In a bid to keep the sprogs from getting frostbite during recess in the winter months, Judith Symonds, an instructional aide at Seth Boyden Elementary School in Maplewood, New Jersey, sat the little monsters on the floor in a hallway and taught them how to knit. The knitting program was so popular that the sessions extended the rest of the year and after school classes were started for parents. Nice to see the old crafts aren’t dying out — via Making Light
A Dutch invention is promising to make vehicles at least 50% more efficient and also bring down the soot and carbon dioxide emissions. This is made possible by replacing the conventional wheels by in-wheel electric engines which are normal electric engines turned inside out. No transmission is necessary as the in-wheel engines are powered by battery-packs installed on the vehicle. A diesel-powered generator which replaces the original engine on the vehicle charges the battery-pack continuously. The Dutch company E-Traction has built a bus using this technology that will undergo testing for the next six months
Microsoft’s Research group are working on a technique to combat spam. Dubbed the Penny Black project, it involves making e-mail senders perform a computation taking around 10 seconds, which their recipients can then check for. This delay would limit bulk e-mailing speeds to around 8000 a day, meaning that to spam all of those fresh, guaranteed 25 million addresses
would take approximately 8.5 years
Software companies in India are embracing the trend where source code for the software being bought or sold is kept safe with an escrow agent with carefully drafted agreements. This allows the buyer to get hold of the source code in cases where software was licensed from a start-up which has now folded or a breach of contract regarding the maintenance services that were agreed upon can be proven. The source code is automatically released upon the occurrence of any of the events mentioned in the escrow agreement and the buyer will be able to study the source code and continue to provide support services for the software bought without relying on the employees of the software supplier
Nickelodeon are screening previously unaired episodes of Invader Zim on the weekends during double up. I screwed up Saturday’s taping and only got one episode — Gaz, Taster of Pork — but got both on Sunday — The Most Horrible X-Mas Ever and a repeat of Abducted and The Sad, Sad Tale of Chickenfoot. Hopefully Nick will loop them until they repeat and I can catch anything I’ve missed
Malamutes are intelligent dogs, they just have no interest in doing what you want them to do.
I have a suspicion that Malamute may be Amish, the first thing she does with her toys is to snap the eyes off and rip the faces out. To avoid this, I was preparing the pods’ xmas presents earlier in the week by removing the faces from two small toy bunnies. Malamute was sitting patiently at my feet watching bunny surgery and occasionally having a gentle tug at an ear in the hope I wouldn’t notice and she could scarper off with it. Husky was content to watch the proceedings from the comfort of the lounge.
They got their presents on xmas morning and a hot pink bunny got tossed about the backyard for five minutes before Malamute realised she also had a food component to her gift.
Half an hour later, after trying to hide the remaining half of a well gnawed rawhide bone under me, behind the television and under Husky’s beanbag, Malamute finally scoffed it and settled in for a good game of remove Husky’s rawhide bone.
This morning she hit on a winning plan. She went hurtling into the backyard and stood at the side gate barking her head off. Husky went to investigate the barks that sounded very much like there’s a strange dog in the front yard. The moment Husky had joined her, Malamute bounded back inside and stole his bone.
Mission accomplished.
