moonbuggy

(4.7meg Windows media)

`In my 7th grade class, we had a tard who was really good at math and growing facial hair, and really bad at just about everything else. He was pretty much harmless, which was a good thing since he was physically ahead of the rest of us by 5 years and probably could have kicked all of our asses at once, but there were some funny moments, one of which I still remember clear as a bell 15 years later.’

`Jumping Frenchman Disorder

The main characteristic is that patients are extremely startled by an unexpected noise or sight. It’s not just twitching when someone sneaks up behind you. Patients with this disorder flail their arms, cry out and repeat words. First identified in some of Maine’s lumberjacks of French-Canadian origin, the odd reflex has been identified in other parts of the world, too.’

`MIT Media Lab’s Counter Intelligence Group, which develops innovative kitchen designs, has created a machine that makes dishes on demand and recycles them after diners have finished a meal. The dishes are made from food-grade, nontoxic acrylic wafers, which are shaped into cups, bowls and plates when heated, then resume their original wafer shape when they are reheated and pressed. [..]

The machine holds 150 acrylic wafers and can produce a dish every 90 seconds. The wafers produce plates that are only 6 inches in diameter, the size of an average salad or dessert plate, but the machine can be adapted to use larger wafers.

Bonanni says the DishMaker would be useful in restaurants, hospitals and other institutions that use a lot of dishes.’

I don’t know what was meant to happen, but it seems when you cover a naked girl in something flammable then ignite her, well, she ignites. [shrug]

`Parts of the Amazon rainforest are enduring the worst drought for 40 years, prompting local government to declare several cities in the Brazilian state of Amazonas as disaster areas. Researchers say that rising sea temperatures in the North Atlantic, perhaps prompted by climate change, are probably to blame.

Researchers at a forest monitoring station in Santarém, where the Amazon and Tapajós rivers meet, report that water levels are some 15 metres lower than usual.

“Everybody has been taken by surprise,” says Paul Lefebvre, a researcher at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, which runs the station.’

Links to some potentially useful stuff. Ad blocking, extensions, etc..

A car bomb going off outside a base in Iraq. It doesn’t look like it was particularly effective, but it’s cool footage.

There’s a PDF storyboard of the event at Boing Boing but it didn’t work when I tried it. Also a photo of the wreckage.

(1.1meg Windows Media)

`For those who yearn for a well-aged, full-bodied vintage wine but lack the funds to feed the habit, the solution may lie with a Japanese boffin, a zany-looking contraption, a couple of metres of latex tubing and a few hundred volts of electricity.

[..] The machine works by pumping wine and tap water through a specially designed electrolysis chamber equipped with wafer-thin platinum electrodes. The water and the wine are separated by an ion exchange membrane — the key component, for which Tanaka holds the patent.’

‘Since the reelection of George W. Bush in November, the rhetoric on the Christian right has grown triumphal and proud; rumors of spiritual war are abroad in the heartland, and fervent whispers of revolution echo among the pews and folding chairs of the nation’s megachurches. I have traveled to Anaheim, California, to observe the rising power of the evangelical political movement at first hand. Orange County, along with Colorado Springs, is a center of the new militant Christianity, and it is here, among friends, that the National Religious Broadcasters association—which brings together some 1,600 Christian radio and television broadcasters, who claim to reach up to 141 million listeners and viewers—is holding its annual convention. [..]

I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.’

also Soldiers of Christ I.

`Michelle Duggar just delivered her 16th child, and she’s already thinking about doing it again. [..]

Jim Bob Duggar, 40, said he and Michelle, 39, want more children.

“We both just love children and we consider each a blessing from the Lord. I have asked Michelle if she wants more and she said yes, if the Lord wants to give us some she will accept them,” he said in a telephone interview.’

Yes, his name is Jim Bob. But no, he doesn’t live in a trailer as you might expect.

It’s not really a game, I s’pose, but it’s good to spend a few minutes playing with.

I got my planet orbiting a blue star and sustaining life after 10 turns or so. Funnily enough, I discovered planets three times the size of Jupiter oribiting closer than Mercury around a star significantly hotter than the sun won’t sustain life. :)

`A confrontation inside a Brewerytown store led to the death of a man who was thrown through a window.

