Web Urbanist blog has a really neat post about 7 abandoned cities and places in Asia. This photo above is of the lawless Walled City of Kowloon in Hong Kong:

In the rogue ungoverned Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong things were so tightly packed that trash blocked off parts of buildings and many occupied apartments literally never saw the light of day.

Like something straight from a William Gibson novel, there were no police or building codes - there was no law. For nearly 50 years this slice of Hong Kong was allowed to exist and grow independently due to a legal technicality.

After the Japanese left following the second World War squatters swarmed to fill the space, with the population at 10,000 people (living on seven acres) by the early 1970s - a combination of dissidents, outlaws and both organized and disorganized criminals. Professionals who couldn’t get a license set up shop, criminals hiding from the law thrived, and the self-organized community grew to 35,000.

Then in 1993 everything changed - no one wants to deal with this lawless place anymore and it is promptly destroyed and turned into a park.

Link - Thanks Kurt!

Tom and Kerry Watts love burgers. So when they got married, it was only natural that their wedding cake was shaped like a huge burger!

Firefighter Tom, 36, said: "Not only did I get to marry the woman of my dreams but I also got to have the burger of my dreams in the same day.

"I could not believe the size of the burger. It was just incredible. Everything has just been amazing. It was the best day ever."

Kerry, also 36, added: "We love burgers and thought it would be a bit of fun. It made the day even more special. We love chocolate too so we also had a chocolate cake."

Link

For an unlucky man, Robert Evans is incredibly lucky: the homeless man was hit by a car in a hit-and-run accident, and when he walking from a hospital to his camp for that, he was hit by a train and survived!

"He got two ambulance rides last night," MacPherson said. "It's an extreme oddity that someone is hit by a car and a train on the same night. I can't imagine that this has ever happened before in Boulder."

Link

Photo: Fabrizio Constantini / NY TImes

Le Mans is a prestigious French endurance car race lasting 24 hours, which is "nasty, brutish, and not short enough," according to Jay Lamm. So he created LeMons as an homage:

Conceived in 2006 in mock homage to the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France, the LeMons is likewise a marathon of man and machine. But unlike the gentlemanly Gallic race, LeMons is a 24-hour brawl and, more defining, nice cars are not welcome. The rules say that teams can spend no more than $500 on their vehicles before adding safety gear.

So this is a race of junkers, and the one that lasts from Saturday to Sunday while turning the most laps is the winner, rewarded with a prize of $1,500 — all of it in nickels.

Eddie Alterman of The New York Times has the story: Link - via digg

In the State of Texas, homeowners have the right to use deadly force to protect their lives and property. But the case of Jose Luis Gonzalez sparked a controversy when the jury found him not guilty for shooting a teenage intruder over snacks and soda:

Gonzalez had endured several break-ins at his trailer when the four boys, ranging in age from 11 to 15, broke in. Gonzalez, who was in a nearby building at the time, went into the trailer and confronted the boys with a 16-gauge shotgun. Then he forced the boys, who were unarmed, to their knees, attorneys on both sides say.

The boys say they were begging for forgiveness when Gonzalez hit them with the barrel of the shotgun and kicked them repeatedly. Then, the medical examiner testified, Anguiano was shot in the back at close range. Two mashed Twinkies and some cookies were stuffed in the pockets of his shorts.

Another boy, Jesus Soto Jr., now 16, testified that Gonzalez ordered them at gunpoint to take Anguiano's body outside.

Gonzalez said he thought Anguiano was lunging at him when he fired the shotgun.

Many people in Laredo — a town just across the Rio Grande from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where drug violence runs rampant — defended Gonzalez's actions. In online responses to articles published by the Morning Times, comments included statements such as "The kid got what he deserved" and calls to "stop the unfair prosecution."

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gQaQF39EbtehzlGgDJF34yEYviEwD93F8OD00 | (Photo from this FOXNews article)

Previously on Neatorama: Was It Self Defense or Murder?

One minute you're eating fried fish in your favorite restaurant, and the next you're spitting out worms.

Now, is that a health code violation? If you say yes, you'd be wrong:

Kelly McCoy, a representative with the Sacramento County Health Department said as long as the worm was dead, there was no health code violation committed. McCoy said the discovery is more of a customer service issue.

On average, the Sacramento County Health Department receives about one complaint a month from restaurant patrons who find dead worms in fish, McCoy said.

Problems can arise if the fish is not properly cooked and the worms are still alive. If a person eats a live worm, he can become a host to the parasite. Finding a live worm in cooked fish would show that the fish was not properly cooked, and that would also be considered a violation, McCoy said.

Link

Psst, needlephobics! (You know who you are!) Are you afraid of shots? Investor Yoshio Oyama has invented something for you: a convenient needle-free syringe that use air pressure to deliver drugs.

