Bangarang

Smile!

VideoTrace - 3D modelling using real video

Wow! This is some cutting edge technology!

Laser + Sound = Amazing Toy! (also a maze finder)

This is the coolest thing!!!

Bat in the house!

I was just on Dr. Fuhrman's weekly phone chat that I host every Tuesday and next thing you know I see a bat flying around, yes a bat!! Everyone on the call had to deal with me vocally squirming as the bat was flying right above my head, I was afraid it was going to bite me, particularly my ear. One of the callers mentioned getting tested for rabies. I later found out that rabies are pretty serious business!

I thought it was a bird at first but then realized it wasn't making any noise. After the phone chat ended I looked up "How to catch bat house" on Google and up came this article, http://www.wikihow.com/Catch-a-Bat-in-Your-House, so, I talked with my house guest staying downstairs and he saw the bat too! I talked about how the article said to open all the doors and windows and chase it towards the area and that we should use a towel etc. just as the article says. I gave him a big bath towel and got one myself too. It was good that he took the lead, calmly, walked upstairs and saw the bat had stopped flying around and settled into the upper side of a window.

My guest was brave enough to just slowly take the towel and wrap it around the bat and sure enough, just as the article said, the bat started making clicking noises, I said, "that is normal, that is what the internet said". I pulled the blind further up and assisted with my towel. It ended up in my towel (the handoff) and it was very weird, I could feel the bat almost vibrating in the towel as he was fighting to get out. I kept thinking that he was going to bite through the towel for some reason, even though it was a very thick bath towel. We then took it outside and slowly unwrapped the towel on a table. Just seconds later the bat was free once again!

In the end it worked perfectly, my heart is still beating though, the bat got away safely, no one got bit and it worked much faster than my idea of opening all the windows and doors and trying to chase it out.

Btw. The bat was upstairs and none of the upstairs windows open anyways.

Where the Wild Things Are - Official Trailer

Reminder to watch this movie!

King salmon vanishing in Alaska, smokehouses empty

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_12978540

Self-explanatory but...

We as a planet need to consider the impact that we are having on future generations. I am not perfect in anyway nor claim to be. The best we can do is to do our best, the best we know how to at any given time. It also helps to have a peer group that you can look up to and be inspired by. Anyways, the less animal products we eat the better. We hear too much talk about carbon and not enough about methane. If you want be a environmentalist you will at a minimum need to reduce your intake of animal products and your dependence upon them. No need to cut them out entirely but just treat them as you would alcohol.

Susanese woman to dare court over flogging

A journalist arrested in Sudan for wearing trousers has become a symbol for women's rights across Africa.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/sudanese-woman-to-dare-court-over-flogging-20090802-e5tf.html

The world is beginning to awaken. Lubna Hussein is helping to inspire the revolution in Sudan and other nearby nations. Can you actually believe a group of men go around and arrest women for not wearing the right dress? Seriously! I don't care what people say about culture this is absolutely ridiculous! Human rights will be universal someday soon! Meaning that everyone on the planet is treated with respect and fairness no matter their age, race, clothing, skin color, eye color, or sex.

Cops should be drafted not recruited...

I kinda like this idea!

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/23056 - Edit: This link has a permission denied problem so I just looked at Google's cache, deactivated the link and posted the article below.

After Professor Gates, Why Pretend?

NEW YORK--The current national conversation about race and the police reminded me about an incident that occurred when I was in Uzbekistan. As I walked into an apartment complex for an appointment I noticed the decomposing body of a man lying on the side of the road.

"How long as he been there?" I asked my host.

"Three, maybe four days," he said.

"What happened to him?"

"Shot, maybe," he shrugged. "Or maybe hit by a car. Something."

I didn't bother to ask why no one had called the police. I knew. Calling the Uzbek militsia amounts to a request to be beaten, robbed or worse. So desperate to avoid interaction with the police was another man I met that, when his mother died of old age at their home in Tashkent, he drove her body to the outskirts of town and deposited her in a field.

With the exception of New Orleans after Katrina, it's not that bad here in the United States. Consider Professor Henry Louis Gates: he shouldn't have been arrested by that Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer, but he came out of the experience physically unscathed.

Nevertheless, the Gates incident has illuminated some basic, strange assumptions about our society. Cops think they have a constitutional right to be treated deferentially. And black people think cops are nice to white people.

