Check out this article on the environmental damage and health hazards associated with Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs, which are currently the focus of a number of legislative drives to replace incandescent bulbs. Apparently, they are made with toxic levels of mercury, and are assembled in places like China and India without much in the way of environmental controls. Additionally, the bulbs will burn out eventually, transferring that mercury into landfills, and thereby into the environment. Plus, breaking one of these is considered a hazardous materials situation:

According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter’s bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.

Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges’ house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state’s “safe” level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter. The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a “low-ball” estimate of US$2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began “gathering finances” to pay for the US$2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn’t cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.

Yikes! Link

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Writing will always take longer than planned.

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“A PUNK gargoyle making a rude gesture has been added to one of the pinnacles of a 15th century parish church.

The stone figure has a spiky, Mohican haircut and is covering his mouth with his left hand.

The middle finger of his right hand is stuck upwards in a typical punk pose.

The Rev James Butterworth, vicar of St John Baptist church in Cirencester, Gloucs, said: “Our punk’s a bit of fun, a cartoon character.”

“Gargoyles were meant to ward off evil spirits and were designed to be as grotesque and peculiar as possible.”

Take that, evil spirits! Link

(from Arbroath)

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“This is a bold statement, but I think we can go so far as to say that this is the silliest, and doubtless the most tasteless piece of desk paraphernalia that we have encountered here at IWOOT. Two attributes of course that make showing it to you an absolute necessity. Introducing the Cat’s Arse Sharpener. Sigh. There are no words that readily spring to mind to soften the blow. It’s a cat, you stick your pencil in its derrière, it meows, and it sharpens your pencil. Your feline friend stands in his own litter tray that catches your pencil shavings. Of course not many people use pencils much these days, but this is perhaps the best reason there has ever been for going out and buying one right now.”

Bored Athenians: Where Good Taste Is Just Another Class Barrier.

Link

(via Random Good Stuff)

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I don’t get the paparazzi. I really, really don’t. I mean, I get that they want to make lots of money by invading people’s privacy and exploiting people’s personal lives. But these are people who, regardless of their lack of scruples and their sometimes over zealous opportunism, clearly are without a smidgen of genius that might propel them into the upper ranks of journalism or at least get them onto the walls of a NoHo gallery. But what is their point? In the grand scheme of things related to life on this planet, who the hell gives a damn about these guys?

Now, I don’t particularly care for violence, but I can’t recall ever being dismayed by the Sean Penn punches these pestering jerks sometimes take. I don’t care about their broken lenses or their broken noses. And I certainly don’t care that they got beans in their hair.

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For those who don’t know (otherwise known as “people with social lives”), a LiveCD is a bootable CD with a fully functioning operating system. In otherwords, if you take your laptop running Windows XP, put in a SuSE Linux LiveCD, and reboot, your computer will boot running SuSE linux. These are great for system rescuing and password changing. They’re also handy if you need this or that Linux utility, but don’t want to permanently devote your computer to Linux, or mess around with dual-booting. Anyway, here’s a list of 315 LiveCD’s, downloadable and with documentation.

(from LifeHacker)

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It isn’t cheap. But it is cheaper than anything else that goes 0 - 60 in four seconds.
And, It makes me wiggle. Picture should link to video.

“The entire package is monitored and controlled by an onboard computer known as the PEM (Power Electronics Module), also situated in the rear of the car. The Linux-based PEM controls and monitors everything from the speed and rotation of the motor to braking and battery charging. From a digital display just under the steering wheel, you can monitor performance stats on your own. You can even see if someone has recently opened the trunk. Like I said: This is your dream car.”

Link for quote

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“He calls himself the Antichrist, wears the number 666 tattooed on his arm and claims a following of 2 million people.

And Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda is coming to Guatemala whether it wants him or not.

The Central American country has banned the leader of the Florida-based Growing in Grace church, arguing he is a security risk because he provokes conflict with Roman Catholics and evangelicals.

He preaches that sin and the devil do not exist. In January, he revealed tattoos of the numbers 666 on his forearms and declared that he and his followers were Antichrists because their beliefs supersede those of Jesus Christ. The Bible describes the Antichrist as someone who will fill the world with wickedness but be conquered by a second coming of Christ.”

Pictured left: Antichrist follower poses with child painted with SSS, for “Salvo, siempre salvo”, or “Saved, always saved”, which sounds like things I’ve heard from standard evangelical Christians as well. Has the corruption of Christ’s message come full circle? Not in Guatemala, apparently. Link

(Found by Warren Ellis, who seems to enjoy looming apocolypses even more than I do)

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Only fair, I think:

Link

(misappropriated from Arbroath)

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And in case that last picture freaked you out, here’s a newly hatched Galapagos tortoise to look at:

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Some images can only be described as “compelling”:

Image from here.

(goddamn Boing Boing always gets there first.)

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Here is a link to an extensive document about why Vista is doomed as an operating system, which means Microsoft may be doomed if they don’t fix it in a hurry. Excerpt:

Say you’ve just bought Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon”, released as a Super Audio CD (SACD) in its 30th anniversary edition in 2003, and you want to play it under Vista (I’m just using SACD as a representative example of protected audio content because it’s a well-known technology, in practice Sony has refused to license it for playback on PCs). Since the S/PDIF link to your amplifier/speakers is regarded as insecure for playing the SA content, Vista would disable it, and you’d end up hearing a performance by Marcel Marceau instead of Pink Floyd.

That’s right, they’ve plugged the analog gap by premptively disabling your speakers, and that’s just the beginning. The full document is forty -four pages, which means I’m not going to read it and neither are any of you, but here it is if we need it.

Link

(Stolen from Boing Boing)

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Looks like I’d better change my alias to “Mostly Evil Overload”:

You Are 78% Evil

You are very evil. And you’re too evil to care. Those who love you probably also fear you. A lot.

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And there was much rejoycing:

A natural ingredient of human blood has been shown to block HIV, raising hopes of a new class of drugs to treat infection with the virus.

The molecule works in a way different to current antiretroviral therapies, and so could be a new line of attack.

Researchers found its potency could be boosted by making tiny changes to its chemical structure. It also worked against drug resistant HIV strains.

Link

via /.

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Well, sort of. But seriously, folks:

“An Australian adventurer emerged from the bottom of a lake yesterday after spending nearly two weeks living underwater, riding a bike to generate electricity and using algae to produce oxygen.

Breathing air provided by algae soaked in his own urine, “aquanaut” Lloyd Godson spent 12 days living in a yellow steel capsule submerged in a flooded gravel pit.

The 29-year-old’s claustrophobic ordeal was intended to shed light on the practical and psychological challenges of living in an alien environment.”

What a great publicity experiment for the isolated biosphere concept. Granted, he had to have his food delivered, but just the fact he kept himself breathing with a urine-fuled air plant is impressive.

Link

(via Arbroath)

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“Smoke like a chimney, work like a horse, eat without thinking, go for a walk only in really pleasant company.

I discovered that nature was constructed in a wonderful way, and our task is to find out the mathematical structure of the nature itself. It is a kind of faith that has helped me through my whole life.

With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon.

The dog is very smart. He feels sorry for me because I receive so much mail. That’s why he tries to bite the mailman.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”

I think the first one might become my new motto, and the last one my new creed.
More…

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Amid a furor of customer demand, Dell, which had previously switched to shipping new computers with Windows Vista, is now going to be offering Windows XP again on systems for businesses, although not for home users.

Like most computer makers, Dell switched nearly entirely to Vista-based systems following Microsoft’s mainstream launch of the operating system in January. However, the company said its customers have been asking for XP as part of its IdeaStorm project, which asks customers to help the company come up with product ideas.

“We heard you loud and clear on bringing the Windows XP option back to our Dell consumer PC offerings,” Dell said on its Ideas in Action page. Users get to vote on various suggestions, and the notion of bringing back XP got 10,000 “points,” making it among the most popular requests but well below top picks such as adding Linux or OpenOffice.org to its PCs.

I’m happy that market forces are confirming what most of us have already figured out about Vista. Maybe Microsoft will fix it, or maybe we’ll see a mass exodus to Mac and Linux over the next few years. I’m thinking…Mac and Linux. Link

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Check out this list from Esquire. A few examples:

• 4. Giving a buddy a kidney.
  You only need one. Hopefully.
• 8. Butter.
• 9. Drugs.
• 16. A night on the town with Kiefer Sutherland.
• 17. Deep-fried Twinkies.
• 21. Smashing the cameras of paparazzi mercilessly hounding Angie, Scarlett, or Halle.
• 37. Speaking truth to power.
  Thomas Becket. William Wallace. You.
• 42. Secondhand smoking.
  The smoker has the best stories, tells the best jokes, and laughs the hearty, hacking laugh of someone wise beyond his dwindling years. If black lung by proxy is the price we must pay for staying close to this dying breed, so be it.

And the crowning glory of our hometown:

• 26. Combo No. 4 at the Varsity in Athens, Georgia.
  For $6.90, you get a tray of Americana and grease: a chili cheese dog, a chili cheeseburger, french fries or onion rings, and a medium drink. Upgrade to the Frosted Orange for 30 cents more.

