Monday, December 31, 2007

LOLCat Bible

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.

4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.

5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

www.lolcatbible.com

54 wine scholars fail to distinguish white from red

In the first (part II of the article), he gave 54 subjects (students in the wine program at the Bordeaux university, experienced with wine tasting, I believe) two wines, both at room temperature: a white wine and an identical white wine dyed red with flavorless food coloring. The vast majority of subjects described the white wine in typical white wine terms (e.g. pear, apricot, fresh, floral), while they described the red-colored wine in typical red wine terms (e.g. raspberry, black currant, plum, tannic). In the second (part II.2), Brochet gave 57 subjects two identical wines to taste (separated by a week); they were told that one was a Grand Cru and the other a table wine. In fact, the wines were identical. The vast majority of subjects described the supposed Grand Cru with laudatory adjectives (e.g. complex, well-balanced, full-bodied) and described the supposed VdT with critical adjectives (e.g. thin, flat, flawed).

Saturday, December 29, 2007

My childhood dream just came true...

I stopped a stopwatch at the one hour mark! With a precision of 10 ms, WHOOOHOOOO!!!!

Friday, December 28, 2007

Best Invention Evar

For when you want that good treadmill exercise but don't want to be indoors all the time.
Buy one here!

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Pandas Aren't Cute All the Time

Most of us on the blog despise pandas, but this one gets a little respect from me.

My Eye

I was playing with my new camera and tried to picture my eye. I couldn't get too close because that blocked all the light, I should retry with sunlight. In the top of my eye was a reflection of the lamp so I mirrored the bottom half of my eye, a bit fake, but it looks way better.

The title links to some professional photographers eye pictures, but you probably can't click that yet because our blog is somewhat fragged.

Benazir Bhutto Killed

(RAWALPINDI, Pakistan) — Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, aides said. [link]

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Rainbowboysblog post statistics 3

Since i wanted to sort the pictures in the left sidebar to post-rank, I extracted the post statistics from blogger (I hope you're not mad at me, Annom). May 2007 August 2007 Annom 231 cybrbeast 265 Douchebag 61 pimp-a-lot bear 145 dekus 85 wiggles 4 exa 38 wiki 58 I also changed the font of the archives in the sidebar, and added a new box with all our labels. unfortunately the labels don't autoupdate, but updating them is a piece of cake. I took them from the 'edit posts' page in the blogger dashboard.

Flash header

/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ Look at what we've got now...... click it to make it go again. P.S. There is an easteregg in there. Don't use the tab button, use this hint instead: Evil will reveal itself within an idle brain.

Happy XXX-mas Rainbow Boys!

Also, Douche you are doing some great flash work on the blog!

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Woohoo I've stood on ice

It's been a while since there has been sufficiently thick ice in Utrecht to stand upon. But today I ventured out into the park on a beautiful winter's day. Too bad the thaw will set in tomorrow.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Cheaper Solar Cell Power

Solar Cell energy production is 4-10 times more expensive than fossil fuel energy. That's what I calculated some time ago if I remember correct. Yesterday I read this hopeful article. It sounds like a decent breakthrough.

"The company, which has raised $150 million and built a 200,000-square-foot factory here, is developing a new manufacturing process that “prints” photovoltaic material on aluminum backing, a process the company says will reduce the manufacturing cost of the basic photovoltaic module by more than 80 percent.
Nanosolar, which recently hired a top manufacturing executive from I.B.M., said that it had orders for its first 18 months of manufacturing capacity. The photovoltaic panels will be made in Silicon Valley and in a second plant in Germany.
Nanosolar’s founder and chief executive, Martin Roscheisen, claims to be the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to profitably sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt. That is the price at which solar energy becomes less expensive than coal.
“With a $1-per-watt panel,” he said, “it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems.”
According to the Energy Department, building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said." - New York Times
It is not very efficient, but very cheap. Let's hope their optimistic words are somewhat true! Solar power can explode when it becomes cheaper than normal coal plants.

I'm blue daba dee daba da.

