Bush steals all his good ideas from the Nazis

"The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their "enhanced interrogation techniques" would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan." (.....)

"The very phrase used by president Bush to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death." Read arguments here...

pistol shrimp

evolution has better guns than we do.......attack evolution

The people that represent our profession...

on google images...

I searched for your study/work related profession, some of you may not actually want to perform that profession, but who cares... I more or less picked the first picture of a man that came up on google search when I searched for:
1. mechanical engineer
2. history teacher
3. website designer
4. geographer
5. communication professional
6. desktop publisher
7. architect
8. space engineer

Here are the pictures in random order, find the combinations:
The filename of the image is the rainbow-boy who belongs to that profession!

Swimming Tiger

More tigers...

Africans have finally invented the wheel ;)

The water-wheel contains at least 4 times more water. It probably is a western invention :)

Running the Numbers

Depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

Ball Ball

Looks like fun. Well is it, my last post for a while. I'm going on fieldwork with my study and will be back June 23. Don't let the blog die guys :)

The best of Stewie

A compilation of the funniest character in Family guy.

White Tigers - Freaks of nature

What you see here is the byproduct of breeding white tigers.

wiki
Because of the extreme rarity of the white tiger allele in the wild, the breeding pool is limited to the small number of white tigers in captivity, which additionally all descend from a common ancestor. Inbreeding between these tigers often leads to defects. Due to the high market value for white tigers, unscrupulous breeders will still inbreed white tigers to ensure the offspring also exhibit the recessive gene. Some animal rights activists have called for a halt to the breeding of white tigers altogether.

This ties in nicely with dekus' previous post.

Chinese cat grows wings

Couldn't find reliable source except for nu.nl (dutch), IOL.co.za (English) and some gophers newsblog. Until I see more reliable evidence I remain sceptic. Eventhough I can't wait seeing the pigeons getting their asses handed to them in mid-air. ^^

UK backs new generation of nuclear reactors

UK ministers have ended a 20-year standstill on nuclear power by giving the go-ahead to a new generation of reactors to help cut the pollution that is disrupting the climate.

And the government has given the first indications of where up to 10 nuclear stations are likely to be built, at a cost of £1.2 billion ($2.4 bn) each. An expert report (pdf) identifies the best sites as being next to existing reactors around the south coast of England, with Hinkley Point in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk topping the list.

The UK government's change of heart on nuclear power will be heralded by the industry as part of a global nuclear renaissance, which has already seen plans for more than 30 new reactors in the US. But it will be condemned by some politicians and environmentalists as the wrong solution to climate change.

Speaking in advance of the launch of the delayed energy policy paper on Wednesday, the trade and industry secretary, Alistair Darling, said it would be a "profound mistake" to rule out nuclear power. "The facts have changed," he told the BBC, "and when the facts change, you change your mind." read more....

Sure Greenpeace has something smart to say about it:

"This will bring home the reality to people of having untried, untested reactors built on their doorsteps," said Jean McSorley from Greenpeace. "All of the sites named as likely candidates are known to be at significant risk of flooding over the coming decades."

Teller speaks!

Yes he can speak, he's only silent when he is on stage or in character on TV. Pretty cool voice also, not what I expected.

Photo or Painting?

The author of the following photo/painting claims that it is a painting:

He, Dru Blair, is a respected artist. Here is his website. I just can't believe the picture above is a painting. What do you think? Please enlarge the picture to see the large detail.

Gorilla Escapes From Zoo

AussieBum for the Rainbowboys!

This must be the best Rainbowboy-outfit for the next holiday. Imagine 8 boys wearing this in all the colours of the rainbow! Our classic nylon cozzie featuring the original aussieBum WONDERJOCK pouch technology. Enhance your natural assets, flaunt your stuff, feel proud and have fun on the beach this summer.

Penn & Teller "Shadows" Trick

Too bad crybaby George from Seinfeld is in it.

Helmet = car magnet

Strange but True: Helmets Attract Cars to Cyclists
Although you might not want to leave your protective gear at home, just know that if you do, drivers will be a lot more scared of hitting you.

