Yummy Wakame

Seen on Chapel Perilous -

Marines’ weapon loaded with ’scream’
US troops are to be armed with a stun gun that uses a baby’s high-pitched scream to bring the enemy to its knees. The gun, which will be issued to marines in Iraq this month, fires “sonic bullets” that can be targeted like a torch beam. The actual sound used is a recording of a baby’s scream played backwards.

Anyone hit with a full blast would suffer excruciating pain, permanent deafness and some form of cellular damage. A prolonged blast could kill.

Pentagon sources said it would be used in Iraq as an alternative to bullets to break up riots or protests, to stop suspects approaching check points and force snipers from buildings or caves.

A secret division in the Pentagon has been financing research on futuristic weapons for more than 15 years. This is the first to go into operation.

Radioactive Ghost Town - photos taken on a ride through Chernobyl
“from the first look ghosttown seems like a normal town, someone hung their washing on a balcony, some windows open, other clothed, here is taxi stop, there is grocery store… then, you read this slogan on building- “party of Lenin lead us to the triumph of a communism”- that helps to realise that clothes hung on balcony for 18 years and that town is empty..”

~ Found by Cait

The Singsons

After months of promising, I finally got round to revamping Nehanda Dreams today.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
by Philip Gourevitch

“Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech - performed largely by machete - it was carried out at a dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days.

Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

I made a brand new comments system for yummy that supports HTML!

I’ll test it out here for a while and then make it freely available to anyone who wants to use it on their site.

This app comes with a password protected admin system where you can add, edit and delete comments as well as change the colourscheme and fonts through a control panel. All you need is a hosting server that supports ASP, SQL and an Access 2000 DB.

Try Vischeck on your website or pictures and find out how colourblind people see them. You can select from three types - Deuteranope, Protanope and Tritanope.

“I was just writing to let you guys know how wonderfull the vischeck engine is! Now my familly and friends know why I always confuse chocolate labs with black labs. They have pity for me after looking at a chrismas tree! It helps people around me understand how I see. I think your website is one of the most usefull site i’ve come across! I hope the site stays up for ever!” ~ Michel C.

Something in the dihydrogen monoxide?

Thanks to the prank site DHMO Homepage and a few gullible city officials, a motion due to go before the Californian legislature proposed banning the ‘potentially deadly’ dihydrogen monoxide from within the city boundaries.

Researchers found that the presence of dihydrogen monoxide in Aliso Viejo had reached startling levels: it was present in its crude form, often spilling unmonitored on to the city streets; it was found to be a crucial ingredient in many common chemical compounds; its presence was even detected in that most ubiquitous of civilised artifacts, the styrofoam cup.

Yes, thats because its H₂O!!!

Handcranked Films
An independent collective of filmmakers and artists who collaborate and share common interests in cinema as an art form, creating their films with hand-cranked movie cameras. Collectively, these four filmmakers have screened their films in festivals worldwide winning many awards.

(credit goes to Roowlants Weploch)

Cat-astrophe! The funniest cat video in the world, EVER!
Found on CatBoxing.com via Chapel Perilous.

What a cute Pepsi ad! (1mb mpg)

Mzansi Afrika tells of The Hidden Health Trauma of Child Soldiers
A new Belgian study reveals that children abducted or recruited to fight in wars suffer horrific atrocities and many are beaten and sexually abused. Young soldiers are forced to kill other children or even members of their own family, and girls are given to senior staff to act as wives.

An estimated 300,000 children, some 12 or younger, are currently serving as soldiers or guerrilla fighters in conflicts around the globe.

“I think this is the first time someone has investigated their experiences,” Ilse Derluyn, of Ghent University in Belgium. Derluyn and her colleagues interviewed 301 former child soldiers who had been abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel movement in northern Uganda. Their research is published in The Lancet medical journal.

UN Regional Information Africa (IRIN) has more on this story.

In the meantime, Oneworld.net reports that Nepal’s Maoist rebels have announced plans to raise a militia of 50,000 children by April.

The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (CSC) is an NGO that does valuable human rights work around this issue. They have been at the forefront of efforts to ban the recruitment and use of child soldiers, while encouraging sustainable networks to promote demobilization and reintegration of former child soldiers. The site provides news, information, resourses and related links.

Toilet seats ‘cleaner’ than office desks
According to a US study, KEYBOARDS, computer mice and telephone dials are more infested with microbes than toilet seats.

Office workstations should be regularly disinfected since they can on average contain 400 times as many germs as a toilet seat. Telephones harbour up to 25,127 germs a square inch, keyboards 3295 and computer mice 1676. The average office contains 20,961 germs a square inch.

Even more reason to work from home!

Another Kollaboration clip - bigger, better quality
(Windows Media)

Bathroom Mania
An illustrative new line of sanitary products by Dutch illustrator and designer Meike van Schijndel.