Hulleye Comes By!

On Wednesday, Fateh Mohammad of Multan, Pakistan underwent surgery to have a lightbulb removed from his rectum. The prison inmate says he has no idea how it ended up there. From Reuters:

Mohammad, who is serving a four-year sentence for making liquor, prohibited for Muslims, said he was shocked when he was first told the cause of his discomfort. He swears he didn’t know the bulb was there.

“When I woke up I felt a pain in my lower abdomen, but later in hospital, they told me this,” Mohammad said.

“I don’t know who did this to me. Police or other prisoners.”

Link to Reuters article, Link to the classic Rectal Foreign Bodies page

aCK! my faith in joss whedon may drop significantly very soon if priyanka ends up as wonder woman.

speaking of optimus prime, paramount just released a super small teaser for next year’s transformer’s movie, though they really don’t reveal anything in it as such but hopefully it won’t be as cheesy as i expect it to be.

oh and also, next year spiderman 3 is being released, and finally it looks like it’s gonna kick ass.

this is a fascinating compilation by new scientist of 13 things that don’t make sense. here is entry #4 on homeopathy.

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this “mother tincture” in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. “We are,” Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

i highly recommend you to read the whole article. it covers everything from dark matter, to placebo’s, to the Kuiper cliff.

guess who’s blog i found? uber jeopardy champ ken jennings himself. go read this and then be amazed if you got no clue who he is.

No one knows who built this 40-foot sculpture of Transformer’s Optimus Prime in Yunnan, China - or why. From the website:

Deep in the mountainous regions of southern China, in a province named Yunnan, or “over the clouds”, by Emperor Wu in 109 BC due to its remoteness from the capital, there is a 40 ft statue of the new great Chinese leader, Optimus Prime. My pilgrimage to find him wasn’t without trial, but as they say:

Nothing of real value is easy.

Wired is reporting that many individuals currently without permanent housing still manage to stay connected via a cellphone, laptop, or some other gadget. Many homeless have email addresses and find that it offers them a way to get their foot back in the door of ‘normal’ society. From the article: “Hellerich slept on benches but she frequented a women’s shelter with a cluster of internet-connected computers used mostly by the children who arrived at the safe house with their mothers. She started blogging and conducting a business. As an independent internet marketer, she was able to maintain bank accounts, nurse existing client connections and forge new business relationships. The business brought in only about $100 a month, but that was enough to help get her life back on track.”

via /.

here’s a morbid way to paint your ceiling. this is a rather interesting ad by anti-smoking advocates in mumbai, india.

since the new movie hype is going on, 40 things you may, or may not have known about superman.

and also, here’s a few scene’s that you won’t be seeing in the movie.

here’s a full encyclopaedia for smoke’s. i was impressed that they had K2 and gold flake’s on there. they don’t have gold leaf’s though.

this is a pretty crazy gallery of macro photographs of insects (and a frog!).

A spider’s orb web is one of the most impressive architectural feats in nature, capturing morning dew and insect meals with equal grace.

But webbing rarely stands the test of time, especially over millions of years, and researchers have few samples of ancient web to study.

Now, scientists have found a 136 million-year-old piece of amber encasing pieces of web and trapped insects. The finding helps fill in the gaps of the origin of orb webs, and also indicates predatory spiders likely played a role in the evolution of flying insects. The study is detailed in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

He’s 80 years old, but Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, a feudal lord in Pakistan’s rugged Baluchistan province, wants to fight to the death. A Kalashnikov rifle strapped to his back, Bugti travels by camel through desert ravines and hobbles up cliffs to hidden caves where he plots ways for his Baluch tribesmen to ambush the Pakistani army. “It’s better to die—as the Americans say—with your spurs on,” says Bugti. “Instead of a slow death in bed, I’d rather death come to me while I’m fighting for a purpose.” That purpose is to make life as difficult as possible for Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Bugti is one of three Baluch tribal chiefs leading an armed uprising against Islamabad. In recent months the fighting has picked up. Hundreds of civilians have died, as well as nearly 400 government soldiers, and thousands of Baluch have been displaced.

keep reading. it’s worth it.

found on 3qd

ever wonder what happens when you pop a few mentos candies into a bottle of diet coke. well, these guys decided to mimic the fountains outside the bellagio in las vegas. you can watch below. (edit: i’ve removed the embedded player. it was a hog. you can watch at the links above)

here’s a collection of zoomorphic images by hassan musa. they are also copyrighted by him.

In this strangely addictive Flash Game, you are a statue in a park and you stood there for years watching birds pooping on you until one day your patience comes to an end and you decide to take revenge. With a shotgun.

BBC NEWS | World | Viewpoints: The urban world in 2050

A new study of animal populations shows that even widely separated populations of a single species will go extinct together if a common external force is applied. Take the analogy of two grandfather clocks falling into synchrony through subtle vibrations in the floorboards linking the two clocks. In the same way a common stimulant, in the form, say, of predators or adverse climate conditions, can synchronize the fate of separate enclaves of an endangered species. R.E. Amritkar of the Physical Research Laboratory (Ahmedabad) and Govindan Rangarajan of the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore) began with actual field data that had demonstrated the synchronizing influence of predators on vole populations and then applied principles from nonlinear dynamics to simulate future behavior. They conclude that provided there is a common threat, separated communities of the species will synchronize together before becoming extinct. This is bad news for conservationists hoping that some decimated species could survive in isolation. They show that the net resistance to extinction can be expressed as a parameter which puts the degree of endangeredness into numerical form. This theory can help explain why species got decimated on a global scale in previous mass extinction events. (Physical Review Letters, upcoming article; rangaraj@math.iisc.ernet.in, 91-80-23600373; website at http://math.iisc.ernet.in/~rangaraj )

via aip

here’s a few good reasons why racial profiling just won’t work for airplane security.

