David Hart was cleaning out the garage when he discovered what looks like a dragon in a jar.
Speculation is that the dragon is a 19th century hoax by German scientists aimed at their English counterparts. Documents suggest that the Natural History Museum turned the dragon away, possibly because they suspected it was a trick, and sent it to be destroyed. But it appears a porter, Hart’s grandfather, intercepted the jar and took it home
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said that people concerned about losing freedom to government anti-terrorism efforts should speak out. The Supreme Court is taking up several terror-related cases this spring, including challenges to the government detention of terror suspects without legal rights
Twenty-two human rights activists, including nuns, priests, a divinity school student, a former New York City firefighter, received three to six month sentences in federal prison for nonviolent actions to close the School of the Americas — a terrorist training camp on US soil
The retarded monkey boy and Prime Minister Tony Blair are among nominees for the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize before a Sunday deadline for nominations despite failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Nobel watchers say Bush or Blair’s chances of winning are close to nil. The 2002 prize went to ex-US President Jimmy Carter, who argued against war. The head of the Nobel committee called the choice a kick in the legs
to Bush on Iraq
Scientists have created a new form of matter saying it could provide a new way to generate electricity. The fermionic condensate is a cloud of cold potassium atoms forced into a state where they behave strangely. The new matter is the sixth known form of matter after solids, liquids, gasses, plasma and a Bose-Einstein condensate, created only in 1995 — via Die Puny Humans
A consortium of consumer electronics makers plans to unveil next week a memory card format that holds one gigabyte of data and is smaller than rival Secure Digital
Online bank Egg is considering a move away from pure Web interfaces for its customers, in a shift that will have implications for developers as well as customer
David Hasselhoff has claimed partial responsibility for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Claiming that in 1989, the year the wall fell, he had helped reunite the country by singing his song Looking for Freedom
among millions of German fans at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin… I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Check-Point Charlie
The joys of legacy coding. The blockquote tags have been causing ugliness in RSS for a while, thanks to some coding in older parts of the site. An inability of the plugin that handles formatting to deal with paragraphs in blockquotes hasn’t helped.
Removed the blockquotes from older parts of the site and replaced them with their own div style instead. This allowed me the fix the weirdness that was happening in the blogs.
Blockquote tags need to be wrapped around each quoted paragraph. That way the RSS doesn’t have to deal with the extraneous br tags in its output, which looks much cleaner.
No idea where she found it, but my sister presented me with a salted licorice Chupa Chup today. I’m guessing someone local is importing them from the Dutch marketplace. Must have more…
Charlie Stross has posted his essay for the now defunct Singularity issue of the Whole Earth Review, entitled The Panopticon Singularity:
If a panopticon singularity emerges, you’d be well advised to stay away from Massachusetts if you and your partner aren’t married. Don’t think about smoking a joint unless you want to see the inside of one of the labour camps where over 50% of the population sooner or later go. Don’t jaywalk, chew gum in public, smoke, exceed the speed limit, stand in front of fire exit routes, or wear clothing that violates the city dress code (passed on the nod in 1892, and never repealed because everybody knew nobody would enforce it and it would take up valuable legislative time). You won’t be able to watch those old DVD’s of
Friendsyou copied during the naughty oughties because if you stick them in your player it’ll call the copyright police on you. You’d better not spend too much time at the bar, or your insurance premiums will rocket and your boss might ask you to undergo therapy. You might be able to read a library book or play a round of a computer game, but your computer will be counting the words you read and monitoring your pulse so that it can bill you for the excitement it has delivered.
Danish biotech company Aresa Biodetection has developed a genetically modified flower that could help detect landmines and it hopes to have a prototype ready for use within a few years. The genetically modified weed has been coded to change colour when its roots come in contact with nitrogen-dioxide (NO²) evaporating from explosives buried in soil
The Prime Minister has labelled Germaine Greer pathetic
after her attack on her home country’s culture, claiming that Australia’s city centres were marooned in oceanic tracts of suburban doldrums
There are NO words to describe my utter shock and abhorrance for this dickhead. He gets a G5 for a GIFT! Who the hell gets a G5 for a GIFT?
Ok that’s not what I’m truly shocked at. He dissembowels it so he can whack PC bits in it so he can run Windows XP, apparently he wanted a Dell (Dill or Hell) not a G5!
Where are the Apple police when you need them!
The Nathan J exhibition is only on in Melbourne. That sucks pretty darn hard, but hey, us Sydney siders get to swoop down and gorge ourselves silly on the Shag exhibit and Shag related goodies first, so that’s pretty cool. You know what enhances the coolness of the impending Shag exhibition? The fact that you can buy the Nathan J book/catalogue of the Melbourne show, you know, the book I said “I fucking want” in this entry here. That’s pretty fucking nice of those wonderful Outré Gallery keepers.
On a totally unrelated note, I finally succumbed and bought myself a graphics tablet. How the hell could I resist? I mean they come in deep purple these days. The theory is it will be delivered to my place of employment tomorrowish.
AARNet has bypassed router heavyweights Cisco and Juniper to select Procket as the backbone platform for its superfast national optical network, AARNet3. Procket has pocketed a multimillion-dollar contract to supply 12 of its high-performance Pro/8000 series core routers for the Australian universities and scientific research network
Australian government users of Linux are ignoring SCO’s offer of licences to protect them from possible legal action over the company’s claim to intellectual property used in the open source operating system. Government users, while generally cautious about legal risks, are taking a wait-and-see approach to SCO’s controversial claims
What would you do if you found an old abandoned tank in the London suburbs?
The Cubitt Artists happened upon just such a tank, so they painted it pink.
Isn’t it pretty, Sergeant Oddball would be so proud — via Beyond the Beyond
Yellowstone National Park’s riverside cottonwoods stopped growing in the mid-1920s and 1930s. Same with willows and aspen. Shoots sprang up, lingered awhile, but never matured. Park officials suspected elk were eating the new growth, but culling the herd did not help. Beginning in the late 1990s, however, things suddenly began to change. The elk moved away from the streams, and trees and willows began to grow. Researchers wondered why. They ruled out drought, flood, fire or climate change. Only one answer remained. Wolves
In a victory for animal rights advocates, the state Court of Appeals in Tacoma has established for the first time just how much pain is needed to convict someone of animal cruelty: not much
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