Lawrence has spent over six years collecting video and other hacks for game consoles. He has recently put together the fourth revision of his video signal primer, expanded to six pages now, including subjects like chroma subsampling, horizontal colour resolution and the interesting revelation that your eyes suck at blue
Vancouver is facing the worst outbreak of syphilis per capita in the developed world, with city health officials fearful of a looming epidemic of the sexually transmitted disease once thought almost wiped out in North America
My latest aggregator toy is nntp/rss. It’s a Java-based bridge between RSS feeds and NNTP clients, enabling you to read your favorite RSS syndicated content within your existing NNTP newsreader. RSS feeds are represented as NNTP newsgroups, providing a simple, straightforward and familiar environment for news reading
Having learned nothing from the UK beef industry’s battle with BSE, the US agribusiness mouthpiece has announced that not only was the suspected animal still slaughtered for human consumption, but its remains went back into the food chain as animal feed. Nice head in the sand tactics, guys
Meghan Stapleton, a Santa hat-clad reporter for the NBC television station KTUU in Anchorage found her way into the national spotlight while taping a scene with a young reindeer named Blitzen at the Santa Claus House in North Pole. Seems the reindeer took a dislike to tacky feel good stories and tackled the silly bint on camera
It has been in place for only a few weeks, but ‘Don’t Miss a Sec’, a contemporary art installation that is in essence a one-way mirrored loo on a construction site near the Thames, has been raising heated, even violent emotions. While it may provide a fine opportunity to indulge in voyeurism and exhibitionism at the same time — like going to the toilet in the bushes, if the bushes were in the middle of the street — in reality the experience is proving prohibitively unnerving to some
In this case Toys ‘R’ Us advertises using a giraffe mascot named Geoffrey. But Toys ‘R’ Us does not own the rights to that mascot, instead Geoffrey, Inc — a Toys ‘R’ Us subsidiary — owns them. So the toy store ‘licenses’ the trademark from Geoffrey, Inc, at a hefty rate, then calls that a business expense and deducts from its pre-tax income. Since Geoffrey, Inc isn’t a Louisiana company, Toys ‘R’ Us argued that it doesn’t need to pay Louisiana taxes on it’s income. The judge disagreed
Maids in Hong Kong can draw a higher salary if they’re computer-literate enough to defrag hard-drives, reinstall operating systems, and do other sysadminly chores. But some have rebelled against the shift to computer-literate cleaners
Rocket have a Xmas game that pretty well mirrors the reality of surviving the office break-up party.
Amuse yourself by shaking the crap out of the occupants of the snowglobe. Hear them scream as they thump off the walls of their glass domed prison.
And my favourite… prepare to be sucked into the addictive joy of Shuffle the Penguin.
No one expects to lose much sleep over it but, for the record, NASA has been sued by three men from Yemen for invading Mars. The three say they own the red planet, and claim they have documents to prove it.
We inherited the planet from our ancestors 3,000 years ago,
they told the weekly Arabic-language newspaper Al-Thawri, which published the report Thursday. Adam Ismail, Mustafa Khalil and Abdullah al-Umari filed the lawsuit in San’a, Yemen, and presented documents to the country’s prosecutor general which they say proves their claim. There was no word on whether they had paid the appropriate inheritance taxes.
An appeals court upheld a verdict to clear Jon Johansen, a 20-year-old Norwegian, of DVD piracy charges on Monday, dismaying Hollywood studios who cluelessly claimed that the decision would encourage hackers
As Wal-Mart stores continue to spread across the US, community opposition is also mounting from critics who say its ‘always low prices’ mean always low wages for nonunion workers and that its famous ‘rollbacks’ on goods roll over local businesses and economies
New Communications Minister Daryl Williams is tipped to close the Government’s National Office of the Information Economy in early 2004 and extend a moratorium on new free-to-air TV licences later in the year
Finnish architect Matti Suuronen designed this UFO shaped dwelling in 1968, initially for use as a ski-cabin or holiday home.
The idea behind the design reflects the optimism of the sixties. At the time people believed technology could solve all problems for the human race. The ideal was of a new era, a space-age, where everybody would have more leisure time to spend on holidays away from home.
The Futuro house was completely furnished and could accommodate eight people. It was constructed entirely out of reinforced plastic, a new, light and inexpensive material back then. The plan was to mass-produce it, so it would be cheap enough to house all people around the earth. Because it was so light-weight, it was easily transportable by helicopter. Mobile living was the new possibility for the future. People could now take their moveable home with them, to wherever they went, and live like modern nomads.
Unfortunately the 1973 oil crisis spoiled all these plans. Prices of plastic raised production costs too high to be profitable. Only 20 Futuro houses were ever built.
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