Police said that the argument appeared to be about food that was prepared in the Community Food Market & Deli at the corner of 29th and Oxford streets.

Sources in the police department told NBC 10 News that there was a dispute between a customer and Emanuel Oliver, a 52-year-old man who made sandwiches in the store. A fight broke out and the employee crashed through the window. [..]

The crime scene unit said that they believe the glass came down on Oliver’s neck. He was taken to Hahneman Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.’

`There is just something very satisfying about looking at a picture of a usually waif and sexy celebrity morphed into something that resembles a big chunk of Fat Ass America. Various photoshop users have submitted pics of celebrities who with some reverse air brushing now look like they subsist on a diet and exercise program of strictly ribs, milk-shakes and remote control curls as opposed to their usual regimen of cigarettes, coke and personal training sessions.’

Also the full gallery.

`Accused of bestiality with rabbits and their mutilation deaths, the 36-year-old New Zealand-born businessman found himself in the glare and flashes of television and newspaper cameras when he left Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court.

It was the first time the financier from Tamarama has had to face media in public since being granted $1000 bail three weeks ago. That court hearing was brought on a week ahead of schedule after he had been held in custody pending psychiatric assessment. [..]

Following his arrest last month, he maintained through his legal counsel that he had been in a drug-induced psychosis caused by smoking the methamphetamine drug “ice” when he committed the acts of cruelty.’

`A Swedish man who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple must pay child support for the three children he fathered, Sweden’s Supreme Court has ruled.

The man, now 39, donated his sperm to the couple in the early 1990s.

Three sons were born during the years 1992-1996, according to Swedish news agency TT, which reported the ruling.

The man told the court that he and the women had agreed that he would play no role in the boys’ child-rearing and that the two women would be their parents.

Nonetheless, the man signed a document confirming that he was the biological father of the children.

Shortly after he signed the document, the two women separated and the biological mother demanded that the man pay child support.’

‘The murder of a tramp was successfully solved in Russia’s southern port city of Novorossiisk after police discovered the victim’s penis on the person of the murderer. He had cut it off and kept it as a trophy, Russian news agency Regnum reported on Tuesday.

According to the agency, police discovered the dead body of a man in a garage block. The dead man was naked and his penis had been cut off. Investigators have found out that the dead man was a local tramp known as Sniper — a nickname he got for allegedly serving in the army in Chechnya. [..]

According to the investigators’ main theory, the murder was committed out of jealousy. The victim and his killer had been drinking in the company of a young homeless woman and started fighting. The young tramp strangled Sniper and then cut off his penis which he apparently kept as a trophy.’

`A red-faced sheriff has apologized to city police, who joined deputies in a phony car chase that a sheriff’s spokesman called “horseplay that has gone seriously awry.”

The Oct. 3 chase ended when police used a spike strip to disable the fleeing car and drew their weapons on the driver, who turned out to be an undercover deputy being chased by another deputy on the way to the Public Safety Building to end their shifts. [..]

When the deputy in the marked car turned on the lights, deputies in the unmarked Mustang accelerated, Reagan said.

After the cars entered the city, a city police officer saw the chase and joined in, thinking the deputy in the marked patrol car was trying to make a legitimate stop.’

`A violent gang rapist should have been given a lesser sentence partly because he was a “cultural time bomb” whose attacks were inevitable, as he had emigrated from a country with traditional views of women, his barrister has argued.

MSK, who, with his three Pakistani brothers, raped several girls at their Ashfield family home over six months in 2002, was affected by “cultural conditioning … in the context of intoxification”, Stephen Odgers, SC, told the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal yesterday. [..]

Mr Odgers said the new evidence showed that he had a disease, which, combined with alcohol and the cultural conditioning of “a society with very traditional views of women”, was “clearly a factor in the commissioning of these offences”.

“The applicant was a cultural time bomb,” Mr Odgers said. “It was almost inevitable that something like this would happen. His culpability is lessened because of that combination.”‘

`A man has been sentenced to three months in jail after pleading guilty to charges of bestiality.

