Clipmarks | pjr-s's clips

Can 80 cyclists power a house for a day?

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:24:22 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Can 80 cyclists power a house for a day?

How much electricity does the average British family of four use in a day?

To find out, BBC's Bang Goes the Theory attempts to power a house for an entire day solely through human pedal power, while an unsuspecting family inside go about their normal Sunday routine.

Bang Goes the Theory: Human Power Station will be broadcast on Thursday, 3 December 2009 at 2000 GMT, on BBC One.

Six drugs service scientists may resign over sacking of chairman

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 06:30:22 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

Six drugs service scientists may resign over sacking of chairman

By Danny Brierley

Sunday, 1 November 2009

Leading members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) are expected to resign over the sacking of its chairman, leaving the service in disarray, one of its leading scientists has warned.

The row has wider ramifications for the relationship between politicians and scientists, many of whom are concerned at Mr Johnson's reaction to Professor Nutt's comments. Dr King said: "Academics, medics and others are going to ask themselves if they want to serve on these agencies without payment, on their own time and expense, when the advice that they produce is routinely ignored."

Professor Nutt's dismissal, a first for a chairman of the ACMD, came days after he expressed dismay at the Prime Minister's insistence that cannabis remain a class B drug, and nine months after he said that there was little difference in the dangers of horse riding and taking ecstasy.

Why boys are turning into girls

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:18:27 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Why boys are turning into girls

Gender-bending chemicals are largely exempt from new EU regulations, warns Geoffrey Lean.

Published: 7:00PM BST 23 Oct 2009

Here's something rather rotten from the State of Denmark. Its government yesterday unveiled official research showing that two-year-old children are at risk from a bewildering array of gender-bending chemicals in such everyday items as waterproof clothes, rubber boots, bed linen, food, nappies, sunscreen lotion and moisturising cream.

Yet gender-benders are largely exempt from new EU regulations controlling hazardous chemicals. Britain, then under Tony Blair's premiership, was largely responsible for this – restricting their inclusion in the first draft of the legislation, and then causing even what was included to be watered down.Confidential documents show that it did so after pressure from George W Bush's administration, which protested that US exports "could be impacted".

God is not the Creator, claims academic

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 02:41:56 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

God is not the Creator, claims academic

The notion of God as the Creator is wrong, claims a top academic, who believes the Bible has been wrongly translated for thousands of years.

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Published: 5:45PM BST 08 Oct 2009

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world -- and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb "bara", which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate".

The first sentence should now read "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth"

'I questioned things at Guantánamo from day one'

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:02:16 GMT

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Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

'I questioned things at Guantánamo from day one'

Six months into his stint as a guard at Guantánamo, Terry Holdbrooks converted to Islam. What made him do it, asks Sarfraz Manzoor

Terry Holdbrooks arrived at Guantánamo detention camp in the summer of 2003 as a godless 19-year-old with a love of drinking, hard rock music and tattoos. By the time he left Cuba the following year, he had alienated his army colleagues, won the respect of the detainees and, most astonishingly, converted to Islam in a midnight ceremony in the presence of one of the detainees, who had become his mentor.

"I didn't have a very high impression of my colleagues," he says. Many of them were "ridiculous Budweiser-drinking, cornbread-fed, tobacco-chewing drunks, racists and bigots" who blindly followed orders, and within months he had stopped talking to them altogether. There were frequent physical altercations: "One time one of them said to me, 'Hey, Holdbrooks, you know what we are going to do today? We are

Ohio governor halts executions

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:33:56 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Ohio governor halts executions

Chris McGreal in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 6 October 2009 16.53 BST
Article history

Three guards stood around him as two nurses tried to insert needles into his arms. "The female nurse tried three separate times to access veins in the middle of my left arm. The male nurse tried three separate times to access veins ... in the middle of my right arm," Broom said in the affidavit. The nurses worked for 30 minutes without success and then took a break. "After the break, the female nurse tried twice to access veins in my left arm. She must have hit a muscle because the pain made me scream out loud," Broom said. "The first time the male nurse successfully accessed a vein in my right arm. He attempted to insert the IV, but he lost it and blood started to run down my arm."

After two hours the prison director, Terry Collins, contacted Strickland who called off the execution.

The bankers haven’t learnt that greed is good . . . for nothing

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 04:17:14 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

October 4, 2009

The bankers haven’t learnt that greed is good . . . for nothing

Rod Liddle

Nothing has changed. The economic crisis of last year is still seeing people put out of work — poor people, natch — but the next boom is being feverishly pumped up right now, on the same grounds as before. Nothing has changed — all that stuff about greater regulation, prudence, stability, financial propriety and a cap on extravagant bonuses? Bankers wandering around looking hurt and contrite and wondering if they should maybe open a donkey sanctuary in Suffolk instead of bankrupting the nation?

Adam Applegarth, for example, was named as one of the 25 people responsible for the financial meltdown of last year. The former chief executive officer of Northern Rock helped drag a respectable and primarily local lending institution into financial annihilation

I wonder, though, if you added up the cost of the crimes of every prisoner in this country whether the total would come to anywhere near £27 billion.

Starbucks kills communities, academic claims

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:51:21 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Starbucks kills communities, academic claims

Starbucks and its latte-frothing emulators have helped to kill off community life, according to an academic who conducted a study of the world’s biggest coffee chain.

By Tom Leonard in New York
Published: 7:25PM BST 28 Sep 2009

Small and widely spaced tables, free wireless internet access and a preference for take-away customers are among the conversation-killing factors that have encouraged patrons to cut themselves off, Bryant Simon claimed.