Last September a plucky psychologist at the University of Bath in England announced the results of a study in which he played both researcher and guinea pig. An avid cyclist, Ian Walker had heard several complaints from fellow riders that wearing a helmet seemed to result in bike riders receiving far less room to maneuver—effectively increasing the chances of an accident. So, Walker attached ultrasonic sensors to his bike and rode around Bath, allowing 2,300 vehicles to overtake him while he was either helmeted or naked-headed. In the process, he was actually contacted by a truck and a bus, both while helmeted—though, miraculously, he did not fall off his bike either time.

Full story @ Scientific American

Finally a link back to Scientific American, whose blog has linked to us.

Breakdancing ownage

chearleading skillzors

cheerleading skillzors !, not sure if it isn't fake do

Scientology and Me

This short film gives us an insiders' view on Scientology's propaganda machine and its frontman, Tommy Davis. Of course that's not entirely what this documentation is about, but one thing is certain: Tommy Davis is my new best friend!

Scientology isn't actually a recognised religion in the United Kingdom, after Hubbard accused the prime minister Harold Wilson and all European Psychiatry of a grand conspiracy against Scientologists. This report by the BBC's excellent Panorama investigative programme tries to understand why Scientologists want that Judges decision made decades ago reversed. Ironicly, the 'church' prooved the presenters point that they use intimidation and espionage to slander outsiders - by harassing the reporter during and after. A few links to explain the aftermath of this documentary:

• The Scientologist looses his temperThe reporter (really!) looses his temper (after attempted brainwashing)
• A UK news report & interview (with the full clips of both)
• BBC News on the row over the above
• The Guardian reports on the 'video ambushing' of the BBC
• The Scientologist's own documentary on the BBC!

World's Smallest Airstrip

It's not only world's smallest, it's also a moving platform! Beats slapping people with a towel I tell you that.

Synchronized skating

wiki Synchronized skating, a large and fast-growing, yet little recognized discipline, consists of 12-20 athletes skating on ice at one time moving as one flowing unit at high speeds. This discipline of figure skating was originally called precision skating in North America because of the emphasis on maintaining precise formations and timing of the group. The International Skating Union held the first official World Synchronized Skating Championships in 2000 in Minneapolis, MN, USA, in which the best senior teams from around the world gather to determine which is the world's best.

Never seen this before. Looks great, they should make it into an Olympic sport. More videos here (Video only works in IE). I bet the North Koreans would be good at this with their mass games and all. But that's for a separate post.

fokke en sukke

the joke of the day!
its a dutch joke don't know if it can be translated in English.

Bagger 288

The Bagger 288 is one of the largest machines ever made.

wiki It was built for the job of removing overburden prior to coal mining in Hambach, Germany. It can excavate 240,000 tons of coal or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden daily — the equivalent of a football field dug to 30 meters (98 ft) deep. The coal produced in one day fills 2400 coal wagons. The excavator is approximately 240 m long and 96 m high. The Bagger's operation requires 16.56 megawatts of externally supplied electricity.1 It can travel 2 to 10 m (6 to 30 ft) per minute (0.1 to 0.6 km/h). The chassis of the main section is 46 meters (151 feet) wide and sits on 3 rows of 4 caterpillar track assemblies, each 3.8 m (12.5 feet) wide. The large surface area of the tracks means the ground pressure of the Bagger 288 is very small (17.1 N/cm2 or 25.8lb/in2); this allows the excavator to travel over gravel, earth and even grass without leaving a significant track. It has a minimum turning radius of approximately 100 meters, and can climb a maximum gradient of 1:18.

In this picture you can see the machine while it's on the move towards another excavation site. It really give a sense of the huge scale of the machine. Here are some more pictures. And here is Google Earth kml file where you can see a couple of these machines in the open pit mines. Courtesy of Google Sightseeing.

Thou Shalt Always Kill

Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip - "Thou Shalt always Kill" Some rules of life, humorous and some truth.

Cheaper 3D printer

I recently posted about a great 3D printer costing €30.000.
A company called Desktop Factory is saying it will produce a 3D printer for $5000 to $7000 next year.

The Desktop Factory 3D printer measures about 25 x 20 x 20 inches and weighs less than 90 lbs. The maximum build volume of the initial product will be 5 x 5 x 5 inches. The thickness of each layer is 0.010 inch.

So it seems the price drop is already well underway.

Wave Cloud

A time-lapse video of wave clouds.

Apparently it's driven by the same mechanism as water waves i.e. gravity waves. Here's a galley with pictures of Wave Clouds.

skydiving is fun

Never figured it would actually come off.