I told you Pappa smurf was real.

blogtest

Ok,

it seems to work in IE now as well. It still looks a bit crap.....and for some reason we don't have a footer in IE.

It was hell btw, I had to manually re-nest the entire code.

(on douches request) IE v6.0.29 screenshot (ignore the gif compression effect):

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Nanowire battery holds 10 times the charge of existing ones

Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices. The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers. "It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development." The breakthrough is described in a paper, "High-performance lithium battery anodes using silicon nanowires," published online Dec. 16 in Nature Nanotechnology, written by Cui, his graduate chemistry student Candace Chan and five others. The greatly expanded storage capacity could make Li-ion batteries attractive to electric car manufacturers. Cui suggested that they could also be used in homes or offices to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels. Full article...
Wow, this could really make electric cars viable. You could drive all day without recharging and let it recharge overnight.

<--just look at it

I've added a few changes. We now have our own flash animated starry rainbow. Click it to make it go again.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Blog design

Care bear psd feel free to tinker with it all you like. All you need to do is replace the image called carebearsitedesign.jpg in the image-directory of our ftp-server.

Intriguing doors

138.99 m high doors for the Saturn 5 rocket at the kennedy space center. The largest doors in the world.

The disappearing car door.

ak47 vs m16

I prefer a m16 after all.

Top Ten Signs You're a Fundamentalist Christian

10 - You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours. 9 - You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt. 8 - You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God. 7 - Your face turns purple when you hear of the "atrocities" attributed to Allah, but you don't even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in "Exodus" and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in "Joshua" including women, children, and trees! 6 - You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky. 5 - You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (few billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old. 4 - You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs -- though excluding those in all rival sects - will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering. And yet consider your religion the most "tolerant" and "loving." 3 - While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in "tongues" may be all the evidence you need to "prove" Christianity. 2 - You define 0.01% as a "high success rate" when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God. 1 - You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history - but still call yourself a Christian.
From Evilbible.com, what a great URL

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Fon

This is an idea of a wifi connection around the world. You can open your wireless modem/router so other people can connect with your modem. If you do do this you can join other fon connections for free. Otherwise it cost you 3 euro a day. This way they wanna give a world cover of wifi Internet. They already got some big investers like skype and google, and 100.000 connection points world wide (mostly USA and spain). The netherlands is a bid behind but we got already 1.700 members still prety good for a small country. On google maps/ earth or the fon mapssite you can find the connection points in the Netherlands/Utrecht or around the world.

Ames Room

The so called Ames Room optical illusion.

Top 20 Coolest Guitar Riffs

Of course lists like these are hugely subjective, but I enjoyed it.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Train Snow Plow

We bitch about leafs on the railroad....
The plow gets stuck: video And is derailed: video

Friday, December 14, 2007

Daffy Duck vs the Nazis

Overall it's a quite boring cartoon, the end however, really makes up for it.

YTMND = random bizarre weird shit

YTMND, an initialism for "You're The Man Now, Dog", is an online community centered on the creation of hosted web pages (known within the community as YTMNDs or sites) featuring a juxtaposition of a single image or a simple slideshow, which may be animated and/or tiled along with optional large zooming text and a looping sound file. Images used in YTMNDs are usually either created or edited by users. Most YTMNDs are meant to expose or reflect the more inane facets of pop culture, and some can be considered inside jokes.
Here is a small compilation
Check out YTMND for more weird shit and tons of crappy shit.

Users are losers!

I just found a sixteen page public school handout to California Middle and High School students in 1970 on drug use. If you ever plan to use drugs, make sure to read this handout :D.

Atheists and Anger

"One of the most common criticisms lobbed at the newly-vocal atheist community is, "Why do you have to be so angry?" So I want to talk about: 1. Why atheists are angry; 2. Why our anger is valid, valuable, and necessary; And 3. Why it's completely fucked-up to try to take our anger away from us." A beautiful rant, maybe a bit long, but worth reading.