The camel involved in the case is to be put down in accordance with Islamic law.’

`In a stroke of irony, Microsoft’s Halo movie will be produced in Wellington by servers running the open-source Linux operating system. [..]

Bungie, the Microsoft-owned development firm which created the game, confirmed that Peter Jackson’s post-production firm Weta Digital would be involved in the movie.

Weta Digital uses more than 1000 dual-processor IBM blade servers running the Fedora version of the Red Hat distribution of the Linux to produce special effects for movies that have so far included Lord of the Rings and King Kong.’

`The US must stop giving young offenders life sentences without the chance of parole, human rights groups have said.

A report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said such prisoners – numbering at least 2,225 in the US – must have access to parole processes.

The report says no more than 12 young offenders are serving life without parole in the rest of the world, where the punishment is largely outlawed. [..]

The practice is outlawed in many countries and by international law, under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The US and Somalia are the only two countries that have not ratified the treaty, the rights groups said.’

Did you ever wonder what 2000 looks like?

With a cool Pink Floyd remix for a soundtrack.

(7.7meg Shockwave)

`I watched the warden sniff down the email addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs, including those that were minimized or in the toolbar. These strings can easily contain social security numbers or credit card numbers, for example, if I have Microsoft Excel or Quickbooks open w/ my personal finances at the time. [..]

Next, warden opens every process running on your computer. When each program is opened, warden then calls ReadProcessMemory and reads a series of addresses – usually in the 0x0040xxxx or 0x0041xxxx range – this is the range that most executable programs on windows will place their code. Warden reads about 10-20 bytes for each test, and again hashes this and compares against a list of banning hashes. These tests are clearly designed to detect known 3rd party programs, such as wowglider and friends. Every process is read from in this way. I watched warden open my email program, and even my PGP key manager. Again, I feel this is a fairly severe violation of privacy, but what can you do?’

‘A revolutionary automated boar collection system developed by Genes Diffusion to reduce labor and increase technician safety in the workplace. This automated system allows a single technician to collect up to 4 boars simultaneously.’

And when they say “boar”, of course, they mean “boar semen”. Pigs have strange penises.

see it here »

`An F1 car doing “full” speed on small streets by the mountain or something, its Unbelievable how they can and dare to drive this fast. Must See!’

`Posters for the new Wallace and Gromit film in a south coast town will not feature the word “rabbit” because of a local superstition.

Because burrowing can cause landslips in quarries, residents of Portland, Dorset, instead call the creatures underground mutton or furry things.

Posters for the new film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, on Portland do not use the word, to respect local folklore.

Instead they simply say “Something bunny is going on”.’

`It’s one of the cutest of those cute IBM Corp. TV commercials, the ones that feature the ever-present help desk. This time, the desk appears smack in the middle of a highway, blocking the path of a big rig.

”Why are you blocking the road?” the driver asks. ”Because you’re going the wrong way,” replies the cheerful Help Desk lady. ”Your cargo told me so.” It seems the cartons inside the truck contained IBM technology that alerted the company when the driver made a wrong turn.

It’s clever, all right — and creepy. Because the technology needn’t be applied only to cases of beer. The trackers could be attached to every can of beer in the case, and allow marketers to track the boozing habits of the purchasers. Or if the cargo is clothing, those little trackers could have been stitched inside every last sweater. Then some high-tech busybody could keep those wearing them under surveillance.

If this sounds paranoid, take it up with IBM. The company filed a patent application in 2001 which contemplates using this wireless snooping technology to track people as they roam through ”shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, rest rooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, museums, etc.” An IBM spokeswoman insisted the company isn’t really prepared to go this far. Patent applications are routinely written to include every possible use of a technology, even some the company doesn’t intend to pursue. Still, it’s clear somebody at IBM has a pretty creepy imagination.’

`Fish can’t speak to each other underwater, but some of them seem to be keeping in touch by farting.

Dr Bob Batty spotted a group of herring swallowing air then releasing it from a small hole near their tail, although the air is nothing to do with food.’