knife-wielding mugger who robbed a woman of her bags before discovering they were full of dog mess has been jailed for four years.
David Carlisle, 32, forced 52-year-old Marion Budd to hand over the bags at knifepoint last July as she walked her dog in Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol.
When he realised what he had taken, Carlisle, a drug addict and father-of -four, fled the scene empty-handed.
The bungling would-be thief was jailed after admitting attempted robbery.’
`James Farrow could have been forgiven for losing his way in the heavily wooded, remote area of the Blue Mountains National Park.
But when the British tourist ignored rescuers who warned him against returning to the steep escarpment of Cedar Creek to retrieve his backpack, he was charged with an obscure criminal offence and this week ordered to repay the cost of his second rescue – more than $3000.’
`Here is the Space Cubed which is claimed to be the world’s smallest personal computer. At the size of 2 x 2 x 2.2 inch, it has a 300 MHz processor and 64MB of SDRAM. Shown in the picture, it includes number of ports such as USB, Ethernet, flash memory. monitor port, serial connection and microphone. Pocket PC anyone?’
2 x 2 x 2.2 isn’t a cube, if you ask me. Still, I want one. :)
`Nanotechnology companies need to do more to understand potential toxic effects of their products, a senior UK researcher has warned.
Professor Anthony Seaton, of Aberdeen University, said “very little” was still known about the health impacts of particles engineered at small scales.
His concern over nanoparticles covered production and lab workers as well as consumers, he told a conference.’
`It’s easier to rig an electronic voting machine than a Las Vegas slot machine, says University of Pennsylvania visiting professor Steve Freeman. That’s because Vegas slots are better monitored and regulated than America’s voting machines, Freeman writes in a book out in July that argues, among other things, that President Bush may owe his 2004 win to an unfair vote count.’
`A California lawmaker has introduced a bill sparked by Tom Cruise’s revelation he bought a sonogram machine to watch his daughter grow in Katie Holmes’ womb.
Democratic Assemblyman Ted Lieu’s bill would ban selling, leasing or distributing ultrasound machines to anyone other than licensed medical professionals, E! Online reported Wednesday. The state assembly is scheduled to debate the bill in Sacramento Thursday.
“If someone sees Tom Cruise buy one, they think this is the thing to do,” Lieu said. “This is a public safety measure. There’s really no medical reason for an untrained person to use this machine.”‘
`”What we do with these boats is amazing,” says Thomas Coville, who was at the helm of Sodebo. “To be flying on the foils at 35 knots with the sail at the perfect angle is such a feeling.”
“There’s no aspect of sailing that’s more demanding or exciting,” Foxall says. He should know: He has competed in the America’s Cup and the globe-circling Volvo, and in 2004 he won the Quebec-Saint-Malo transatlantic race.
But the Jacques Vabre disaster posed a dilemma: In a sport made exciting by engineering and design innovation, have things gone too far? Maybe technology has taken sailors to a place they shouldn’t be going in ocean racing. Even Nigel Irens, a multihull designer whose trimaran Banque Populaire won the race, admits: “The power of these boats is getting beyond the reach of sailors. The problem is that you either break, capsize, or win.”‘
`Unlike Windows, which is a mature commercial product which is normally included with every new computer, Linux is given away. Now it may not sound like much of a problem, after all there is very little profit in merely giving a product away.
This would be certainly true were in not for the Linux project’s seductive Marxist ideology and the effect that it has on ‘Blue-State’ liberals. Indeed, Linux is so pervasive amongst the blue states and many liberal universities that a leading computer expert Steve Balmer (from Microsoft) described Linux as cancer. [..]
Imagine if the State of the Union address were hacked because the TV station decided to save money by using Linux? Imagine if a stealth-bomber crashed because it’s software was written by anonymous Chinese or European hackers. It would make as much sense as inviting the French to come over and take over the White-House.
And guess what software Osama Bin Laden uses on his laptop?’
`Irish rail officials have lashed out at the “gross stupidity” of truck drivers who can’t seem to stop ramming into low bridges.
Trucks have rammed — and become lodged beneath — bridges 52 times so far this year. One bridge had been struck 70 times in the past five years, The Independent reported. [..]
“It’s gross stupidity not being aware of the height of the bridge,” he said. “Another bridge that is regularly struck is 10-feet-6-inches. It’s absolutely insane that somebody could be stupid enough to hit that bridge.”
Jimmy Quinn of the Irish Road Haulers’ Association agrees.
“Anybody who’s driving round in a vehicle and doesn’t know its height is stupid,” said Quinn. “That’s a bald fact and only an idiot would try to defend that.”‘
`An engineered virus tracks down and infects the most common and deadly form of brain cancer and then kills tumor cells by forcing them to devour themselves, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report this week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The modified adenovirus homed in on malignant glioma cells in mice and induced enough self-cannibalization among the cancer cells — a process called autophagy — to reduce tumor size and extend survival, says senior author Seiji Kondo, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at M. D. Anderson.
”This virus uses telomerase, an enzyme found in 80 percent of brain tumors, as a target,” Kondo says. ”Once the virus enters the cell, it needs telomerase to replicate. Normal brain tissue does not have telomerase, so this virus replicates only in cancer cells.”’
A whole bunch of games rolled into one, each of which must be completed in 4 seconds.
`Midvale police are on the lookout for a man who allegedly tried to kidnap a 13 year old boy while he walked to school Tuesday morning.
Brendon Nichol tells police that he noticed a man following him almost from the moment he left his home headed to Midvale Middle School around 7:00 a.m.
“That’s when I took out my notepad and pencil and started looking at his facial expression and how big he was,” says Nichol.
Nichol also says the man followed him for several blocks, and then finally approached the boy from behind, getting him in a headlock. “My first reaction was to pick it up and stab him like this and it broke off somewhere in his face.” Nichol says.’
`The basic elements of the system are as follows.
* All the user need prepare is a collection of A4-sized envelopes and some means for marking the outside of the envelope. If some color coding (optional) is to be done, this can be done with marker pens.
* All documents, regardless of their class, level of importance, or perceived chance of being required at a later date are stored in A4-sized envelopes, which have the flaps cut off, as shown below.
By “all documents,” Noguchi means just that. He puts all categories of documents, including things like membership lists and his passport in envelopes.
* The title and date of the document are marked on the side of the envelope, as shown, and the envelopes are stored vertically on a bookshelf.
* Absolutely no “classification” of documents is attempted. The color coding is optional, and used only to shorten the amount of time to find a document.
* New documents (envelopes) are added at the left end of the “envelope buffer,” and whenever a document is used (i.e., the envelope removed from the shelf), it is returned to the left end of the bookshelf. The result of this system is that the most recent (and frequently) used documents migrate to the left, while documents that are not used often or not used at all migrate to the right.’
`A Malaysian housewife says a bogus spiritual medium duped her into having sex with him 51 times as the only way to exorcise her evil spirits.
The 41-year old woman, who sought the man’s help after he claimed to be able to heal her from her numerous ailments, was allegedly told that she had many evil spirits in her, the Star daily reported today.
The medium, who claims to be the reincarnation of a God, allegedly hypnotised her into having sex with him a total of 51 times over a period of six months.
The victim was also told to pay up to 50 ringgit ($A17) for each “exorcism” session.’
`Governments in Canada should steer completely clear from adopting or emulating any current drug policies in the United States, an outspoken New York state prosecutor said Tuesday.
“My advice to Canada is stay as completely far away from U.S. drug law policy as possible,” said David Soares, the district attorney for Albany County in the state of New York. “You (Canada) are headed in the right direction.”
In a blunt and scathing condemnation of his state and country’s ineffective drug war, Mr. Soares said lawmakers, judges and prosecutors in the U.S. know their system is ineffective.
But they support it anyway because it provides law enforcement officials with lucrative jobs.’
`I’ve been a fan of Michael Dell for about ten years since I read an article about him in Reader’s Digest. Not wanting to believe that my friend Michael would allow this garbage to be installed on computers that bare his name, I assumed that somehow a virus had snuck its way onto my machine in the ten minute window where my computer was without anti-virus software. Sadly, Google search after Google search revealed that in fact Dell is being paid to pre-install this filth on their machines. [..]
What Dell is doing should be illegal. They are being paid to install spyware on new computers. They are making it difficult for customers to remove the spyware on their own. Then, they charge $49 to teach you how to remove it. This would be like a doctor being paid to infect you with a disease and then charging you for the antidote.
Dell claims that people like me are overreacting, but a lot of people seem to disagree.’
`A McHenry County man is suing his marriage counselor, contending the therapist he hired to help improve his marriage instead began an affair with his wife.
That relationship eventually prompted the couple to divorce, according to the breach-of-contract suit filed by 35-year-old Scott Buetow of Lake in the Hills. [..]
The lawsuit filed by Buetow in McHenry County also accuses Blair — a state-licensed clinical professional counselor — of fraud and professional malpractice. [..]
Despite the alleged relationship, Blair continued counseling Buetow and worked “to undermine the marriage to his benefit by tendering poor advice,” the suit contends.’
`The Catholic Church is on the brink of a historic change of approach over condoms which could bring hope to millions in Africa and other parts of the developing world devastated by Aids.
“We are conducting a very profound scientific, technical and moral study,” said the head of the Vatican Council for Health Pastoral Care. The church is expected to give a guarded, provisional blessing to the use of condoms by married couples when one of them suffers from Aids, as a way of protecting the health of the other partner. It is only a technical concession, based on two ancient principles, but, against the background of the stolid refusal by church authorities to countenance even the slightest deviation for more than a generation, it amounts to a revolution.
At a time when more than 40 million people are infected with HIV, and there are 13,000 new cases every day, the Vatican has been accused of contributing to the spread of the epidemic by forbidding the use of prophylactics.’
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