Monkey in Ecuador opening my bag

I just started filming when the little monkey (wild but domesticated) came close. Very skilled in opening zippers. It was the only organism that tried to pickpocket me.

Robert Mugabe's suffering

He came to power in Zimbabwe 27 years ago, Robert Mugabe. With an inflation of 8000% Zimbabwe is not in the best situation at the moment. He was declared candidate for the presidential elections and said "Their welfare is my welfare. Their suffering is my suffering. I dare not abandon them.". The country does not have enough goods in the shops to calculate the inflation rate since last month. I wanted to know in what house he sleeps and in what car he drives while "suffering".

Here is one of his private residences, under construction, I found:and his football field sized presidential palace since 1980:
his car:

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Harlequin Ichthyosis

Came across this while wasting corporate time, didn't think much of it until I saw the picture. Harlequin-type ichthyosis (also harlequin ichthyosis, ichthyosis congenita, or keratosis diffusa fetalis), a skin disease, is the most severe form of congenital ichthyosis, characterized by a thickening of the keratin layer in fetal human skin. In sufferers of the disease, the skin contains massive, diamond-shaped scales, and tends to give off a reddish color. In addition, the eyes, ears, mouth, and other appendages may be abnormally contracted. The scaly keratin greatly limits the child's movement. Because the skin is cracked where normal skin would fold, it is easily pregnable by bacteria and other contaminants, resulting in serious risk of fatal infection.
!!! Please be advised, I personally think these pictures are quite disturbing!!! (you might need to turn google filter off to see them)

Trout Stage Daring Breakout at Fish Farm

Owners of a fish farm near the village of Alresford have been raising fish for nearly 30 years. Recently they noticed some of their brown trout appeared to be missing. Then a local wildlife photographer and friend of the fish farmers made an amazing discovery.
Dennis Bright captured images of the trout leaping 3 feet out of the water into the mouth of an 8 inch wide metal feeding pipe. The pipe leads to a tributary of the River Itchen about 30 feet away. To get to the water, the trout had to leap into the tiny metal pipe then swim against the swift current.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Dutch weird shit

b3ta.hnldesign.nl - click <span class= I mostly see this when i'm drunk i'm so glad somebody finally caught this on tape. b3ta.hnldesign.nl - click <span class= Discobal on his head and you got a standalone drive in DJ! b3ta.hnldesign.nl - click to visit Hmmm weird shit without being Japanese or haveing midgets in it.

First Digital Clock

The first and most primitive digital clock online

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Human Statue of Liberty

Human Statue of Liberty formed by 18,000 US soldiers , taken in 1918 in Iowa, as part of a promotional campaign to sell war bonds during the first world war.

Random image 1.0

I added a random image generator to our blog. I rewrote a crappy script and can add large amounts of pictures semi-automatically now. It is, as far as I know, impossible to write a javascript that picks a random file from a folder. You can not just add the pictures to our randomimage folder at rainbowboys.org.

Douchebag needs to add a coloured title and you can send me any images you want in there or I'll just add some blog images from time to time.

Monday, December 10, 2007

The "new" C-String

They did it! A bunch of rocket scientists have made womens underwear even more uncomfortable! Introducing: The new C-String!

No Panty Lines! No Tan Lines!
The C-String is a completely new and exciting innovation in lingerie. Say goodbye to panty line and uncomfortable straps. Say hello to a sexy new freedom.

The C-String can be worn under all your favorite clothes:
Dresses Skirts Jeans
The C-String can also be worn alone:
Swimwear Lingerie

My colleague told me that it's not new but at least 20 years old, I couldn't find a source to confirm that.

New logo uploaded

And it looks crappy! (I'm so proud)

I had to shop it on top of the old logo, but because the new logo rests on a "glass" plate you can still see the old one... Can anyone (douche?) get me the original rainbow background without the old logo?