Many branches had community message boards and – borrowing from sociology – the company marketed itself as a “third place” between work and home. But Prof Simon, an academic at Temple University in Philadelphia, said the communal feel was an “illusion”.

“People immediately create their own little private, gated communities. You come in, set up your laptop and put on your headphones,” he said yesterday. “You couldn’t be more alone in public if you wanted to be.”

Bicyclists vs. Pedestrians: An Armistice

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:56:50 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Bicyclists vs. Pedestrians: An Armistice

By ROBERT SULLIVAN

Published: September 26, 2009

ONE of the great battlefields in the war between bicyclists and pedestrians in New York City is the Brooklyn Bridge. Pedestrians think all bicyclists are out-of-control maniacs; bicyclists — the majority, anyway — are just trying to avoid cars and not break a sweat. The stripe painted down the center of the elevated Brooklyn Bridge walkway, to separate bicyclists from pedestrians, has become a line in the sand. We need to erase that line once and for all.

Today, though, I am prepared to accept a bicycle ban on the walkway, allowing just one condition.

If we bicyclists cede the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, then it might be a step toward winning the public’s respect. Then, just maybe, pedestrians would call a truce and recognize that their real enemy is the car, that bikers are like pedestrians in that they are just trying to get to work without the use of a gurney.

Microsoft's grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:48:39 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Microsoft's grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?

Windows works for me. But I'd never recommend it to anybody else, ever.

The most nauseating advert in history? The Windows 7 ‘launch party’

I admit it: I'm a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can't control it. It's Apple. I don't like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.

Of course, it's safe to assume Mac products are indeed as brilliant as their owners make out. Why else would they spend so much time trying to convert non-believers? They're not getting paid. They simply want to spread their happiness, like religious crusaders.

Consequently, nothing pleases them more than watching a PC owner struggle with a slab of non-Mac machinery. It validates their spiritual choice.

Japan's new First Lady Miyuki Hatoyama: 'I went to Venus in a UFO'

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:08:09 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

September 4, 2009

Japan's new First Lady Miyuki Hatoyama: 'I went to Venus in a UFO'

Richard Lloyd Parry in Tokyo

Japan’s new Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, faces formidable foreign policy challenges in dealing with an expansionist China, a nuclear armed North Korea and a sinister Russia. But he need have no concerns about establishing friendly relations with the planet Venus — his own wife is a friend of the Venusians, having travelled there in a UFO in the 1970s.

The distinctions of Miyuki Hatoyama, 66, do not end there. As well as being a musical actress, cookery writer, clothes maker and television personality, she also says that she knew the actor Tom Cruise in a past life when he was incarnated as a Japanese.

She also described how she “eats the sun” every morning. She closed her eyes and mimed the act of removing pieces from the sky. “Yum, yum, yum,” she said, placing the imaginary solar morsels in her mouth. “I get energy from it. My husband also does this.”

Bangladeshi newspapers duped by The Onion's spoof Moon landing story

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:32:23 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Bangladeshi newspapers duped by The Onion's spoof Moon landing story

Two Bangladeshi newspapers have apologised after publishing a story taken from the satirical US website The Onion that claimed Neil Armstrong's 1969 Moon landing was faked.

Published: 1:43PM BST 04 Sep 2009

The Daily Manab Zamin reported that Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, had admitted at a news conference that the historic landing was part of an "elaborate hoax".

Neither they, nor The New Nation, which also ran the story, realised that The Onion, which also prints a parody newspaper, was not a genuine news site.

The New Nation's associate editor Hasanuzzuman Khan told AFP news agency: "We thought it was true so we printed it without checking. We didn't know The Onion was not a real news site."

Damien Hirst in vicious feud with teenage artist over a box of pencils

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:21:26 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

Damien Hirst in vicious feud with teenage artist over a box of pencils

Millionaire gets young rival banned from galleries after taking exception to prank played on him

By Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent

Friday, 4 September 2009

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How much is a box of pencils worth? Fifty pence? £3.99 if the pencils have rubbers on the ends? Well, if they're part of a Damien Hirst art installation, the value is £500,000. That is what 17-year-old graffiti artist Cartrain discovered when he pilfered some pencils from Hirst's sculpture Pharmacy. And that wasn't all – he was arrested, released on bail, and is waiting to find out if he will be formally charged with causing damage to an iconic artwork worth £10m.

He was told by custody officers that the pencils were valued at £500,000 and that he had damaged "the concept of a public artwork

Spot the difference: it's the all-new black and white Microsoft show

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:16:45 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

Spot the difference: it's the all-new black and white Microsoft show

By Guy Adams in Los Angeles

Thursday, 27 August 2009

The software giant Microsoft has been forced to apologise after employees decided to alter a marketing photo by swapping a black man's face for a white one.

The Seattle-based companyhad used the image of three people sitting around desks in an advertisement on its US website urging customers to "empower your people". But when the same photo was used on the internet site of the firm's Polish business unit, the central character was suddenly white. The problem was he still had a black hand.

Marketing experts believe the black man's image was doctored to appeal to Polish consumers. The country boasts a tiny black community, numbering just a few thousand people. At the last census, in 2002, the demographic was too small to even be counted.

the white laptop in front of the Photoshopped man is actually a Macbook, made by Microsoft's arch rival Apple.

Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:18:20 GMT

clipped by: pjr-s

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

Johann Hari: Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year.

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult