A (student? prof? researcher?) at the Israel Institute of Technology has created some amazing three-dimensional models of M.C. Escher’s impossible drawings.
Kite flying techniques in Pakistan seem to be a very different from where I grew up:
An 18-month-old girl’s throat was cut by a stray kite string while she was travelling with her parents on a motorbike, witnesses said, adding that she died on the spot.
Three people were electrocuted when metal wires they were using to fly or catch stray kites fell on live electric lines, and two people fell from roofs, hospital officials said.
A 12-year-old boy died while trying to catch a stray kite when he was hit by a car on a main road, police said.
More than 100 people had been reported injured since last night in various kite-related accidents, medical workers said.
Back in 1998, I lost quite a bit of hearing in my right ear due to a viral infection. I remember lying in bed and having the strange sensation of my ear “popping in reverse” (it’s hard to explain). After several visits to the ear doctor — one visit specifically to test if I had a tumor — I was diagnosed with sudden deafness. I lost the majority of hearing in the high- and mid-range in that ear, combined with a wonderful case of tinnitus (ringing). I’ve been living with it ever since, and to be honest, I’ve mostly come to terms with it. If the ringing gets too annoying at night, I simply turn on the air conditioner and the white noise blocks most of it. The hardest part is trying to hear conversations where there’s a high level of background noise. The good news is that the left ear seems to have adjusted to the other ear’s problem, and I can carry on conversations much easier than I could after the problem first occurred.
Anyways, I saw an article on the BBC’s web site this morning that stated that vitamin E can help to restore hearing in some people that suffer from sudden deafness. I hope it’s true – it would be great to regain any of the hearing I’ve lost. I already take 400-800 mg of vitamin E every day to help recover from heavy weight lifting sessions. The vitamin helps speed up recovery from torn muscle tissue — I honestly feel less muscle pain after taking it in the morning.
I’m sure this will be the Internet meme of the week:
From Fred Langa’s column in Information Week:
But not swiftly: The update process can take a considerable chunk of your workday, even if you don’t count the download time or install from the free SP2 CD. Twenty to 40 minutes seems about the norm for installs on faster PCs; older, slower systems can take well over an hour.
There’s not a lot that can be done about that, but you can achieve a huge time savings on future installations and reinstallations of XP by integrating SP2’s files with those of your original XP setup CD. Your hybrid install CD will work exactly as the original one did, even to the point of using the same 25-character Product Key, but it will be completely up to date with all patches and updates, up to and including SP2. Any system you set up with the hybrid CD will be pre-patched to current levels, in one step. You’ll be totally up to date from the start, rather than facing maybe an hour or more of additional downloads to bring the new installation or reinstallation to SP2 levels.
Wow.
On Saturday afternoon, State Patrol pilot Al Loney was flying near Wabasha, in southeastern Minnesota on the Wisconsin border, watching two motorcyclists racing along U.S. Highway 61.
When one of the riders shot forward, Loney was ready with his stopwatch. He clicked it once when the motorcycle reached a white marker on the road and again a quarter-mile later. The watch read 4.39 seconds, which Loney calculated to be 205 mph.
“I was in total disbelief,” Loney told the St. Paul Pioneer Press for Tuesday’s editions. “I had to double-check my watch because in 27 years I’d never seen anything move that fast.”
Several law enforcement sources told the newspaper that, although no official records are kept, it was probably the fastest ticket ever written in the state.
After about three-quarters of a mile, the biker slowed to about 100 mph and let the other cycle catch up. By then Loney had radioed ahead to another state trooper, who pulled the two over soon afterward.
The State Patrol officer arrested the faster rider, 20-year-old Stillwater resident Samuel Armstrong Tilley, for reckless driving, driving without a motorcycle license and driving 140 miles per hour over the posted speed limit of 65 mph.
A search of speeding tickets written by state troopers, who patrol most of the state’s highways, between 1990 and February 2004 shows the next fastest ticket was for 150 mph in 1994 in Lake of the Woods County.
Tilley did not return calls from the newspaper to his home Monday. A working number for him could not immediately be found by The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Only a handful of exotic sports cars can reach 200 mph, but many high-performance motorcycles can top 175 mph. With minor modifications, they can hit 200 mph. Tilley was riding a Honda 1000, Loney said.
Kathy Swanson of the state Office of Traffic Safety said unless Tilley was wearing the kind of protective gear professional motorcycle racers wear, he was courting death at 200 mph.
“I’m not entirely sure what would happen if you crashed at 200 miles per hour,” Swanson said. “But it wouldn’t be pretty, that’s for sure.”
A bunch of us here at DebtX just took the geek test at Innergeek.us. I knew I’d scored high, but I didn’t expect to be the biggest geek. I scored 40.0395%, which is “Major Geek”. One of the developers came close with 39.25049%, and as expected the non-engineers had sub-10% scores.
Update: Oops, I tied with one of the developers. Congrats, Zach. 
The BBC is broadcasting a new “phase” of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on BBC 4.
The last three books of the ?trilogy in five parts?, Life, The Universe And Everything; So Long And Thanks For All The Fish and Mostly Harmless, have been dramatised as two new series (none of them were previously produced for radio).
As the original two series were dubbed the Primary and Secondary Phases by Douglas Adams, these new series form the Tertiary, Quadrenary and Quintessential Phases.
Thanks to the wonders of digital technology, Douglas Adams himself can be heard playing the part of Agrajag.
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