Archive for March, 2006

Cell phones for the hereafter

Friday, March 31st, 2006

The BBC reports on a weird trend of people taking their mobile phone to their grave. The origin of this idea was fear of being buried alive, according to Martin Raymond, director of international trend-spotting think-tank, The Future Laboratory. However, that does not explain cremations with cell phones: “We came across this in places like […]

Immigration amnesty makes America safer

Wednesday, March 29th, 2006

To be clear: I still think Bush is Nuts, but I do agree with the shrubman on the guestworker issue. For different reasons, but I do agree with removing millions of hardworking immigrants from the legal twilight zone of being “undocumented” or “illegal” aliens. On this issue, the racist, anti-immigration wingnuts are the real nutcases. […]

Life is mostly analog

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Don’t know exactly what’s come over us, but recently Laura and I have been listening to some of our records. You know, vinyl records, the black, 12-inch wide disks with grooves all over them. You put a needle on them and they produce a scratchy hiss with some music. You put one of those things […]

Cool car, cheap and 157 MpG

Sunday, March 12th, 2006

Sure, you can argue about the styling – I have seen much worse, especially in the less-than- $15.000-category. And I’ve seen much, much worse in the a-new-mortgage-for-every-fillup category. This little vehicle is pretty revolutionary in many ways: to enter it you flip open the entire front (see below the fold); the structure of the passenger […]

Milosevic found dead in his cell

Saturday, March 11th, 2006

Good riddance to the Serbian mini-Hitler. Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has died in the detention centre at The Hague tribunal. The tribunal said he was found dead in his cell on Saturday morning and that although the cause was not yet clear, there was no indication of suicide. Mr Milosevic, 64, had been on […]

Ali Farka Toure, 1939-2006

Wednesday, March 8th, 2006

Monday we lost a cultural treasure and a generous human being: Ali Farka Touré, a son of Mali, and one of the world’s great musicians died in Bamako, Mali. He was born in Timbuktu in 1939, and worked as a docker on the river Niger and a driver for Mali’s national radio and television company, […]

Toxic soda – another reason to drink beer

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006

So the FDA figured out in the 1990s that two common preservatives used in soda pop, when combined, can produce enough benzene in the soda to exceed legal levels for this stuff in drinking water. They just neglected to tell us, Foodnavigator.com reports: Chemists from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said they were […]

Go Heels

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

Ready for March Madness? This was a good weekend for TarHeel basketball – the boys beat the Boohoo-Devils in Cameron and the girls secured the ACC Championship! After last year’s championship men’s team scattered to the winds, coach Williams seems to have managed to put together a brand-new top-notch team. Looks like they are fast […]

TurboSLUG

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

I know – I know, I’m a geek! But this is cool: I overclocked my slug. The NSLU2 as supplied from Linksys actually runs the little MIPS IXP420 CPU at 133 MHz, which is half its rated clock speed. You can fix the NSLU2 to run the processor at the full 266MHz by removing a […]

Highschool kids build diesel-hybrid sports car

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006

Very cool: five high-school near-dropouts build a fun, cool-looking, 50MPG, biodiesel sports car: The star at last week’s Philadelphia Auto Show wasn’t a sports car or an economy car. It was a sports-economy car — one that combines performance and practicality under one hood. But as CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman reports in this week’s […]