moonbuggy

I remember once back in early high school we had an assignment for phys. ed. class where we had to write about something we’re recently achieved and were proud of. It was some self-esteem building thing, I assume.

This was back in the early 90’s, when the interwebs were nothing much more than shell accounts, lynx and telnet. At this point in time, at the tender age of 12 or 13, I was playing MUDs quite a bit, and had infact, after many months of effort, managed to become a wizard and was able to actually program my own little kingdom in the game that other players could run around and kill monsters in. [They were mostly killing hobbits. That’ll teach the hairy little bastards.]

So, I wrote my assignment about the months of work I’d put in to reaching the point where I could program my own part of the game, and I wrote about how I’d learnt the programming language [LpC, it was] and done good bit of coding in the time since, and all the various other things that had taken many months to do. [I didn’t write about just _how_ I was accessing the internet in the early 90’s, which was an achievement in itself. :)]

And I was reasonably proud of all the effort it had taken me to get there, and the effort I’d put into the coding. Bear in mind that all the other people playing/programming this game were university students, so I thought it was pretty good to be holding my own with people 10 years older than me, many of whom were actually studying for Bachelor degrees in computing at the time.

Anyways, I got the assignment back and was told by the teacher that it didn’t count as an achievement and I’d have to do the assignment again. Everyone else’s achievements counted, except mine, apparently.

And that is why PE teachers are PE teachers and not kings of the interwebs like me. Ha! 🙂

`Most people who know about the Hurricane Carter case only know the Hollywood version presented in the movie starring Denzel Washington. The Hurricane, released in 1999, features crooked, lying, racist cops and frightened witnesses who won’t come forward. Carter himself is brash but noble, persecuted his whole life by one obsessed detective who keeps sending him to jail.

The real Rubin Carter and the real Lafayette Grill murder case are nothing like the movie. This movie bills itself as being about hope and redemption. The movie, in terms of Carter and the actual murders at the Lafayette Grill, is a fraud from beginning to end, full of errors, distortions and fictions, large and small. [..]

”Rubin used to tell me time and time again, ‘You’ve met Rubin and you know Carter, but you’ve never met the Hurricane. The Hurricane’s bad. The Hurricane’s mean.'”‘

This is quite long, but interesting. Turns out this guy is some sorta sociopath and it’s very probable that he is infact guilty.

A guy with a funny laugh ruins a upsets a comedy act in an amusing way. It’s pretty hilarious. Half quack, half snort.

(21.9meg Flash video)

see it here »

`We may have already encountered Martian life about 30 years ago and accidentally killed it, according to a new analysis of NASA’s Viking mission to Mars presented Sunday at a major astronomy conference in Seattle. [..]

Schulze-Makuch and Houtkooper suggest that the hydrogen peroxide detected by Viking could have come from killing Martian microbes that, like some peculiar creatures on Earth, use hydrogen peroxide the same way humans use water.

The Mars landers did all their chemical analyses by mixing samples with water — a step that would have prompted a powerful chemical reaction in any microbe full of hydrogen peroxide, killing it and releasing the peroxide.’

`A US nuclear submarine has collided with a Japanese ship in the Arabian Sea, Japanese and US government officials have said.

The collision took place in the Arabian Sea, south of the Straits of Hormuz, although no details were available about the submarine’s exact location.

A Pentagon spokesman confirmed that a collision had taken place, AFP reports.

There was no immediate information about any possible casualties or the exact nature of the collision.’

She seems pretty pleased with her dive.

see it here »

`This threat is being compounded by the loss of permafrost which has kept river banks from eroding too quickly.

The waves are larger because there is no sea ice to diminish their intensity, slamming against the west and northern shores of Alaska, causing severe storm driven coastal erosion.

It has become so serious that several coastal villages are now actively trying to figure out where to move entire communities.’

`Coca-Cola has come under fire again for fuelling the childhood obesity crisis after Melbourne research found that adding caffeine — an addictive stimulant — does not enhance flavour.

Soft drink companies say caffeine adds flavour to cola, but a scientific taste test conducted by Deakin University found consumers could not tell the difference between caffeine-free Coke and a version with caffeine.

Head researcher Russell Keast said it was “unethical” for companies to use caffeine if it did not enhance flavour and could lead to young people becoming addicted to sugary drinks.’

`Saddam Hussein and his cousin “Chemical Ali” discussed how chemical weapons would exterminate thousands before unleashing them on Kurds in 1988, according to tapes played on Monday in a trial of former Iraqi officials.

“I will strike them with chemical weapons and kill them all and damn anyone who is going to say anything,” a voice identified by prosecutors as “Chemical Ali” Hassan al-Majeed is heard saying. [..]

“Yes, it exterminates thousands and forces them not to eat or drink and they will have to evacuate their homes without taking anything with them, until we can finally purge them,” the voice identified as Saddam answers.’

see it here »

`A traditional circumcision ceremony in South Africa went awry over the weekend when a policeman had his nose bitten off.

The policeman had tried to put paid to an argument between a man and his family during the ceremony in the Eastern Cape province, when the man attacked him, biting off his nose.

The aggrieved policeman then shot the 30-year-old man in the chest, the SAPA news agency reported.’

‘These guys decide it would be funny to scare the garbage man during his pickup by hiding in a seemingly empty cardboard box. I guess he didn’t find it that funny.’