I'm also not sure of the glass plate, still working on what to do with it.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Moviez and TV showz on Demand

Stage6 is kind of like YouTube, but with DivX quality and unlimited length video clips. This has led to a lot of reasonably high quality DivX movies, TV shows and documentaries being uploaded to the site. The site streams the movies on demand which makes it pretty handy if you just feel like watching a movie or show without downloading or turning on the crappy TV with commercials. You can try searching for yourself but I recommend using a site which tracks them like Joox, Nabolister or this forum. You also need DivX web player. Watch a few episodes of Weeds for example. Or start watching Farscape, awesome sci-fi!

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Educational Rap

Over on the Freakonomics blog I read a bit about educational rap music.
Rhythm, Rhyme, Results, LLC was founded in 2006 and is located in Cambridge, MA. We produce supplementary educational music in academic subjects such as mathematics, language arts, science, and social studies. The content-rich lyrics adhere to state and federal curriculum requirements and flow to thumping, original music. People remember song lyrics. When combined with music, lyrics embed themselves into our memory in a fundamentally different—and sometimes more enduring—manner than text alone. Our contemporary twist helps students remember important concepts by transforming them into memorable rap lyrics and combining them with thumping hip-hop tracks. We value the ability of music, specifically hip-hop music, to transcend social contexts.
Demand, Supply
Here is one relevant to my study on the water cycle.
Full playlist here...

Trick of the brain count the F's

Read this sentence: FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS. Now count the F's is that sentence. Count them ONLY ONCE. Do not go back and count them again. Then see the comment:

Friday, December 07, 2007

Liberation Army Against Freedom

note: Can't embed it within 10 seconds, sorry...

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Next Gen Paint Brush

At first glance, it looks like your standard brush, but upon closer inspection you’ll find integrated LEDs, touch sensors, and a camera. This gadget basically “lifts up and captures photons”, allowing artists to draw with “special ink” picked up from their immediate environment.

Parabolic Flights

Three parabolic flights with hilarious consequences :)

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Physics game

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Dwarf party

Monday, December 03, 2007

Picture diary ;)

This morning I grabbed my camera when I left home for Delft. I was bored and wanted to make some random pictures. Here is the AMAZING result ;) A photo diary of my way to Delft. It is extremely boring, but then you know what I have to go through when I go to Delft!

Click here for a slide-show of this amazing route :)

Gotta love Jehovah's Witnesses!

A Jehovah's Witness who for decades refused all surgery on his horrific facial disfigurement has been given hope by a British doctor and new medical technology.

Unwilling to accept a blood transfusion, Jose Mestre has allowed the bloody tumour that first appeared on his lip in adolescence to obliterate almost all of his face.

Now 15 inches long and weighing 12 pounds, it has blinded him in one eye and made eating a daily ordeal. As it begins to block his airways, doctors fear his life could be in danger.

O Aliens, where art thou?

When consulting the wisdom of probability, one finds that the universe ought to be teeming with technology-toting aliens; but aside from a couple of interesting-but-inconclusive detections, no discernibly intelligent patterns have ever been observed by Earth's space-listening instruments. One might surmise that the conspicuous silence is "evidence of absence," but such a conclusion might be a bit premature under the circumstances.

[...]

If, hypothetically, A) a race of extra-intelligent extraterrestrials happened to reside in the nearby Alpha Centauri star system, B) they happened to broadcast a 5 Megawatt UHF television signal, and C) we were fortunate enough to be pointing the mighty Arecibo telescope directly towards the source when it arrived four years later, we would still be unable to enjoy the zany capers of the Alpha Centauri equivalent of Mork & Mindy. In order to detect such a signal from this relatively proximate star, a dish with a diameter of 33,000 kilometers would be required. Even using Very Long Baseline Interferometry to link two Arecibo-style radio telescopes on opposite sides of the planet– thereby providing a virtual radio telescope the size of the entire Earth– our antenna area would still be 20,244 kilometers too small.

Read the rest of this damn interesting article. It also contains an interactive Drake equation which calculates the number of probable communicating civilizations in our galaxy based on a variety of parameters.

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Flocking Behavior of Starlings

A clip that shows off the really beautiful flocking behavior of starlings. It's a bit longwinded and the best footage starts at 3:20.