The Colors Man

Great Commercial

Email Lists to Join

The Darwin Awards email list appears to be alive and can provide many good laughs at the thinning of the speciers

/nev/dull is a collobrative email list where members can send Keith Bostic, the maintainer, links to great sites. All links are great in their own way.

Junkmail from Bob is a monthly email that contains a huge collection of links to various informative sites of Bob's choosing.

More Evidence That Smoking Kills

(6 May 2004, Ukraine) Piling up live artillery is grueling work, so it
makes perfect sense that a group of soldiers would take a cigarette break
at lunchtime. The warehouse was filled with 92,000 tons of ammunition --
until the soldiers lit up their ciggies and inhaled deeply, ignoring
warnings that smoking can cause cancer. They flicked the butts away and
went back to work. The glowing embers of the tobacco butts acted like slow
fuses, which started a small fire that nobody noticed until it ignited a
chain reaction of massive explosions.

The explosions lasted for a week, tossing debris as far as 25 miles away,
destroying buildings in a two-mile radius, and forcing the evacuation of
thousands of nearby residents. Red-hot shrapnel set off additional fires in
nearby towns and ruptured a minor gas pipeline. Total damage from the smoke
break was estimated at $750 million.

Miraculously, only one of the soldiers at the arsenal died in the
disaster. Six soldiers were charged with "grossly neglecting the fire
safety rules and smoking on the ammunition site."

What the Bellagio will do when Las Vegas runs out of water...

Well...It said to turn

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German motorist followed the command "Turn right now!" from his navigation system and crashed into a small toilet hut by the side of the road -- about 30 yards before the crossing he was meant to take.

The overly obedient 53-year-old from Freiburg drove his sport utility vehicle off the road onto into a building site, up a stairway and into the small toilet shack, police in the eastern town of Rudolstadt said Sunday.

It caused 2,000 euros ($2,500) worth of damage to the stairway, 100 euros damage to his car, and he was also fined 35 euros.

Earlier this month an 80-year-old motorist also chose to follow his navigation system and ignored a "closed for construction" sign on a Hamburg motorway. He then crashed into a pile of sand but neither he nor his passenger were injured.

Stinkymeat Returns!

First the Angry Woman eating lettuce, an old Mirsky Worst of the Web favorite, returns and now I've found Stinkymeat.

Just In Case You Find One...

Sure, the odds are slim that you'd ever be faced with an atomic device ticking down to zero. But think of how Jack Bauer it'd be if you were. And then who're you going to trust? Us or some do-gooder rock band?

Disconnect the wires leading from the battery or the trigger/timer to the detonator. The battery will look like a battery; the timer is the part that's counting down. Be careful: This is the trickiest part of the bomb – and where it's most likely to be booby-trapped (the whole red wire/blue wire thing comes into play here). And for God's sake, don't fuss over the process in order to make the timer stop at something clever like 0-0-7.

Remove the neutron trigger. This will be a small disc or ball. Don't eat it – it will be made of polonium or some other highly radioactive material, which initiates the chain reaction. After this step, the bomb can still detonate, but it won't be Hiroshima.

Remove the conventional explosive. It's the first part to go boom. In government weapons, it'll likely be some type of IHE (insensitive high explosive), which is fairly safe to handle. But in an improvised device, it might be considerably more unstable. Just keep a steady hand …

Separate the U-235 masses. These will be two small but very heavy chunks of metal – an isotope of uranium. If they get too close to one another, the combined critical mass will flood the area with radiation, and you will die. Kept apart, each emits only relatively harmless alpha particles – you could even handle them without gloves if necessary. Put each piece in a separate metal box and call the authorities.

If these tips don't work, give us a call and let us know what we got wrong.

They'll Try Smoking Them Out Now

OTTAWA, Canada (Reuters) -- Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy -- almost impenetrable forests of marijuana plants 10 feet tall.
General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defense staff, said Thursday that Taliban fighters were using the forests as cover. In response, the crew of at least one armored car had camouflaged their vehicle with marijuana.
"The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It's very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices. ... And as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," he said in a speech in Ottawa, Canada.
"We tried burning them with white phosphorous -- it didn't work. We tried burning them with diesel -- it didn't work. The plants are so full of water right now ... that we simply couldn't burn them," he said.
Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.
"A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those [forests] did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action," Hiller said dryly.
One soldier told him later: "Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I'd say 'That damn marijuana'."

The Nietzsche Family Circus

The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.

Egyptology

The Egypt Council of Antiquities and IBM have gotton together to present Eternal Egypt, a project to bring to the world information on the 5000+ years of Egyptian history and culture.

Thebes was the capital of Egypt during the New (1550 - 1070BC) and Middle (2040 - 1600 BC) Kingdoms. The Theban Mapping Project was an offshoot of an excavation of tomb KV5 in the Valley of the Kings.

The Ig Noble Prize

It's that time of year again

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Research into stinky feet, a study on the sound of fingernails on a blackboard and a device that repels teen-agers with an annoying high-pitched hum on Thursday won IgNobel prizes -- the humorous counterpart to this week's Nobel prizes.

Other winning research included a U.S. and Israeli team's discovery that hiccups could be cured with a finger up the rectum and a study into why woodpeckers do not get headaches.

"The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology," said Marc Abrahams, editor of the science humor magazine "Annals of Improbable Research," which sponsors the awards with the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.

All the research is real and has been published in often-prestigious scientific and medical journals. However, unlike the Nobel prizes awarded this week by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, IgNobel winners receive no money, little recognition and have virtually no hope of transforming science or medicine.

Google Notebook

Yet another amazing new tool from Google Labs has been released into the wild. Google Notebook is a firefox extension that allows you to create a note related to a web page and it also relates the note to the page that you were on.