The new Photoshop diet

Star Trek Cribs - The Director's Cut

My crew mate BlastGT1 dropped this on in #tit @ irc.after-all.org. It's not only funny as fuck, it's also a perfect excuse to check out YouTube's new and improved full screen feature - if you haven't already.

How Scientology fucks with real Science

This is an example of how Scientology gets in the way of an innocents dream(at least two of my dreams), the space elevator and life extension. Keith Hanson is an American electrical and space engineer who is working on the space elevator(a true elevator to space; very cheap access to space) concept. He was convicted for "interfering with a religion", he demonstrated against Scientology, in California in 2001. He fled to Canada and became the first Scientology fugitive. He was trown in jail a few weeks ago because he came back to the USA for 3 court cases related to Scientology. Here you can find an interview with Hanson. He talks about scientology, the space elevator and solving the global energy problem with a giant space-based solar collector. I didn't have time to check the correctness of this article and how serious/reliable he is a scientist/engineer.

Korean family reunions

Among those reunited with their family was Kim Hong-kyun (2nd left), a former South Korean fisherman abducted by the North in 1968. Accompanied by his North Korean wife, Kim, now aged 62, was reunited with his mother and younger brother.

These pictures struck me as really powerful. Some of these people haven't been able to see each other since 1953. It's so wrong, just imagine the Berlin Wall still standing...

The Encyclopedia of Life

Ultimately, the Encyclopedia will serve as an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet, as well as all those later discovered and described. Encyclopedia of Life will be used as both a teaching and a learning tool, helping scientists, educators, students, and the community at large gain a better understanding of this planet and all who inhabit it.

Also check out their demonstration pages. This initiative was partly made possible by E.O. Wilsons wish at the 2007 TED conference.

Big mofo bunny

note: the guy holding the bunny is NOT a dwarf!

Awesome 3D printer

I want one of those! Too bad it costs €30.000. Though it's probably only a matter of time before the price drops, I'll just have to be patient.

Wanna shoot krauts?

In the comments on the Call of Duty 4 post people said they rather shoot krauts instead of terrorist, and I agree. Therefore this post, when I saw the trailer this morning the "teenager-with-a-new-game-feeling" all came back to me. It will be released the 28th of november (I think), until then, save money for a better GPU! the trailer: Medal of Honor: Airborne

How it's made: Hatchery Chicks

Not as nice as the scene from Baraka, but more educational.

Poor chicks..

Gamers make better surgeons

Playing videogames appears to help surgeons with skills that truly count: how well they operate using a precise technique, a new study says.There was a strong correlation between videogame skills and a surgeon's capabilities performing laparoscopic surgery in the study published on Monday in the February issue of Archives of Surgery. Laparoscopy and related surgeries involve manipulating instruments through a small incision or body opening where the surgeon's movements are guided by watching a television screen. Videogame skills translated into higher scores on a day-and-half-long surgical skills test, and the correlation was much higher than the surgeon's length of training or prior experience in laparoscopic surgery, the study said.

The full article...

Navy Heats Up Cold Fusion Hopes

New proof that cold fusion works could fuel additional interest in generating power from low energy nuclear reactions

Cold fusion, the ability to generate nuclear power at room temperatures, has proven to be a highly elusive feat. In fact, it is considered by many experts to be a mere pipe dream -- a potentially unlimited source of clean energy that remains tantalizing, but so far unattainable.

However, a recently published academic paper from the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (Spawar) in San Diego throws cold water on skeptics of cold fusion. Appearing in the respected journal Naturwissenschaften, (...) the article claims that Spawar scientists Stanislaw Szpak and Pamela Mosier-Boss have achieved a low energy nuclear reaction (LERN) that can be replicated and verified by the scientific community. Full article...

Another Cold Fusion story! But maybe this time it's for real! (wikipedia on Cold Fusion)

Picture of the entire supercell thunderstorm structure as the storm produces a tornado near Red Cloud, Nebraska

Dutchman's Noah's Ark opens doors

A half-sized replica of the biblical Noah's Ark has been built by a Dutch man, complete with model animals.

Dutch creationist Johan Huibers built the ark as testament to his literal belief in the Bible.

The ark, in the town of Schagen, is 150 cubits long - half the length of Noah's - and three storeys high. A cubit was about 45cm (18in) long.