Yoshio's system is called Mother's Kiss, and National Geographic News has the video clip: Link

light-Bot is an easy to learn and surprisingly fun Flash game by Coolio_Niato where you have to guide a little robot to light up a certain square.

It starts out easy, but it gets harder ...

Link

Congress is burning the midnight oil negotiating over the bailout package, and I bet you dollar to donuts it'll happen soon. But have you ever wonder how they arrived at the magic number of $700 billion figure for the bailout? The answer may surprise you:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Whaaaa? Not based on any particular data point? Then why not make it $888 billion - it's catchier and plus 8 is a lucky number.

Link

Belly dancer Amira Sa'id has both beauty and brains (her college degree is in physics). And now, she also has a following of geeks who are enthralled by her rendition of Princess Leia belly dancing!

When she returned to performing following college and discovered a new affinity for Middle Eastern dance, it soon occurred to her that her various interests met within the gilded beauty of Princess Leia's slave girl get-up.

"I danced in the outfit for the very first time at a Halloween show at the restaurant I perform at here in Orlando," Amira said. "I then wore the costume to dance at a 2006 sci-fi convention in Connecticut. It was hit."

As Amira continued performing for ever-growing crowds of Star Wars and Star Trek fans at her beloved cons, YouTube videos of her performances (like this one from Megacon 2007, embedded) began to circulate -- building a little nerd buzz for the scantily clad nouveau celebrity. She was in demand.

The Underwire blog has more: http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/09/amiri----leia-s.html (with video clips, of course!) - via The Official Star Wars Blog

UCLA mathematician Edson Smith and colleagues have found a really, really large prime number: it's 13 million digits long!

The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm. [...]

Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th-century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of "P" minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609.

Thousands of people around the world have been participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a cooperative system in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform the calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes.

Link - Thanks cjdavis!

To visualize how large the prime number 2^43,112,609 - 1 really is, if you print out the number at 75 digits per line and 50 lines per page, it would be almost 3,500 pages long!

Legendary actor Paul Newman has died at the age of 83 of cancer:

Paul Newman, the legendary actor whose steely blue eyes, good-humored charm and advocacy of worthy causes made him one of the most renowned figures in American arts, has died of cancer at his home in Westport, Connecticut. He was 83. [...]

In 1982, Newman and his friend A.E. Hotchner founded Newman's Own, a food company that produced food ranging from pasta sauces to salad dressing to chocolate chip cookies.

"The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is outgrossing my films," Newman once wryly noted.

To date, the company -- which donates all profits to charities such as Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang camps -- has given away more than $200 million. Newman established the camp to benefit gravely ill children.

Link

We covered the case of Henry Earl a while ago on Neatorama. Since then, he's been arrested for ... oh, a few hundred more times ...

For those of you who don't know, Henry has the dubious distinction of being the most arrested man on Earth: he's been arrested an astonishing 1,332 times!

YesButNoButYes has a really nice clip of Henry's mugshot montage from over the years. Ah, the memories! Link

IT consulting firm Robert Half Technology asked over 1,400 CIO weird questions people ask their company's tech support. Here are some of the oddball questions they got:

CIOs were asked, “What is the strangest or most unusual request you or a member of your help desk or technical support team has ever received?” Their responses included:

* “Why isn’t my wireless mouse connected to the computer?”
* “My laptop was run over by a truck. What should I do?”
* “Can you rearrange the keyboard alphabetically?”
* “How do I read my e-mail?”
* “My computer is telling me to press any key to continue. Where is the ‘any’ key?”
* “Can you reset the Internet for me?”
* “There are animal crackers in my CD-ROM drive.”
* “Can you build me a robot?”

Link

Photo: Proximacentauri [Flickr]

The Ariel Atom is one sweet car, but it costs a lot of money. So Flickr user Proximacentauri decided that he's going to build his own. Behold the z59, which was made out of ... junk!

This is the final result of 15 months and at least 800 hours of work in the garage. This is not counting time spent designing, ordering parts, negotiating prices, etc.

The car was built from scratch. The engine is an Acura k20a3 from an RSX. It sounds awesome.

Special thanks for the Make community for inspiring the maker spirit in me. Building stuff yourself is a much better way to be a citizen than senseless consumption.

The car has a good amount of junk (recycled stuff) in it. The stainless panels all came from old appliances. The black body panels came from an ancient kayak and an old doghouse. The throttle pedal was made entirely from salvaged parts from a dumpster at an engineering firm around town. Of course, the engine was also recycled from a crashed car.

It's a blast to drive.

0-60: 4.5 seconds
MPG: 35+ miles per gallon
The best part: the bizarre looks I get from random strangers.

Link (including the build gallery) - via MAKE