Yummy Wakame

Can you escape from the CRIMSON ROOM?
If you get stuck, hints are offered over at Chapel Perilous.

PaPeRo - Personal Robot in development by NEC
PaPeRo stands for ‘Partner type Personal Robot’. When it has nothing to do, PaPeRo will wander around the room, using visual and ultrasonic sensors, for fun or to look for someone. When PaPeRo finds a person, it will try to communicate with the person. Its behavior and reaction to you will change according to your behavior towards the robot.

• The official PaPeRo Website with full info
• PaPeRo Movie

“NEC has been revising this robot since 1997 and they think that now they have gotten it right. Personal Robot PaPeRo 2003 is over a foot tall and can do some amazing things like recognize faces, listen for phrases and respond verbally, change the channel on the TV for you, check email for you, a lot of other stuff too numerous to mention. It has two cameras for eyes for face recognition so it can call you by name. It has four microphones for voice and command recognition. It has 5 ultrasonic sensors to help it navigate. TV output, a wireless internet connection, LEDs for facial expressions, it even has a stroking sensor so it can feel you stroking it’s head.” ~ Robots.net

If you cant wait for PaPeRo to hit the shelves - make one. Get yourself Growing up with Lucy - How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps by Steve Grand. It comes with rave reviews.

“Lucy Matilda is a robot baby orangutan, conceived during May 2000 by Cyberlife Research. When completed, Lucy will have a radically new kind of artificial brain. She will not be as smart as a human or ape baby of the same age, but she will learn for herself and she will have something that no robot has ever had before - an imagination.” ~ AgentLand.com

The South African Constitution - as the world’s only - explicitly guarantees the rights of homosexuals.

The country’s gay and lesbian couples are however still barred from marrying. Still, this week’s progresses make South Africa one of the countries in the world with the most ample rights for same-sex couples.
(via FARRAGO)

Death by Dyeing is an organization devoted to halting the barbaric process of injecting ornamental tropical fish with colored dyes and carcinogens.

Each day, hundreds of fish of multiple species are killed by these “lethal injections”. Many of those that do survive will die from their wounds or resulting disease. Only a very small percentile of dyed fish go on to live normal lives, forever branded with a sign of utmost suffering. However, we live in a world of supply and demand. We, the consumers, have the power to stop this atrocity. This is where those who really care are seperated from those who really don’t. Take a minute of your life, and save a life.

• Practical Fishkeeping Dyed Fish Campaign

Wow!!! Play Classic Sonic the Hedgehog online. See it to believe it!
Flash Player Required

Found by bsti

Get your weekend off to a rockin start with David Hasselhoff & Pingu!
Do the Pingu dance (3.3MB mp3)
(song lyrics)

Flatpack Brighton - bringing IKEA to your doorstep
“We take the hassle out of buying stuff from IKEA.”
What a great idea.

Classic Rainbow! (16MB mpeg but so worth the wait!)

J: “Oh Hello. We’re going to talk about playing today.”
B:”Playing with each other Jeffrey?”
J: “Yes Bungle. Tell me have you got a special friend you like to play with?”

ATM Card skimming - not an urban legend.
ATM houses duplicate card reader and wireless camera (photos)
As seen on enschede aan/zee

I found this on Chapel Perilous ~

Ending Biblical Brainwash
“Imagine that you’re a psychiatrist. A new patient comes to see you and says that he regularly talks to an invisible being who never responds, that he reads excerpts from one ancient book and that he believes wholeheartedly that its contents must be accepted implicitly, if not taken literally.

The patient goes on to say that that the world is only 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs never existed. He brazenly rejects modern science’s observations and conclusions, and subscribes to the notion that after death he will live in eternal bliss in some alternate dimension. And throughout your meeting, he keeps handing you his book and urging you to join him, lest you end up after death in a far less desirable alternate dimension than him.

Is this a mentally healthy person? If you were a responsible psychiatrist, how could you answer yes? These symptoms border on delusional schizophrenia, which the American Psychological Association’s DSM-IV describes as involving a profound disruption in cognition and emotion, assigning unusual significance or meaning to normal events and holding fixed false personal beliefs.”

You’ll notice that he also calls religion a “virus of the mind”.

‘Love meter’ foresees divorce
Two American academics have conceived a mathematical model that enables them with high accuracy to foresee what many love-struck couples tying the marital knot cannot: a future divorce.

Bonding mathematics and psychology, their cupid meter forecasts whether a couple will divorce within five years, “with a 94 percent accuracy,” or whether a marriage will stand the test of time, according to psychologist John Gottman.

How it works…

What a little BRAT!!

Tot expelled from UK schools
A GIRL of SIX has been expelled from two schools in four months. Little Nicola Hough banged on desks, shouted at teachers and attacked her headmistress in wild temper tantrums.

Nicola was expelled from Oaks Primary School in Birmingham, last October after punching and kicking the headmistress. She was suspended after just an hour and a half at her second school after try to stab a pupil with scissors. She was expelled last week for thumping her desk.

Nicola is now being educated at home while her parents Martin and Suzanne try to find a school to accept her.

Martin says Nicola - who has a high IQ of 107 - may be suffering from a form of autism. “Nicola is a bright girl who gets bored with basic work. She is entitled to an education.”

If 107 is considered to be a high IQ, I am seriously worried about the future of the human race.

fluffy battle kitten: on men and their balls and the superbowl.

Dress up your desktop with these delicious fluffy battle kitten dope desktop clothes.

Popcap games - free fun games to play in your browser
My favourites: insaniquarium, bejeweled and candy train.

Fat May Be Our Future
Scientists have decided that so much of the human world is becoming fat that this represents a kind of evolution, which can be compared to the basic change in our species that took place 200 years ago which Europeans all became taller, due to improved diets. But while taller people who eat better are healthier, this new evolutionary shift toward obesity makes us less healthy than before. Diabetes and heart problems may become a permanent part of our future as human beings.

“What’s happening now is that we’ve changed the environment that we live in in an incredibly short time - one generation or perhaps two generations at most, and this has challenged our ancient metabolism, which for thousands of generations has been geared to fighting famine.” ~ researcher Andrew Prentice.

Prentice, an expert on nutrition from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says obesity is made worse by sedentary lifestyles brought on by television, computers and labor-saving machines. He thinks the current generation will suffer from mild ailments such as breathlessness and varicose veins, as well as serious conditions such as diabetes and cancer.

Can you dig it… Lola writes:

I don’t think that I can hold my tongue about this much longer…

If I hear that “I’m lovin’ it” song or even see the commercial from that evil American Fast Food chain, I think I am going to explode. I don’t know about you, but it irritates me that a company that makes all of its money literally poisoning people is trying to make itself out to be a health-conscious food choice. It’s not food. And it certainly is not healthy, no matter what they try to tell you.

Which brings me to another problem: Money! Companies will say anything to make money. They try to convince us that they are looking into your well-being but, in fact, they just want to line their pockets with cash. It makes me really angry.

However, we have also convinced ourselves that happiness comes in how much you own and that makes it necessary to work for that evil which is money.

It just seems that we can never quite win…

EmptyPictures - Dead men don’t walk

Polaroid manipulation - Love it!!
(found on jane and richard’s yak and natter)