‘A Spanish businessman withdrew a controversial lawsuit Wednesday against the family of a teenage boy he struck and killed while driving a luxury car.
Tomas Delgado had filed a suit asking the dead boy’s parents to pay him €20,000 ($29,400) on the grounds that the collision that killed their teenage son also damaged his Audi A-8.
News of the case sparked outrage in Spain and generated deep sympathy for the parents of 17-year-old Enaitz Iriondo Trinidad. He was riding his bicycle home to a campground when Delgado’s car hit and killed him in August 2004.
Hundreds of people descended on a courthouse in northern Spain in a show of support for the boy’s parents Wednesday. They broke into applause when word came that Delgado had dropped the suit.’
Followup to Driver who killed teen sues for damage.
‘The world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracking site, The Pirate Bay, won’t be going to Davy Jones’ Locker, even if its four operators are convicted of facilitating copyright infringement, one of the defendants said in an interview Friday with THREAT LEVEL.
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of the four Swedes charged in Sweden on Thursday, said in a telephone interview that the site has set up a clandestine, double-blind operation with its servers spread throughout the world — and out of reach of the Swedish authorities.
“The Pirate Bay is not in Sweden,” the 29-year-old Kolmisoppi said.
Where are the servers?
“It’s a distributed system. We don’t know where the servers are. We gave them to people we trust and they don’t know it’s The Pirate Bay,” Kolmisoppi said. “They then rent locations and space for them somewhere else. It could be three countries. It could be six countries. We don’t want to know because then you’ll have a problem shutting them down.”‘
‘While most kids spend free time with their Xbox 360s and Guitar Hero games, this 10-year-old whiz kid was busy inventing a snow machine.
Austinites haven’t seen much snow through the winter season; perhaps individuals seeking a fun slide down a hoary hill should turn to this young genius in West Linn, Oregon.
Pearson, using a 30 gallon air compressor he received for Christmas, a pressure washer, and loads of research, created his own backyard ski resort. [..]
“We’re past toys, we’re into air compressors and spray nozzles,” said Pearson’s mother.
The nozzle on his concoction sprays out a perfect powder. His machine is so efficient that it produced the astounding three feet of snow overnight.’
‘Gangs of criminals are hiding dwarves in sports bags and smuggling them onto buses to steal luggage.
The tiny terrors are placed in the luggage hold where they are free to rummage through personal belongings.
Travellers in Sweden are now being advised not to leave valuables in their bags.’
‘As a 16-year-old high school student in the International Baccalaureate program, I am required to complete a ‘personal project’ on a non-academic topic that is of interest to me. I have always enjoyed woodworking and design, so I decided to build a functional wooden bicycle. There was to be no metal used in its construction, only wood and glue. I wanted a project that would be a challenge.
This project came to mind as I was reflecting on the many stories my opa, Case Vandersluis, told me about his adventures in Holland during World War II. Opa was roughly the age I am now when he had to build wooden wheels for his bicycle, as rubber was scarce during the war.
I wasn’t sure my wooden bicycle would actually work. I quickly realized the first pieces of the puzzle I needed to figure out were the chain and the sprockets (gears), since the design of all the other components depended on these.’
A car that drives itself around the race track at high speed.. Cunning. 🙂
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It’s certainly a fairly crazy looking move. He’s lucky he didn’t break his leg, I reckon. 🙂
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‘Researchers from the University of Tokyo have teamed up with members of the Japan Origami Airplane Association to develop a paper aircraft capable of surviving the flight from the International Space Station to the Earth’s surface.
The researchers are scheduled to begin testing the strength and heat resistance of an 8 centimeter (3.1 in) long prototype on January 17 in an ultra-high-speed wind tunnel at the University of Tokyo’s Okashiwa campus (Chiba prefecture). In the tests, the origami glider — which is shaped like the Space Shuttle and has been treated to withstand intense heat — will be subjected to wind speeds of Mach 7, or about 8,600 kilometers (5,300 miles) per hour.
A large spacecraft such as the Space Shuttle can reach speeds of up to Mach 20 (over 15,200 mph) when it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere, and friction with the air heats the outer surface to extreme temperatures. The much lighter origami aircraft, which the researchers claim will come down more slowly, is not expected to burn up on re-entry.’
‘Scientists at a California company reported yesterday that they had created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, a significant advance toward the goal of growing personalized stem cells for patients suffering from various diseases.
Creation of the embryos — grown from cells taken from the company’s chief executive and one of its investors — also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies. That reality could prompt renewed controversy on Capitol Hill, where the debate over human cloning has died down of late.
Five of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors consider ready for transfer to a woman’s womb: a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved before.’
