Hulleye Comes By!

i’m in karachi for a couple of weeks. posts will either be extremely intermediate or non-existent while i’m here so don’t expect much. should resume when i get back.

- abbas

super neat. this is one of the coolest images i found on the transparent screens flickr pool mentioned a few posts ago. there is no photoshop behind this. try and figure out how this was accomplished.

SG, writes about what karachi has become. may whatever God you believe in, bless you for what you are doing and all that you can do so selfishlessly.

browse through the canadian snow sculpture team gallery. comment with your stereotypical canadian joke below.

cool shirt being made by madeindesign.com that shows off a smart ambigram. the t-shirt spells out hate, until viewed in a mirror when it reads love. all you fans of godel, escher and bach should love this.

i found a kick ass flickr pool called transparent screens. the idea is to use an image which matches your surroundings on your computer desktop wallpaper. the effect makes it seems as if your computer monitor is transparent.

The Bush administration is planning to use nuclear weapons against Iran, to prevent it acquiring its own atomic warheads, claims an investigative writer with high-level Pentagon and intelligence contacts.

President George W Bush is said to be so alarmed by the threat of Iran’s hard-line leader, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, that privately he refers to him as “the new Hitler”, says Seymour Hersh, who broke the story of the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

Some US military chiefs have unsuccessfully urged the White House to drop the nuclear option from its war plans, Hersh writes in The New Yorker magazine. The conviction that Mr Ahmedinejad would attack Israel or US forces in the Middle East, if Iran obtains atomic weapons, is what drives American planning for the destruction of Teheran’s nuclear programme.

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings among the joint chiefs of staff, and some officers have talked about resigning, Hersh has been told. The military chiefs sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran, without success, a former senior intelligence officer said.

The Pentagon consultant on the war on terror confirmed that some in the administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among defence department political appointees…

Scientists have determined that people had their teeth drilled at least 9,000 years ago. University of Kansas anthropologists dated skulls containing drilled teeth that were found in a Pakistan graveyard. The research was published in the scientific journal Nature, which also released photos demonstrating how a drill fashioned from flint, a rod, and a bow string might have been wielded sometime around 5500 - 7000 B.C.. From the Associated Press:

“The holes were so perfect, so nice,” said study co-author David Frayer, an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas. “I showed the pictures to my dentist and he thought they were amazing holes.”

How it was done is painful just to think about. Researchers figured that a small bow was used to drive the flint drill tips into patients’ teeth. Flint drill heads were found on site. So study lead author Roberto Macchiarelli, an anthropology professor at the University of Poitiers, France, and colleagues simulated the technique and drilled through human (but no longer attached) teeth in less than a minute.

“Definitely it had to be painful for the patient,” Macchiarelli said.

I am assuming that they had some form of an anasthetic or got high from all the opium plants growing before they had any dental work done.

observations from the new yorker.

When you sign up online for Skywards, which is the frequent-flier program of Emirates, the international airline of the United Arab Emirates, you enter your name, address, passport number, and other information, and you select an honorific for yourself from a drop-down list. A few of the choices, in addition to the standard Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, and Dr, are: Admiral, Air Comm, Air Marshal, Al-Haj (denoting a Muslim who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca), Archbishop, Archdeacon, Baron, Baroness, Colonel, Commander, Corporal, Count, Countess, Dame, Deacon, Deaconess, Deshamanya (a title conferred on eminent Sri Lankans), Dowager (for a British widow whose social status derives from that of her late husband, properly used in combination with a second honorific, such as Duchess), Duchess, Duke, Earl, Father, Frau, General, Governor, HRH, Hon, Hon Lady, Hon Professor, JP (justice of the peace?), Judge, Khun (the Thai all-purpose honorific, used for both men and women), L Cpl, Lt, Lt Cmdr, Lt Col, Lt Gen, Midshipman, Mlle, Monsieur, Monsignor, Mother, Pastor, Petty Officer, Professor, Senor, Senora, Senorita, Sgt, Sgt Mjr, Shaikha (for a female shaikh, or sheikh), Sheikh, Shriman (an Indian honorific, for one blessed by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, wisdom, luck, and other good things), Sister, Sqdn Ldr, Sqn Ldr, Sub Lt, Sultan, Swami, The Countess, The Dowager, The Duchess, The Marquis, The Matron, The Rev Canon, the Reverend, The Rt Hon, The Ven, The Very Revd, Ven, Ven Dr, Very Revd, Vice Admiral, Viscount, and Viscountess.

Anyone who chooses King obviously goes in first class, Private in economy, Wing Cmdr in an exit row. But what about Cardinal?

read on. via 3qd

i love short stories. so i thought i’d share two of my favourite ones over here. i hope you like them. i read them in high school and they sort of stuck with me. the first one is by this american lady, shirley jackson. the lottery is one of her most famous works and the first story that you should read today.

next in line is a short called “–All You Zombies–”, by famous sci-fi writer robert heinlein known more commonly for his famous novels such stranger in a strange land. this is a slightly longer and much harder, and much, much darker read. please be aware of the time line. the storyline is pretty bizarre and makes you wonder how much you can mess with reality.

here’s a graphic to help you out with the timeline of the story to keep next to you while reading.

hope you enjoy them and do let me know what you thought of the short stories, especially ‘all you zombies’.

here are the wikipedia entries for the lottery, and all you zombies.

• Europe sets next phase in asteroid deflection project
  ESA shortlisted three European consortia to submit proposals for its Don Quijote project to deflect any future asteroid on a collision course with Earth
• Bush’s NASA cuts halts much research
  236 researchers were sent termination letters
• Scientists study ‘moon catapult’
  plan to support a moon mission using a giant slingshot is to be studied by researchers at Glasgow University

With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade.

“Einstein showed that mass and energy are the same thing,” said Mallett, who published his first research on time travel in 2000 in Physics Letters. “The time machine we’ve designed uses light in the form of circulating lasers to warp or loop time instead of using massive objects.”

To determine if time loops exist, Mallett is designing a desktop-sized device that will test his time-warping theory. By arranging mirrors, Mallett can make a circulating light beam which should warp surrounding space. Because some subatomic particles have extremely short lifetimes, Mallett hopes that he will observe these particles to exist for a longer time than expected when placed in the vicinity of the circulating light beam. A longer lifetime means that the particles must have flowed through a time loop into the future.

“Say you have a cup of coffee and a spoon,” Mallett explained to PhysOrg.com. “The coffee is empty space, and the spoon is the circulating light beam. When you stir the coffee with the spoon, the coffee – or the empty space – gets twisted. Suppose you drop a sugar cube in the coffee. If empty space were twisting, you’d be able to detect it by observing a subatomic particle moving around in the space.”

And according to Einstein, whenever you do something to space, you also affect time. Twisting space causes time to be twisted, meaning you could theoretically walk through time as you walk through space.

the simpsons trailer.

after much hype, riya.com has a beta which is now public. please review it and leave feedback if you so desire.

security guru, bruce schneier hosts a movie plot terrorist threat contest.

funny man, frank caliendo doing some crazy impressions.

and for all those morons coming to this site looking for kevin pollack doing the christopher walken impression in the aristocrats, well here’s the link.

little brother is watching you.

google’s april fool’s joke this year.

ubuntu dapper drake 6.06 flight 6 has also been released.

a brief history of porn. (scroll all the way down for the time line conversation)

the top 10 ways to destroy earth.