The ark opened its doors on Saturday, after almost two years' construction, most of it by Mr Huiber himself.

Full story...

Official site (Dutch)

When is it time buy a new computer?

"Hi, I'm Bob. I have a 2.8Ghz Dell with 1GB RAM and 180GB of hard drive space. When I'm looking at porn, things seem sluggish. And my computer gets slow too. I really need a new computer. However, I just don't know what to do!"


This site has some inside info on aging PC's, a checklist and a guide for buying the right PC.

RainbowBoysBlog Post Statistics

The Barnum Effect: A personality test

An interesting personality test based on your favorite hot drink!
More information on this test can be found here

Peculiar Flat

We passed the 500posts on this blog this week

Mr. TorrentIt Speaks!

It's been a while since TorrentIt publicized a press release stating they will return once again - and will do so before the end of May. Today, TorrentFreak released the 35th installment of their p2p podcast which features no one other than Lermy, administrator of TorrentIt.

The podcast can roughly be divided into to sections, the first bit where Charlie asks a couple of questions that dig deeper into the past and focuses on the source of TorrentIt's previous success. Then there's the last section where a number of news items are discussed. Check it out if you're into p2p news!

BitTorrent Pirates vs MPAA Ninjas

I came across this image at TorrentFreak and loved it!

Test your typing skills!

TyperA is a Java program that tests your typing speed. You get randomly chosen words or sentences and try to type them as fast as possible. A game lasts for one or two minutes. The program counts letters of the correctly typed words and divides it by the test time. This will be your score, expressed in KPM, keystrokes per minute. TyperA was originally developed in 1999 on an Amiga 1200 running LinuxPPC and hosted on a Linux server. However, it is no longer actively developed.

Student Arrested for “Suspected Terrorist Activity”

A Chinese student has been arrested in Texas, charged with “Suspected Terrorist Activity”. This student was apprehended after parents discovered that he had used plans of his High School in the creation of a map for an online first person shooter. The authorities were notified after parents learned of the map from their children, who had downloaded it off of the internet.

“They arrested him,” Chen said of FBISD police, “and also went to the house to search.” The Lin family consented to the search, and a hammer was found in the boy’s room, which he used to fix his bed, because it wasn’t in good shape, Chen said. He indicated police seized the hammer as a potential weapon.

While no charges have been filed against the student, he has been removed from Clements High School and will not be allowed to graduate with his former classmates.

Full Article...

Completely ridiculous. Everyone who has designed levels must have at one point thought about modeling the school. I know I have, and if I'd had the patience and time I certainly would have.

The Beverly Clock

The Beverly Clock is a clock situated in the foyer of the Department of Physics at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. The clock has been running continuously without the need to be wound up since its construction in 1864 by Arthur Beverly. It is a contender for the title of longest continuously running scientific experiment.
The clock mechanism is driven by variations in atmospheric pressure and by daily temperature variations; of the two, the temperature variations are the more important. Either cause the air in a one cubic-foot air-tight box to expand and contract, pushing on a diaphragm. A six-degree Celsius temperature variation over the course of each day creates enough pressure to raise a one-pound weight by one inch (energy extracted = 11 Joule (my wiki contribution :)), which drives the clock mechanism.

Here is a commercial version...

Battle of the Brains

Horizon takes seven people who are some of the highest flyers in their field - a musical prodigy, a quantum physicist, an artist, a dramatist, an RAF fighter pilot, a chess grandmaster and a Wall Street trader. Each is put through a series of tests to discover who is the most intelligent? The principle way that we measure intelligence, the IQ test, remains popular and convenient. Yet most psychologists agree that it only tells half the story... at most. Where they disagree is how to measure intelligence, for the simple reason that the experts still don't know exactly what it is.

You can also download the torrent.

Cannabis and Driving

Interesting video found on YouTube, courtesey of PlanetGanja.

Mouse brain simulated on computer

Recently some of us had a discussion about the possibility of simulating the human brain. Through an act of serendipity I found this article.

US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer.

The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer.

[....]

The researchers say that although the simulation shared some similarities with a mouse's mental make-up in terms of nerves and connections it lacked the structures seen in real mice brains.

Imposing such structures and getting the simulation to do useful work might be a much more difficult task than simply setting up the plumbing.

Full article