‘First I got 3 dead harddisks. A small one that used to be my Amiga’s, a normal sized one, and a bigass ancient one. I did this just for the fun of saying I have a harddisk sound system with woofer, midrange, and tweeter drivers ;). I ripped the drives apart. I took sound (in electrical signal form) from the output jack of my sound card. I fed it through a Velleman 30 watt audio amplifier that I bought from Parts Express here and soldered together. I took the amplified signals and fed them through the coil that controls the movement of the HD drive heads. I also connected the amplified signals to the platter motors of the ‘midrange’ and ‘tweeter’ drives, so you can actually see the platters spin sometimes. I determined which places to connect the wires by studying the drives and poking wires around in random places. Hey… they were dead anyway. Anyways, the sound that is being produced is from the rapid vibrations of the heads/platters due to the ‘sound’ signals passing through them. With lower frequency sounds being passed through the drives, you can see the heads move quite a lot. For the high frequency ones, its invisible to our inferior human eyes. This kind of fun isn’t just limited to harddisks… I also got low frequency sounds to come out of an electric motor, and even standard cooling fans will make some sound. Girls can try even making music come out of their vibr… *cough*… The 3 harddisks are connected to the amp in parallel. It’s like ghetto raid with groove ;)’
‘The locking DVD case is a ubiquitous fixture in libraries and video rental
stores across the country. It uses a magic yellow tab to keep you from
opening the case. A gizmo mounted to the checkout counter can open the case
easily by sliding the DVD across its slot.
Ever wonder how it works?
The secret is two very powerful magnets. From reading the sales literature
for the locks, these magnets are supposedly only available to sooper-seekret
authorized personnel. What they don’t tell their customers is that these
magnets are also available inside every junk 3.5″ hard disk drive made in the
last 15 years. They are part of the head seeking motor.’
‘We wanted to make a catapult that could destroy a car with bowling balls from at least 80 feet away, throw fireballs, and be controlled through a computer vision system so it could be aimed from a laptop. Result? Success.’
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I don’t know what they’re saying, but the sign speaks for itself, I s’pose. 🙂
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‘A couple of weeks ago, Sabian Lucas, 9, and her Edna Sosa, 8, were having a sleepover. While playing and eating, Edna began choking on an apple.
“I was like, ‘Are you choking?'” Sabian recalled. [..]
KMBC’s Marcus Moore reported that Sabian ended up performing the Heimlich maneuver on Edna.
“I never did it on a person because I was tiny. So I did it for the first time and I was like, ‘OK, I’ll try to do this,'” Sabian said. [..]
“She saved my life. Now I have to be really, really, really nice to her,” Edna said.
“She doesn’t really have to do anything. All she has to do is be my best friend for life,” Sabian said.’
‘A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last U.S. regulatory barrier to the marketing of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats.
The 968-page “final risk assessment,” not yet released but obtained by The Washington Post, finds no evidence to support opponents’ concerns that food from clones may harbor hidden risks.
But, recognizing that a majority of consumers are wary of food from clones — and that cloning could undermine the wholesome image of American milk and meat — the agency report includes hundreds of pages of raw data so that others can see how it came to its conclusions.’
‘The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten.’
‘#xkcd has had about 250 chatters these days. Large communities suck. This problem is hard to solve, but we’ve come up with a fun attack on it — enforced originality (in a very narrow sense). We’ve put together an auto-moderation system in an experimental channel, #xkcd-signal, and it seems to work well, so we invite you all to take part. [..]
I was trying to decide what made a channel consistently enjoyable. A common factor in my favorite hangouts seemed to be a focus on original and unpredictable content on each line. It didn’t necessarily need to be useful, just interesting. I started trying to think of ways to encourage this.
And then I had an idea — what if you were only allowed to say sentences that had never been said before, ever? A bot with access to the full channel logs could kick you out when you repeated something that had already been said. There would be no “all your base are belong to us”, no “lol”, no “asl”, no “there are no girls on the internet”. No “I know rite”, no “hi everyone”, no “morning sucks.” Just thoughtful, full sentences.’
‘Scientists at the University of Minnesota have taken a big step toward making replacement organs with the recipients’ cells. In experiments performed on rats and pigs, the researchers stripped donor hearts of their cells to create scaffolds on which the recipients’ cells were grown. The hope is that a similar approach might someday prove useful to human patients with end-stage heart disease. In theory, these novel hearts could prove to be better than traditional donor hearts because they are less likely to cause an immune response.
“It’s an audacious, gutsy, exciting piece of work,” says Buddy Ratner, a professor of bioengineering and chemical engineering at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the research. Still, substantial hurdles remain before the approach might be applicable to human patients.’
‘A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train set, triggering chaos and derailing four vehicles in the process. Twelve people were injured in one of the incidents.
The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points, The Telegraph reports. Local police said the youngster trespassed in tram depots to gather information needed to build the device. The teenager told police that he modified track setting for a prank.
“He studied the trams and the tracks for a long time and then built a device that looked like a TV remote control and used it to manoeuvre the trams and the tracks,” said Miroslaw Micor, a spokesman for Lodz police. [..]
“He treated it like any other schoolboy might a giant train set, but it was lucky nobody was killed. Four trams were derailed, and others had to make emergency stops that left passengers hurt. He clearly did not think about the consequences of his actions,” Micor added.’
‘An extraordinary new scientific study, which for the first time documents marked improvement in Alzheimer’s disease within minutes of administration of a therapeutic molecule, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation.