Link

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A team of “counselors” from the Church of Scientology have apparently been deployed on the Virginia Tech campus, to take advantage of this unique soul-soliciting opportunity. Here’s a link to a press release aimed at Scientology ministers, complete with a link to their handbook of techniques.

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As I’m sure everyone has heard, a terrible tragedy happened yesterday. My girlfriend called me a little after noon yesterday and asked me if I’d heard anything about the shootings at Virginia Tech. I had not, so I looked it up on the internet and read about the blurry details of a still unfolding tragedy. Unfortunately, I also read the president’s initial statement about the tragedy:

“The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Really? With all those people dead, you want to go ahead and politically position yourself ahead of the anticipated gun backlash? Come on. Though I don’t own any guns myself, I am a pretty adamant supporter of the 2nd amendment, and personal freedom in general. But this is a very poor time for political posturing.

LINK

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Wonkette explains it all.

But just so you don’t read that and despair about the state of the world, here is a very lovely story about how utterly amazing love is.

That first story has nothing at all to do with love.

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M. John Harrison reminds us that writing is an interactive, rather than purely creative, endeavor, and that reading is not meant to be passive:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there.

Link (via Warren Ellis)

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Device harvests energy from the environment to provide direct current

Atlanta (April 5, 2007) — Researchers have demonstrated a prototype nanometer-scale generator that produces continuous direct-current electricity by harvesting mechanical energy from such environmental sources as ultrasonic waves, mechanical vibration or blood flow.

Based on arrays of vertically-aligned zinc oxide nanowires that move inside a novel “zig-zag” plate electrode, the nanogenerators could provide a new way to power nanoscale devices without batteries or other external power sources.

I’m wondering if this development might have implecations beyond nano-scale machines. If these generators can produce small amounts of power based on peripheral kinetic energy, we might be able to apply them in large numbers to generate power from wind, waves, sounds, etc.

Pictured left: the nano-scale power generation device, and some very blurry intelligent person.

Link (thanks, Jason)

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I wasn’t going to repeat what the whole rest of the blogging community has already made abundantly clear, but it just doesn’t feel right not to honor the passing of writer and visionary Kurt Vonnegut. Honoring his life and his work, of course, precludes the usual sentimental elegies, so…yeah. The world is better for his having been a part of it.

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“When it becomes good versus evil ~ which side of the foosball table are YOU on? On the team of Evil XI we have: Pot, Lucifer, Calgula, Ripper (as in Jack), Impaler (as in Vlad the), Hitler, Macbeth (as in Lady), Hyde, Klebb (as in Rosa), Amin, Catcher (as in the Child). Playing for Good XI we have: Claus (as in Santa), More (as in Sir Thomas), Moore (as in Bobby), Gordon (as in Flash), Robin (as in Christopher), God, Assisi, Jekyll, Poppins, Teresa, M.K. Gandhi.”

That’s right. God. He’s kind of hard to see, but he’s the old bearded white guy playing forward. Link

(via Kottke)

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Seriously this is one of the most fun flash games I’ve ever found.

Desktop Tower Defense

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http://www.teslamotors.com/blog4/

Richard Feynman rocks my purple socks.

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Photographing Churchill’s arse.

Of course!

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I’m seriously tempted to try this one:

“Tired of waking up and having to wait for your morning java to brew? Are you one of those groggy early morning types that just needs that extra kick? Know any programmers who dont regularly bathe and need some special motivation? Introducing Shower Shock, the original and world’s first caffeinated soap from ThinkGeek. When you think about it, ShowerShock is the ultimate clean buzz “

Link

(purloined from Arbroath)

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I love Wikipedia. It’s amazing how interesting the histories of mundane, everday objects are. Take, for instance, this excerpt from Wikipedia’s entry about underwear:

Braies were usually fitted with a flap in the front that buttoned or tied closed. This codpiece allowed men to urinate without having to remove the braies completely. Henry VIII of England began padding his own codpiece, which caused a spiraling trend of larger and larger codpieces that only ended by the end of the 16th century. There are two possible explanations for Henry VIII’s codpiece becoming larger and larger. It is speculated that he, along with many others in this time period, may have had the venereal disease syphilis. The large codpiece may have included a bandage soaked in medication to relieve the symptoms. It would then be wrapped again to protect the outer clothing. Henry VIII also wanted a healthy son and may have thought that projecting himself in this way would portray fertility.

“… projecting himself in this way would portray fertility.” Right. So Henry VIII wanted people to think he had a big dick. It’s no surprise really, that he was overcompensating - given everything else we know about him from history. I’m sure if he were alive today, he’d be driving a Hummer.

LINK

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