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Boten Anna
Another new meme from Norway or Sweden (cant tell which): Boten Anna
This is the original (with Dutch subtitles)
Geoengineering
Wireless FM transmitters
This is a device you attach to your mp3 player, either through a port or via the headphone output, which then allows you to select a frequency and transmits the music on FM on that frequency. This allows you to tune your radio to your mp3 player.
In the Netherlands they are finally legal (since about one month) so I decided to get one.
Walking through town I couldn’t find any, except iPod dedicated units (which use the port, so are only iPod compatible). There are 2 Apple versions: one which only works for a dedicated model (eg. only for the nano) and one which works with all iPods except the very first model (and presumably any model they release in the future). These both look slick and work with the ipod seamlessly. Unfortunately they are expensive and iPod only.
Computers reading emotions
Attractive cockroach robot
Measuring gravitational waves
2 gravity wave detectors have been switched on, trying to prove and discover waves posited by Einstein as part of his theory of general relativity.
Apparently there’s also a similar experiment in Japan, but I couldn’t find the links to that.
Boys from Bahrain
Software desktop as desk top
NB. check out the ring on the guys hand in the first few frames 🙂
Hundreds of WMDs found in Iraq
The finds started in 2003, but oddly enough the Bush administration has been sitting on this, probably in the hopes of proving an ongoing programme before going live with the information.
Random links
500 person Japanese synchronized orgy
Japan is probably the only country in the world where you could pull something like this off.
http://ethnorotica.com/article/129/500-person-japanese-orgy
Go Japan!
Beijing to shoot down rain
Using an arsenal of rockets, artillery and aircraft, China will try to blast the clouds out of the sky, a meteorologist told a Beijing magazine, through a technique which falls under the umbrella of “cloud seeding.”
“We can turn a cloudy day into a dry and sunny one by shooting the clouds less intensively than when we make rain,” head meteorologist Mian Donglian for the Beijing municipal weather bureau told Time Out.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/06/05/china.rain/index.html
Giant crossbow to shoot man 20 miles into the air

Brian Walker, mad scientist and all around crazy person, plans to shoot himself 20 miles into the air in a homemade rocket launched from the world’s biggest crossbow. The rocket, which has a jet turbine with 1,350 pounds of thrust, will shoot off the track of the giant crossbow shown above, which is equipped with a 24-foot carbon-fiber bowstring. At the peak of his flight he’ll be traveling at a comfortable 10 Gs, and he’ll be wearing a $15,000 surplus Russian space suit to stay safe, because everyone knows the Russians will sell anything for a price.
http://www.uberreview.com/2006/06/worlds-largest-crossbow.htm/
SSTAR – small, sealed, transportable, autonomous reactor
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6344
The aim is to create a sealed reactor that can be delivered to a site, left to generate power for up to 30 years, and retrieved when its fuel is spent. The developers claim that no one would be able to remove the fissile material from the reactor because its core would be inside a tamper-proof cask protected by a thicket of alarms
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6344
The 100 megawatt version is expected to be 15 meters high by 3 meters wide, and weigh 500 tonnes. A 10 megawatt version is expected to weigh less than 200 tonnes. To obtain the desired 30 year life span, the design calls for a moveable neutron reflector to be placed over a column of fuel. The reflector’s slow downward travel over the column would cause the fuel to be burned from the top of the column to the bottom. Because the unit will be sealed, it is expected that a breeder reaction will be used to further extend the life of the fuel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSTAR
Read up on your ‘small nuclear power reactors’ : see “Liquid Metal cooled Fast Reactors”
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf33.htm
F88 Wrist Watch Mobile Phone

CEC Corp in China specially made this wrist watch phone to one of the China’s most famous ping pong player, the GSM F88 Watch. It is available to the market at the price of 8,888Yuan which is about USD1,111. F88 is a watch with built-in mobile phone capabilities which have 26K colors CSTN display. It boasts a built-in microphone, speakerphone for conferencing, voice dialing, 4 minutes of voice recording, IrDA connectivity and organization tools such as schedule, alarm clock and reminder note. You can even play the pre-install world cup games on the phone. The keypad number is located on the strap. Video conferencing could be done by the watch because it has a built-in 3 megapixel 180-degree rotating camera
http://www.mobilewhack.com/reviews/f88_wrist_watch_mobile_phone.html
Futurama will be back
Comedy Central has resurrected the former Fox animated SF series Futurama, ordering 13 episodes to debut in 2008, Variety reported. The deal builds on the cable network’s acquisition of the 72-episode library last fall.
Discussions about a revival of the half-hour show began in earnest earlier this year between Futurama producer 20th Century Fox Television and series creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen. A sticking point, which has been resolved, had been bringing back the cast, who hadn’t worked on new episodes for the show since it left the air in August 2003.
Voice actors Billy West, Katey Sagal and John DiMaggio are on board for the new episodes, which will continue the story of Fry (West), a pizza delivery boy who was accidentally frozen for 1,000 years and who wakes up in the future.
MMORPG with deer

US Navy accepting pilots with surgically corrected eyes
Unattended Windows XP Installation
Interactive Urban Growth Map
Carry your PC around with you
Here in the office we have a problem with people who work 32 hour work weeks – it basically means that one workstation is unuseable for one day per week per 32 hour employee. This means we have troo many computers. As space is at a premium, we need a solution that allows employees to sit down behind any PC, log in, and be faced with their own desktop, email settings, bookmarks, etc etc.
At first though one would go for roaming profiles, but as profiles here are around 1 GB large, It would take too long to copy the whole profile from the server in the morning and to the server at shutdown time. Also it’s not unheard of for one person to log into two computers at the same time, which brings problems when they log off the PCs in the “wrong” order. Also, reading the samba documentation and commentary, people who try to implement this all seem to think it’s a bitch to do.
Then there’s an Active Directory server. I don’t know Active Directory and I don’t feel like installing one of these things and administering it (hey, I like LINUX servers!). Apparently though this is supposed to be a viable option.
Then there’s thin client setups. Unfortunately we all need to run photoshop. A server running 8 concurrent copies of photoshop is going to cost me much more than I want to spend on this project.
So I started looking for ways to store your domain profile on USB flash drives. The XP user manager doesn’t allow you to edit or even acknowledge domain profiles, so I can’t just set the clients to read and write to a USB stick.
After a lot of looking around I found these alternatives: