Romain Jerome have decided that watches need to have style over substance. For example, they now have the:
T-oxy Concept watch with non-stabilised rusted steel from the Titanic, which you can only admire under a glass dome filled with Argon.
And:
Day & Night which actually doesn’t tell the time, it just tells you if it’s daytime or nighttime.
All yours for a cool $300,000 bucks.
Wayne Gerdes gives Dennis Gaffney some info on his Hypermiling techniques to get less fuel consumption by driving consciously to avoid unnecessary fuel consumption. Unfortunately, it probably drives everyone else crazy as he doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination drive like a normal person and probably is illegal in quite a few areas.
Read about it from Mother Jones here.
Ever since I upgraded to the joys of cruise control in my car, I’ve noticed that most people actually don’t do the speed limit on the long 60 km/h stretches I traverse on the way to and from work. Regularly, I’ve been passed by cars doing at least 70 km/h, if not 75 km/h in these zones which makes you wonder if either my speedo or theirs is broken? Anyone else agree with the recent news articles that WA drivers get the most speeding tickets in Australia?
Found this link on FriendlyAtheist.com by Hemant Mehta, How to Ruin a Trip to the Museum where Biblically Correct Museum Tours have their own view of things. Interesting things pop up like:
• Adam and Eve walked with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden
• Tyrannosaurus Rex ate vegetables until evicted from the Garden of Eden (what, no coconuts?)
• Fossil exhibits are artwork, not science
• Evolution is a religion or philosophy
• Determining the age of fossils by measuring the age of the sandstone they are in is considered circular reasoning
• Ignore the exhibit on radiometric dating claiming “We can’t cover everything!”
Queried about the lack of dinosaur and human fossils being found together (which would prove the whole Garden of Eden issue) the comment is “Well, there are some problems for Creationalists…”
Someone else out there decides to have a rant about pennies being a useless part of the US currency. While I travel through USA I inevitably end up with loads of pennies as they had the intelligent idea that you shouldn’t know how much tax to pay until you hit the counter, ending up with some bizarre non-5 or 0 cent count. It’s really hard to get the right number of pennies out when there’s about 5 people behind you urging you to get a move on.
In my view, they should:
1) Declare the price up front. None of this calculated tax nonsense when you get to the counter. You can anticipate and get the right change out before you hit the counter.
2) Switch to a minimum 5 cent denomination. Maybe even 10 cents.
3) Ditch $1 notes in favour of coins and bring in $2 coins or more widely circulate $2 notes like in Australia. No more grubby “I found it in a toilet” $1 notes!
Anyhow, usually what I do in USA is find one of those penny squashing machines that turns them into a surfboard or something, that’s about all they’re good for.
TV talk show host Montel Williams lost his job after voicing his disgust at the excessive video coverage of Heath Ledger’s death when he claims we should be respectful of the 28 US citizens who died in Iraq since the start of the year defending US interests.
Read more about it (and see the video) here.
According to AlterNet, apparently bogus crisis pregnancy clinics are springing up in USA attempting to lure people in where they can then pressure you into not having an abortion, deliberately lying to you until the legal date for having an abortion has passed or conducting a campaign of harassment and whistleblowing.
Read about it from AlterNet here. Warning - some of the tactics may be pretty disturbing.
Scary documentary of the work the brave Russians are doing to investigate and fix the Sarcophagus around the destroyed reactor at Chernobyl circa 1996. They basically have scientists running around in overalls and dust masks (!) in areas of radiation of 200+ Röntgen while hot spots can get up to 500+ Röntgen. In comparison, the limit for most people working with radioactive substances is 5 REM per year (about 4.66 Röntgen, or 0.05 Sv). The former is enough to give light radiation poisoning, the latter gives acute radiation poisoning if you stay too long in there. They were investigating to discover where the fuel for the reactor had gone (the actual reactor is empty) and eventually discovered it had fused with surrounding reactor sand in the basement, part of it is known as the Elephant’s Foot. Underneath the reactor they measured it as 10,000+ Röntgen where any sort of unprotected exposure means a very painful death within about 2 days from lethal radiation poisoning.
Unfortunately contrary to their earlier beliefs of the fuel being stable in the glass like sand, the nuclear fuel is breaking down and mixing with water, scientists in Russia are worried about possible contamination as the Sarcophagus is not hermetically sealed. They hope to be able to form a new superstructure to seal the reactor in and proceed to clear the debris out from the accident without contamination or dust release into the atmosphere.
You can watch the video here.
I was having a look for Fedora Core 7 when I absentmindedly typed in fedora.org to find some bizarre pictures. See more here. I presume thy lady is quite fond of thy cat, no?
Scary to see how doctored some pictures are getting nowadays. See for yourself here. Probably not as severe as the plastic surgery in South Korea, but getting pretty worrying.