http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhD-7pw2Pv0
Instructions on how to build a wood-fired hottub :0D
I love the fact you can boil a kettle for tea at the same time, that’s just fantastic.
Right, new plan, I’m going to have to move to a new location where I can set up my own hottub. I’ll probably need a garden too.
I think thats my boy Nate on the far right hand side of this photo.
UPDATE : According to Water Raven, that is Nate in the photograph.
http://seemikedraw.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/giant-telescope.gif
From SeeMikeDraw “Of course they’ve discovered life on other planets. They just don’t want to share the telescope.”
Thanks to the Binary Ape, who appears to be convinced this practice goes on.
The easiest machine applications are the technical/scientific computations.
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
FORTRAN —”the infantile disorder”—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one’s native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity.
By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support.
In the good old days physicists repeated each other’s experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other’s programs, bugs included.
Projects promoting programming in “natural language” are intrinsically doomed to fail.
PS. If the conjecture “You would rather that I had not disturbed you by sending you this.” is correct, you may add it to the list of uncomfortable truths.
From Aunty …
A man caught trying to have sex with his bicycle has been sentenced
Do I really need to go on ?
I think everything you need to know is encapsulated in that fragment of a sentence.
No ?
Sheriff Colin Miller also placed Stewart on the Sex Offenders Register
People, and bicycles, everywhere will breathe-a-sigh-of-relief I’m sure.
Mr Stewart was caught in the act with his bicycle by cleaners
“They knocked on the door several times and there was no reply.
“They used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the accused wearing only a white t-shirt, naked from the waist down.
“The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex.”
Both cleaners, who were “extremely shocked“, told the hostel manager who called police.
Sheriff Colin Miller told Stewart: “In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a ‘cycle-sexualist’.”
Stewart had denied the offence, claiming it was caused by a misunderstanding after he had too much to drink.
Aye mate, blame the “beer-goggles“.
UPDATE : An eighteen-year-old is sentenced to twelve months probation for having sex with a pavement, though his name will not be placed on the sex offenders register.
Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is “about” something or other. I wrote a story, “The Fifth Child,” which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.
A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course ‘The Fifth Child’ is about AIDS.”
An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.
The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.
The best advice regarding scientific knowledge, which certainly applies to climate, came to me from Mr Mallory, my high school physics teacher.
He proposed that we should always begin our scientific pronouncements with this statement: “At our present level of ignorance, we think we know…”
UPDATE : Another quote from the same article …
The tendency to succumb to group-think and the herd-instinct (now formally called the “informational cascade”) is perhaps as tempting among scientists as any group because we, by definition, must be the “ones who know” (from the Latin sciere, to know).
What this says, when juxtaposed against the previous quote, is that there are no real scientists, a scientist is what we aspire to be.
From News.com.au …
A toddler was knocked over and a police officer had his shirt torn to shreds during the chaotic scenes captured on video in suburban Reservoir.
The Eastern Grey kangaroo is believed to have lost touch with his mob, before being lost in the streets just metres from Ruthven Railway Station.
Police blocked off several streets as wildlife rescuers set up nets to trap the marsupial fugitive, which leapt between several backyards.
“Pretty much when the kangaroo comes towards us and hits the net we’ll pull it over, keep it tucked in drop right down to keep the hold,” Wildlife Victoria rescuer Narelle Smith said.
But things did not go to plan after a police officer holding a net appeared to panic when the large roo, which rescuers said was “as big as they come” headed towards him.
A young boy watching the drama, was knocked down by the hopping kangaroo and was lucky to avoid serious injuries.
But the kangaroo’s powerful claws tore the officer’s shirt to shreds, before it again bounded away.
The kangaroo was finally trapped after volunteer rescuers crept up to where it had decided to nap under a tree on a road verge.
“Normally they’re a lot more straightforward than this one. He gave us a run for our money, but thankfully we won in the end,”
“Narelle rescues as many as 1000 kangaroos-a-year, but it’s all completely volunteer work,” Ms Fernee said.
“They’re coming into the suburbs because there’s so much development to Melbourne’s north, in the traditional habitat for many of the mobs, but there’s no allowance for the animals in those areas.”
“Supermarkets and new houses are pushing them this way.”
From TCPalm …
A venomous snake aficionado with the nickname “Cobraman” has been in the intensive care unit in the past after being bit by the slithery reptiles.
That’s where 44-year-old Raymond Hunter is today — in critical condition in St. Lucie Medical Center — after an eastern diamondback rattlesnake chomped his right hand.
“He’s got two passions in this world, Jesus Christ and venomous snakes,”
He’s known around St. Lucie County for his hobby of keeping venomous snakes. He sometimes helps animal control officers move a snake from one place to another. Sometimes he sells it; sometimes he gives it to a herpetologist; and sometimes he releases it into the wild in a non-populated area
Hunter got the eastern diamondback — the deadliest of all rattlers — following a call last week from city animal control officers. Apparently early Saturday morning, the creature bit him on the right hand, near the base of his forefinger and thumb, he told Port St. Lucie police and hospital staff.
He drove himself to St. Lucie Medical Center - and almost made it inside. About 12:30 a.m. Saturday a passerby told a police officer there that a man appeared to be unconscious in the parking lot behind the wheel of his parked vehicle, according to a police report.
“When (Hunter) got there, he already was in bad shape,” Hunter’s 47-year-old friend Maristela Duffield said.
As he lost consciousness, Hunter, who is licensed to possess venomous snakes, told investigators that his snakes and his residence were secure and that he lived in Midport Place, an apartment/condominium complex on Southeast Royal Green Circle.
“He was unable to provide any further details due to his rapidly declining condition,” according to the report.
Al Cruz with Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s Venom Response Bureau said his agency delivered 30 vials of anti-venom to the hospital.
He said eastern diamondbacks are the deadliest rattlers in the nation.
“One bite (has powerful enough venom to) kill five people,” he said, estimating that 250 to 300 people each year are bitten by venomous snakes in Florida.
Duffield, who also has a license to keep venomous snakes, said Monday that Hunter was having dialysis in the hospital and has a tube in his throat. She said Hunter is fascinated with cobras and they’ve become a part of his identity.
“I believe it was an accident that maybe he just got too confident,” said Duffield, who met Hunter through his sister-in-law more than 10 years ago.
She told investigators Hunter “self-immunized himself against many different exotic, poisonous snakes and had been bitten many times in the past,” the report states.
Nancy Haast, administrator at the Miami Serpentarium Laboratories where Hunter worked briefly in the 1990s, said venom from eastern diamondbacks can cause a “massive destruction of blood and tissue and vital organs.”