This new study highlights the importance of certain soluble proteins, called cytokines, in Alzheimer’s disease. The study focuses on one of these cytokines, tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF), a critical component of the brain’s immune system. Normally, TNF finely regulates the transmission of neural impulses in the brain. The authors hypothesized that elevated levels of TNF in Alzheimer’s disease interfere with this regulation. To reduce elevated TNF, the authors gave patients an injection of an anti-TNF therapeutic called etanercept. Excess TNF-alpha has been documented in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with Alzheimer’s.’
‘Mourners shivering in a chapel are to be kept warm using “body heat” generated from cremating their loved ones.
The idea will be tried at a crematorium near Manchester where grieving friends and relatives have complained of the cold during services.
Tameside council will use heat from cremating bodies to keep the mourners warm at Dukinfield Crematorium.
Town hall chiefs say the heat generated will be enough to power the boiler and light the chapel. But they admit it is a “sensitive” issue and have promised to consult clergy and the wider community.’
‘You can’t deny I’m full of ideas. After doing 5 earlier attempts at getting shadowless light onto a macro scene, some good, some bad, this is yet another approach: fiber optics. I haven’t seen many people try this. [..]’
‘If you’ve ever blistered your bare feet on a hot road you know that asphalt absorbs the sun’s energy. A Dutch company is now siphoning heat from roads and parking lots to heat homes and offices.
As climate change rises on the international agenda, the system built by the civil engineering firm, Ooms Avenhorn Holding BV, doesn’t look as wacky as it might have 10 years ago when first conceived.
Solar energy collected from a 200-yard stretch of road and a small parking lot helps heat a 70-unit four-story apartment building in the northern village of Avenhorn. An industrial park of some 160,000 square feet in the nearby city of Hoorn is kept warm in winter with the help of heat stored during the summer from 36,000 square feet of pavement. The runways of a Dutch air force base in the south supply heat for its hangar.’
‘Paul Brant considers himself a penny pincher, but his savings in quarters and dollar coins really paid off.
Brant, 70, used more than $25,000 in change to help buy a new Dodge Ram half-ton pickup truck Friday – 13 years after buying another truck with spare change.
“(The old truck) didn’t have four-wheel drive, and living in the country, I figured I better get a new one to help get me through the snow,” he said.
Brant said he was raised to be thrifty. His father always paid in cash and saved up loose change to take vacations.
Brant has been storing his change for years, and estimated he had about $26,000 in coins for Friday’s purchase. In 1994, he bought a Dodge pickup and a Dodge Neon using about $36,000 in quarters.
“As long as you don’t put your hands back in the till, it really adds up,” he said.’
‘Smoking during a brain scan is not easy. Why would you want to? Because functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to observe activity in the brain, and doing so while smoking tobacco or pot could enhance our understanding of addiction and how to treat it.
But during an MRI, the head must remain completely still. In the narrow bore of a superconducting magnet, there isn’t much room to maneuver a cigarette or eat a pot brownie either. Smoke raises a second set of concerns. At the very least, it will stink up the lab. Perhaps, it could even damage the expensive machine.
So Blaise Frederick at Harvard Medical School built a device that delivers smoke into the narrow confines of a scanner. His colleagues, Kim Lindsey and Liz Ryan, tested it out on nine volunteers at McLean Hospital. They described their work in the May issue of Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior.’
A friend of mine said she’d shave her head if she could get $1,000 in donations towards education for some kids in Kenya. Apparently people like to help children in Kenya, or they really want to see her with no hair. Either way, the money was raised and the hair came off.
Kenyans will be able to read, and muppet’s skull will be cold. It’s a win-win situation.
I think she should glue the hair she’s chopped off to her boyfriend’s face whilst he sleeps so he wakes up thinking he’s a wolfman. That would be a win-win-win situation. 🙂
Hopefully there’ll be a wolfman video in the near future, but for now the video of the hair removal will have to suffice. 🙂
Good stuff!
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‘Put your butt to use: Cigarette butts are a perfect fit for gun barrels and can help keep out dirt, sand or water. And they shoot out easily when the weapon is fired. For non-smokers, there are other options: in Vietnam, soldiers rubber-banded condoms around the tops of their guns.’
‘A homeless contractor known as the “mole man” dug a multi-room 200-square foot home underground in Fresno that surprised police when they recently stumbled upon a hidden entrance. [..]
The home had a bed, a leak-proof roof, a kitchen and escape hatch, Local 6 reported.
Tracy said it took him about 2 months with a shovel and other tools to carve out the underground rooms.
The state said it is a danger to people living nearby and plan to demolish it.
Tracy said it is no big deal and he is already looking for a new location for his next underground home.’
‘This time I went for chip wood board to get it straight and stable. I also used a 4 layer glass. Two outer layers of 3mm float glass and two inner layers of 3mm plexi glass where the image were engraved. I had to use plexiglass as it conducts light way better than normal glass.’
If I had one tho, it would probably being a glowing goatse door. Because goatse is always funny. 🙂