…here’s a more useful quiz:

• In 1985, Air India Flight 182 was blown up over the Atlantic by:

  a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
  b. Bill O’Reilly
  c. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir
  d. Indian Sikh extremists, in retaliation for the Indian Army’s attack on the Golden Temple shrine in Amritsar

• In 1986, who attempted to smuggle three pounds of explosives onto an El Al jetliner bound from London to Tel Aviv?

  a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
  b. Michael Smerconish
  c. Bob Mould
  d. A pregnant Irishwoman named Anne Murphy

• In 1962, in the first-ever successful sabotage of a commercial jet, a Continental Airlines 707 was blown up with dynamite over Missouri by:

  a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
  b. Ann Coulter
  c. Henry Rollins
  d. Thomas Doty, a 34-year-old American passenger, as part of an insurance scam

• In 1994, who nearly succeeding in skyjacking a DC-10 and crashing it into the Federal Express Corp. headquarters?

  a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
  b. Michelle Malkin
  c. Charlie Rose
  d. Auburn Calloway, an off-duty FedEx employee and resident of Memphis, Tenn.

• In 1974, who stormed a Delta Air Lines DC-9 at Baltimore-Washington Airport, intending to crash it into the White House, and shot both pilots?

  a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
  b. Joe Scarborough
  c. Spalding Gray
  d. Samuel Byck, an unemployed tire salesman from Philadelphia

The answer, in all cases, is D.

Racial profiling doesn’t work against terrorism, because terrorists don’t fit any racial profile.

Patrick Smith writes the “Ask the Pilot” column for Salon. He’s written two very good posts on airline security, one about how Israel’s system won’t work in the U.S., and the other about profiling

via Schneier.

This Wikipedia article on Peru’s Inca Kola offers a fascinating theory as to why the Pepsi Challenge (where Coke drinkers are asked to blind-test Coke and Pepsi, then shown that they chose Pepsi as the superior drink) fails. According to the article, “consumers do not enjoy being told they’re wrong.”

In the 1980s, Pepsi’s infamous “Pepsi Challenge” (El Reto Pepsi) campaign helped to virtually destroy the Pepsi brand in Peru, due in large part to the fact that consumers do not enjoy being told they’re wrong. The campaign was quite simple actually: Tasting centers were set up in and around Lima where people could freely participate in a blind taste test between Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Attendees were presented with two covered bottles and two glasses, each bottle was opened and poured into its respective glass, whereupon the tester was asked to drink each and declare his or her favorite, but not before being asked which they preferred and drank regularly.

The campaign was a disaster, as one of three results came from the testing, all detrimental to Pepsi: 1) People were angered by the fact that they were “wrong” in their choice and abandoned Pepsi, switching to either Coca-Cola or Inca Kola; 2) Those who chose Coca-Cola over Pepsi either switched to or stayed with Coca-Cola; 3) Those who were ambivalent between them cemented their ambivalence and switched to Inca Kola. Additionally, the costs of the Pepsi Challenge, which started tu run into the millions of US dollars, coupled with managerial mistakes left CEPSA virtually bankrupt.

Anyone who knows me personally knows my dislike of Pepsi. I think Malcolm Gladwell also brings up similar reasons in his book Blink.

Found on BB

halai in history.

the halai archaelogical project.

halai, papua new guinea.

the winning of halai auna at the house of tuina.

bharat mankush halai.

HALAI.X.

halai image archive.

halai in polish.

wanna be a mensan? try these on for size.

though, truth be told, i am a mensan and the mensa quiz has no logic questions even close to these. i’m running out of titles.

i can just imagine all the females clicking on this post getting all gleamy eyed with weird looks on their faces. ugh. sickening.

this one’s for you guidi. this truly proves how much wikipedia kicks ass. here’s a list of all the problems ever solved by angus macgyver. good luck trying to look that up in the brittanica.

“They are wreaking havoc ecologically and economically, so I say we do need a bunny extermination program.”

via hugh.

you guys remember suicide bunnies?

As the sort of quiet campaign for Kofi Annan’s successor heats up, a look at the fight in store for one potential UN Secretary-General, the writer, poet and novelist Shashi Tharoor.

Pakistan has indicated that it is likely to challenge the Indian nominee for the UN Secretary General post Shashi Tharoor and said it believes that his candidature showed New Delhi giving up its bid for a permanent seat in the Security Council, a claim rejected by India.

Islamabad believes that New Delhi fielding a candidate for the post of UN Secretary-General clearly indicates that it has given up its bid for a permanent seat in the Security Council for lack of support, its Ambassador Munir Akram told reporters after India announced Tharoor’s nomination for the post.

It is a tradition that permanent members of UNSC or countries aspiring to be its permanent members do not field candidates for the post of UN Secretary General, he said, adding he did not know India’s mind but this was the view of the diplomatic community here.

the gallery of bad hair. i mean it. it’s really, really bad. just keep clicking next. it’s super bad.

you guys remember that transparency effect which these guys were doing with their monitor screens? well this guy in chicago decided to paint road signs to give the same effect.