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This Episode’s Executive Producer: Roman Visintine Associate Executive Producers: Oliver Judge, Ralf Nellessen, Breetai Artwork by Jimmy Tanner Listen to show by clicking ► Direct link to show. |
Sources: Wikipedia (1) | Wikipedia (2) | Wikipedia (3) | World Bank | Theodora
The largest ransom ever paid to Somali pirates has been dropped onto the deck of a Greek-flagged oil tanker carrying two million barrels of oil.
The ransom delivered on Sunday is believed to be between $5.5m and $7m, according to unnamed sources interviewed by the Reuters news agency.
With 28 crew members on board, the Maran Centaurus oil tanker was captured in November as it was crossing the Indian Ocean, northeast of the Seychelles islands.
The tanker was sailing from Kuwait to the United States.
The European Union’s anti-piracy force says the crew includes one Romanian, two Ukrainians, nine Greeks and 16 Filipinos.
The EU has an anti-piracy force?
A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.
This sort of stuff really pisses me off. Taking advantage of a frightened public like this is just plain wrong. The original article here and New Scientist angle here.
School sees science project of 11-year-old as threat — This is incredible. Exactly how stupid are these people? No wonder the kids learn nothing in California schools.
Students were evacuated from Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School in the Chollas View neighborhood Friday afternoon after an 11-year-old student brought a personal science project that he had been making at home to school, authorities said.
Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified.
The school, which has about 440 students in grades 6 to 8 and emphasizes technology skills, was initially put on lockdown while authorities responded.
Luque said the project was made of an empty half-liter Gatorade bottle with some wires and other electrical components attached. There was no substance inside.
When police and the Metro Arson Strike Team responded, they also found electrical components in the student’s backpack, Luque said. After talking to the student, it was decided about 1 p.m. to evacuate the school as a precaution while the item was examined. Students were escorted to a nearby playing field, and parents were called and told they could come pick up their children.
A MAST robot took pictures of the device and X-rays were evaluated. About 3 p.m., the device was determined to be harmless, Luque said. Luque said the project was intended to be a type of motion-detector device.
Found by Kevin Terminella via Twitter.
We’ve pointed out in the past how unfortunate it is that so few browsers recognize the sarcasm markup tag in HTML, because sarcasm sometimes gets missed in text. Apparently some random company is trying to fix that by creating an explicit sarcasm punctuation mark, called the SarcMark, made up of a squiggle around a dot. I’m hoping the whole effort itself is sarcastic, because the company has apparently registered a trademark on it (no, you can’t use that punctuation!) and is trying to get you to pay $1.99 for a special app to let you use the mark. What a great deal! I’ll buy 6!
I have to admit that the inability of some people to detect, or even understand sarcasm is a real problem. I’ve written before about the teacher who was actually arrested for posting a sarcastic comment. And I was taken seriously for a piece I wrote that I considered to be obvious satire. (Note to the internet, when the writer is in favor of euthanasia for healthy people, he’s probably kidding!)
 You can even get imitation goslings |
A pair of goose hunters trigged a security alert at a nuclear weapons assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Officials locked the plant after getting reports of individuals in camouflage gear stalking across the road from the factory.
They turned out to be two plant employees who had decided to spend their day off hunting fowl. The plant was briefly shut as a “precautionary measure,” a plant official said.
The pair, who sparked the alert when spotted early in the morning carrying arms and dressed in camouflage gear, were later found in a nearby field setting up goose decoys.
No charges will be filed against the men who both had permission to hunt from the local landowner.
Amarillo hasn’t changed much since last I was there.
“Lexicon and THX apparently attempted to pull a fast one on the consumer electronics industry, but got caught this week when a couple websites exposed the fact that the high-end electronics company put a nearly-unmodified $500 Oppo Blu-ray player into a new Lexicon chassis and was selling it for $3500. AV Rant broke the story first on its home theater podcast with some pics of the two players’ internals. Audioholics.com then posted a full suite of pics and tested the players with an Audio Precision analyzer. Both showed identical analogue audio performance and both failed a couple of basic THX specifications. Audioholics also posted commentary from THX on the matter and noted that both companies appear to be in a mad scramble to hide the fact that the player was ever deemed THX certified.”
It’s shocking enough that people are willing to spend $500 for a Blu-ray player, but $3500?! My $250 PS3 is more than good enough for me.
Back in the early ’00s, I saw Smart cars zipping around my neighborhood in France and thought, “Europe is so weird! They’d never sell those in the US.” But I was wrong. And the relative success of tiny cars like the Mini Cooper and, the Smart fortwo has led to the inevitable. The world’s cheapest car, India’s Tata Nano, is coming to America and Europe in about three years.
The Nano sells for about $2,500 USD in India, and will be more robust and safer before it shows up on the American and European markets. But it’ll still be tiny, and cheaper than a base-model Hyundai Accent, currently the cheapest new car on the US market.
FYI, the Hyundai Accent lists for about $13,000, so will they price the Tata Nano for less than 10 grand?
A floor collapsed beneath a group of about 20 members of Weight Watchers as they gathered to compare how many pounds they had shed over Christmas.
Members of the weight-loss club were lining up to compare readings on the scales when they heard a bang as the floor came away from the walls of their meeting room in Växjö in southern Sweden.
“We suddenly heard a huge thud – we almost thought it was an earthquake and everything flew up in the air. The floor collapsed in one corner of the room and along the walls,” one of the those present told the Smålandsposten newspaper.
They abandoned the room as the floor started to give way in other areas.
So, they waited until the rest of the floor started to collapse?
Found by Brother Uncle Don
Four years ago, Lucille Rembert brought flowers to her husband’s grave at Royal Palm Cemetery.
But as she looked down, she started to cry. Another woman had been buried next to him — in her spot.
“I said, ‘Oh no, not again,’ ” she recalled recently.
In 1995, the cemetery buried a man in the plot she bought next to her husband. She agreed to move her husband’s body to a place with room for her.
Now they wanted to move him again.
For Kindle and with free ePub version. Only $9.49 Great reading.
Here is what Gary Shapiro CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) said: Dvorak's writing sings with insight and clarity. Whether or not you agree with John's views, he will get you thinking and is never boring. These essays are worth the read!
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