A fantastic resource for those who are looking to (or are forced to) use the power of the sun to cook their food. From the website:
Where are solar ovens being used the most?
There are reliable reports that there are over 100,000 cookers in use in both India and China. We are aware of solar cooking projects in most of the countries of the world. Solar Cookers International has recently had a breakthrough in Kenya using the CooKit panel cooker. More than 5000 families are now solar cooking there.
Molly, the cat who was trapped for 2 weeks inside a 19th century building in New York, was finally found and freed!
Rescuers finally drilled a hole in the wall of the 157-year-old landmarked building on Hudson Street where the elusive feline was trapped. Earlier Friday, the Landmarks Preservation Commission gave rescuers permission to do whatever necessary to free the cat, despite the building's 157-year-old history.
More than 40 Animal Care and Control workers spent days trying to lure the little black kitten out of her hiding spot using everything from fresh fish to new age music, while dozens of camera crews from all over the country looked on. Molly had sought refuge from a dog in the wall 14 days before.
Why be buried in a boring coffin, when you can get handmade coffins that look like a Mercedes Benz, lobster, onion, shoe, beer bottle, even a cigarette?
From the website:
For the Ga tribe in coastal Ghana, funerals are a time of mourning, but also of celebration. The Ga people believe that when their loved ones die, they move on into another life -- and the Ga make sure they do so in style. They honor their dead with brightly colored coffins that celebrate the way they lived.
The coffins are designed to represent an aspect of the dead person's life -- such as a car if they were a driver, a fish if their livelihood was the sea -- or a sewing machine for a seamstress. They might also symbolize a vice -- such as a bottle of beer or a cigarette.
There’s little doubt that this car is one of a kind. Nickel got the idea to build a wooden car from an article in a 1955 issue of Hot Rod magazine. Once Nickel retired from the waste collection business, he began making his dream come true. He decided to use two 500-cubic-inch Cadillac V-8 engines because someone told him it wouldn’t work. One engine and transaxle, from an Eldorado, drives the front wheels. The other engine, from a Deville, drives the rear wheels. Although the engines aren’t synchronized, Nickel said they work fine together.
It took Nickel more than four years to form the body by laminating 1-inch strips of mahogany. He used 1,000 board-feet feet of wood cut into 4,183 individual pieces, five gallons of glue, 60 pounds of drywall screws and four gallons of varnish.
Les Stewart from Mudjimba, Australia, holds the world's record of typing all numbers from one to one million in words (not numbers). He began in 1982 and finished with the entry "one million" on November 25, 1998.
Seven manual typewriters, 1000 ink ribbons, 19,890 pages, 16 years and seven months later, he finished with the lines
nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine. one million.
When asked why he has undertaken this time consuming and repetitious task, Les says that he has little else to do now that he has been classed as an invalid, and can no longer work. Besides that, Les enjoys typing and used to be a police typing instructor before his sickness which meant his withdrawal from the force. Typing an average three pages a day with one finger since April 1982, Les said his secret was to type for 20 minutes on the hour, every hour
Link (via the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society)
Kevin "Cannonball" Alderton, 34, a former soldier who lost his sight when he was attacked in the street, has set a new world record for downhill speed skiing: 100.94 mph!
He was guided on the slope via radio speakers in his helmet.
Afterwards he said: "I feel absolutely amazing. It shows disability is no barrier to achievement."
Mr Alderton had his eyes gouged when he tried to stop a gang attacking a woman.
Not to be outdone by the World's Most Expensive Sandwich, Chef Tom Bridge is making the World's Most Expensive Cheese Toast (£345 or $604 a slice!):
He will use L’Aquila White Umbrian truffles at £1,400 per kilo, and Matsutake Chinese mushrooms, which are £250 a pound and are harvested under armed guard.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006170320,00.html (via A Welsh View)
This is what a wall of 12 30-inch flatscreen monitors looks like. From the website:
When friend of QJ.NET "Crazy Jon" called us up and told us about a project he was working on, we didn't believe it at first. But when we got to his house, sure enough -- twelve 30-inch Dell flatscreen monitors are sitting in his office, and he's grinning from ear to ear. Also among the pile of goodies are six NVidia GeForce 7900 GTX 512mb video cards, and three Turbo-Cool 1KW 1000-watt power supplies. Soon the QJ.NET crew was busy unboxing and tackling the project of mounting these bad boys.
Traditional Easter eggs, depicting Jesus Christ and other religious themes, lie in a basket at an Easter traditions fair in Bucharest, Romania, Sunday April 4, 2004. Romanians, the majority sharing the Orthodox religion, will celebrate Easter on April 11.
