Monthly Archives: December 2006

SkyTag™ – Green Laser Aircraft Tracker

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Bored using your advanced green laser for traditional spreadsheet pointing techniques? Why not kick up your skills a notch and start using green lasers to track aircraft? With beams visible in daylight that extend for miles, green lasers are ideally suited to track objects in the sky. Stop worrying about things like mandatory jail time and social isolation and play the intriguing game of SkyTag™ today.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/tracker.shtml

Britain finally pays of WWII loan

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One of the reasons that Britain has been running behind the U.S. arse is that they owe the U.S. a huge amount of money for saving the rest of Europe from Hitler. Not that the rest of Europe is helping GB to pay it off. Now the interest on that loan is very very small indeed, but the U.S. has always had the option of raising that if GB didn’t toe the line. Tomorrow, the loan will be repaid – what effect will that have on the face of British foreign policy.

Saddam goes to his death

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Weird one this – Saddam is now certain that he will be hung, so his prose is all martylike. Strangely enough Yahoo news is running 2 stories on this:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) –
Saddam Hussein, due to be hanged within 30 days, said his execution should be seen as a sacrifice for the nation and called on Iraqis to unite and fight U.S. forces in the country.

and

BAGHDAD, Iraq – In a farewell letter to the Iraqi people,
Saddam Hussein urged his countrymen not to hate the people of the nations that toppled his regime nearly four years ago and said he was offering “my soul to God as a sacrifice.

So which one is it?

Congressman Demands Iraqis Be Converted To Christianity

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OMG, how fucking dumb/ignorant can some people be:

North Carolina’s 8th District congressman has a winning plan for Iraq: “The only way to make Iraq stable enough for the U.S. to withdraw is by “spreading the message of Jesus Christ, the message of peace on earth, good will towards men. Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the Savior.”

http://www.wonkette.com/politics/crazies/congressman-demands-iraqis-be-converted-to-christianity-223931.php

Climate Change vs Mother Nature: Scientists reveal that bears have stopped hibernating

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Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, scientists revealed yesterday, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is affecting the natural world.

In a December in which bumblebees, butterflies and even swallows have been on the wing in Britain, European brown bears have been lumbering through the forests of Spain’s Cantabrian mountains, when normally they would already be in their long, annual sleep.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2091875.ece

Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran

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According to journalist Jason Leopold, sources at former Cheney company Halliburton allege that, as recently as January of 2005, Halliburton sold key components for a nuclear reactor to an Iranian oil development company. Leopold says his Halliburton sources have intimate knowledge of the business dealings of both Halliburton and Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies.

http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/index.htm#2

Academics want to be able to state science

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That PC has come to this: Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF) is pissed off with how if academic research stirs controversy for some reason and challenges conventional wisdom, disciplinary action (eg. firing) is being taken against the academic who voiced the research. I thought the whole point of research was to challenge accepted wisdom, otherwise we’d still think the world was flat with heaven above and hell below. The result is that now academics try to avoid controversy – and thus destroy potentially valuable science – in order to not be disciplined in some way. Shouldn’t we be open to free speech and discussion on any subject in the halls of academia?

That this isn’t some weird splinter group is evidenced by the Students for Academic Freedom (SAF) which have a site filled with examples of students being disciplined for “offensive” (ie. someone, somewhere, for some reason doesn’t like it) science.

This makes me sick in the stomach, that we are willing to prefer Political Correctness to furthering knowledge and our understanding of the world we live in, not even allowing for proper debate to refute or support unpopular views.

CVN-21 Supercarrier

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The US is going from biggest to even bigger and commissioning a new class of aircraft carrier, the CVN-21. This will displace around 102,000 tons – compared to the British Invincible (22,000t) and the future French carrier (75,000t), this is indeed massive.
The current US aircraft carriers are built around a basic design developed 50 years ago, and allthough there are to be no radical departures in hull design (unlike the new British designs which are a radical departure featuring trimaran hulls and hexagonal flight decks), the CVN-21 will feature quite a few innovations, such as an electromagnetic launch rail, allowing for much more free space and electricity, a repositioned island and plug and play electronics, as well as better armour around the munitions bays and a better protected and more modern command centre.
The plan is to have the first one off the line in 2014.
This site has a comprehensive run down of the new features and is kept updated.

That’s sooooo GAY!!!

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Jeremy Clarkson called a car ‘a bit gay’ and due to four complaints by a couple of poofters (four of them, no less), the Top Gear team has been told off by the BBC. Besides that calling things gay doesn’t automatically mean they are

Derogatory references to homosexuality

or even sexually oriented at all, even if he had specifically meant it that way, what’s wrong with referring to items as catering specifically to the gay community? Plenty of advertisers see the gay community as a key market!
Won’t the queer, hetero-male hating, PC crowd ever let up?!

Tin Foil Hats enhance death rays!

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Four intrepid MIT scientists have taken an empirical look at the effectiveness of tin foil hats at stopping dangerous radio signals from penentrating the brain. Using three different models of tin foil hats, they used a network analyser to determine that these hats in fact greatly amplify certain frequencies into your brain. Coincidentally the frequencies amplified are those radio bands reserved for use by the US Government, leading the reaserchers to conclude that the governmnet may have perpetuated the tin foil hat myth for its own diabolical ends.