(1.8meg Windows media)

see it here »

`Health authorities in Madrid have acted to close a pro-anorexia website, accusing it of endangering the lives of teenage girls.

Four months after the city led the world in the Size 0 debate by banning ultra-skinny models from its catwalks, health officials are shining the spotlight on the growing number of “pro-ana” websites that glorify starvation diets.

Their first strike is against The Great Ana Competition, a website that awards a diploma to the girl who eats the fewest calories in a two-week period. They have filed a suit against the competition, which uses a scoring system that doctors said “would cause malnutrition in normal women”.’

‘An actual British government poster outside a London Metro station. And you thought talk of a police state was just fearmongering.’

see it here »

I’ve seen still photos of this sorta thing before, never a video tho. Give me a lever big enough and I can move anything, even a donkey.

see it here »

`But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it “the cough.” People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. [..]

The makeshift clinic at a church where Justice Eta was vaccinated and the flares spewing over Ebocha represent a head-on conflict for the Gates Foundation. In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.’

`Three people were killed, at least two of them decapitated, and one seriously injured when a helicopter crashed into a restaurant carpark in the Camargue region in southern France, a local source said Sunday. [..]

The incident happened in the hamlet of Villeneuve when the Alouette 2-type aircraft carrying four people crashed Sunday afternoon.

“It was 15h30. The helicopter crashed onto parked cars close to the restaurant. The victims were the parents of a five-year-old girl. At least two of them were been decapitated,” said the source, a former AFP journalist.

“The little girl cried out ‘My daddy doesn’t have a head anymore’. Everyone is in a state of shock,” he added. ‘

This is a follow up to the Full Saddam Execution Video.

see it here »

`An incident recently occurred at an outpatient imaging center in western New York State, in which a firearm spontaneously discharged in a 1.5-T MR imaging environment with active shielding. To our knowledge, this is the first documented case of such an occurrence. The event confirms previously reported theoretic risks of a firearm discharging in an MR imaging environment [1]. In this report, we examine the incident in detail from the official police and ballistic reports.’

`Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.’

That’s a surprise. It never even occurred to me that the US government might have some interest in Iraqi oil fields.

It’s a reasonably impressive sorta thing, I suppose. 🙂

see it here »

`British police said Friday they were hunting a man who stole a urinal from a pub toilet.

The suspect walked into the Royal Oak pub in Southampton, on the English south coast, ordered half a pint of beer and then made several visits to the men’s toilet.

There he carefully removed a white urinal from the wall, stuffed it into a rucksack and was captured on closed circuit television walking out with the bulging sack on his back.

“He made a very, very expert job of dismantling it from the wall and turning the water off. A very professional job,” landlord Alan Dreja said in a video posted on the Southampton Daily Echo newspaper’s Web site.’

I don’t know if there should be a comma in there or not. “If you see her, run” is just as valid a title. 🙂

see it here »

`A mother and son accused of stealing a snake from a pet store were arrested when they returned to the store and asked for books on how to care for the animal, police said.

Store clerks recognized the suspects from surveillance video taken during the theft and stalled them until police arrived.

The video showed the 15-year-old taking the 30-inch baby boa from its cage, wrapping it around his neck and hiding it with his jacket, while his mother acted as a lookout, police said.’

‘Although tales about men suffering severe burns to their genitalia (or even being electrocuted) through urinating on electric fences or electrified train rails are common in urban legendry, such occurrences are exceeding unlikely (if not outright impossible). Accordingly, the story accompanying the photograph reproduced above about a “Texas redneck” who met with an unfortunate injury after drinking too much and then “peeing on a 3-phase electric fence” — is a fanciful invention that has nothing to do with the picture’s actual origins.

This image accompanied an article authored by five Chinese doctors (from the Department of Urology at the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing) and published in the Asian Journal of Andrology, a case report from 2003 about a 38-year-old man who sought medical attention at a clinic for genital herpes simplex. A circumcision was performed and the patient was treated with short-wave diathermy that proved excessive, producing a severe burn to the penis that resulted in necrosis and gangrene.’

see it here »

`Experts think a Carolina Beach couple owns a real Pablo Picasso masterpiece.

Pete Bivens and his fiancé had the painting analyzed last week by art historians. They think the painting could be an original piece.

Now they have to begin the lengthy process of having the painting carbon dated and authenticated.

Bivens and his fiancé bought the painting at a yard sale more than a decade ago for one dollar.’

‘Professional man giving a power point presentation had a technological miss-hap which showed one of his particular fetishes.’

see it here »

`Forget learning lines or polishing jokes – having sex may be the best way to prepare for giving a speech.

New Scientist magazine reports that Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley, found having sex can help keep stress at bay.

However, only penetrative intercourse did the trick – other forms of sex had no impact on stress levels at all.’

`After seven years of toiling, scientists at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and Harvard School of Medicine report they have isolated stem cells from a new source: amniotic fluid. The researchers not only succeeded in separating the progenitor cells from the many cells residing in the watery fluid in the placenta surrounding an embryo, but were also able to coax the cells to differentiate into muscle, bone, fat, blood vessel, liver and nerve cells.

According to lead author Anthony Atala, director of Wake Forest’s Institute of Regenerative Medicine, 99 percent of the U.S., population could conceivably find genetic matches for tissue regeneration or engineered organs from just 100,000 amniotic fluid samples. [..]’

That he finds dead on the plains. Without bothering to cook it. After he scares some vultures off.

see it here »