Yeah, well, take it from a white guy: we don't like cops either.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. references "the African immigrant killed while reaching for his wallet, the Maryland man beaten senseless as he lay in bed, the Miami man beaten to death for speeding, the dozens of men jailed on manufactured evidence in Los Angeles and manufactured police testimony in Tulia, Texas, the man sodomized with a broomstick in New York. Are we supposed to believe it coincidence that the men this happens to always happen to be black?"

Of course not. Blacks are 30 to 50 percent more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crime. Their prison sentences are longer. In the notorious "driving while black" New Jersey trooper case, African-Americans made up 70 percent of those randomly pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike--but fewer than 17 percent of motorists. Blacks are more likely to be stopped, frisked, arrested, beaten and murdered by the police than members of all other ethnic groups. American racism against blacks remains systematic, pervasive, and murderous. When there's a policeman in the picture, it's best to be white.

Still, whites and blacks have more in common than they think when it comes to their feelings about the fuzz. When those flashing lights appear in the rearview mirror, even the biggest right-winger's day is ruined.

No one should be less scared of cops than me. I'm white, clean-cut, middle-aged, invariably polite: "Hello, sir. Is there a problem, officer?" Yet I can't point to a single positive experience I've ever had with a cop. Neutral ones, sure--basic, cold, bureaucratic interactions. But no great ones.

And lots and lots of negative ones.

Where to begin?

I'll never forget the New York traffic cop who stepped off the curb in front of my car on Madison Avenue and ordered me to turn right. He wrote me up for illegal right turn. "But you told me to," I protested. "Wrong place, wrong time," he smirked. $165 plus three points on my license. I appealed. The cop lied under oath. The court believed him.

Or the Nevada highway patrolman who pulled me over. I was doing 80 in a 70. He wrote me up at 100 mph. My brother-in-law, never the suck-up, confirmed I was going 80. I was so furious--the fine would have been $400--that I spent double that to fly back and challenge the ticket in court. I won.

When my 20-year-old self forgot to turn on my headlights as we pulled out of a parking lot while on a road trip with my druggie roommate, a Massachusetts cop pulled us over. I couldn't begrudge him probable cause; pot smoke billowed out the window, "Cheech and Chong"-style, when I opened it. Still, what came next was unforgivable: he handcuffed my arms so tight that the metal cut to the wrist bone. (The scar lasted ten years.) When we got out of the town lock-up the next morning, $400 was missing from my wallet. (A judge, examining my wrist a few months later, dropped the charges. My $400, of course, was gone forever.)

An LAPD cop--it bears mentioning that he was black--arrested me for jaywalking on Melrose Avenue. I wasn't. I didn't resist, but he roughed me up. Upon releasing me, he chucked my wallet into the sewer, laughed and zoomed off on his motorcycle. I filed a complaint, which the LAPD ignored.

And so on.

I admit it: I don't like cops. I like the idea of cops. The specific people who actually are cops are the problem. My theory is that cops should be drafted, not recruited. After all, the kind of person who would want to become a police officer is precisely the kind of person who should not be allowed to work as one. But I didn't start out harboring this prejudice. It resulted from dozens of unpleasant interactions with law enforcement.

Race has long been a classic predictor of attitudes toward the police. But high-profile cases of police brutality, coupled with over-the-top security measures taken since 9/11 that targeted whites as well as blacks, have helped bring the races together in their contempt for the police. In 1969, the Harris poll found that only 19 percent of whites thought cops discriminated against African-Americans. Now 54 percent of whites think so.

Don't worry, Professor Gates. We don't care what you said about the cop's mama. A lot of white guys see this thing your way.
_______
Ted Rall Online: www.rall.com
COMING OCTOBER '09: New graphic novel "The Year of Loving Dangerously"

About author
Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.

Researchers launch study of ocean & garbage patch' twice the size of Texas

www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jul/30/1m30trash231552-researchers-launch-study-ocean-gar

Is Vancouver About to Become the Greenest City in the World?

The city has made a rapid transition: It draws 90% of its energy from renewables, has a booming bicycle culture and a very popular progressive mayor.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/141657/is_vancouver_about_to_become_the_greenest_city_in_the_world?page=2

Close up lightning strike (language - NSFW)

Mute this if you are at work. What do you think you would say if this happened to you!

Bill Maher says America is a Stupid Country

How Differential Gear works (BEST Tutorial)

This was very educational!

Katy Perry - Hot and Cold (Cover)

This was very entertaining. Makes me smile for some reason.

Bobby McFerrin rocks the audience with the pentatonic scale!!!

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

You must take a minute to enlighten yourself with this feat!! I have never seen anything like it. Must watch to understand!