A pair of marauding pit bulls emerged from the edge of the bayou beyond New Orleans as the floods receded. Bred as fighting animals, their bloodlust had been sharpened by starvation. The dogs, which were wearing collars, had survived for more than two weeks but food was scarce.

They stalked towards their prey, a lone bull: a massive beast more than 10 times their combined weight. Like a wrestling tag team, the bitch and the dog attacked with awesome ferocity, leaping at the bull’s head and latching on to its muzzle.

The stricken bull repeatedly shook the dogs off, flinging them up to 15 feet in the air. But they took turns to keep up the attack, exhausting the bull which was by now smeared with blood. Even after the bull trampled the bitch, leaving it dazed, the dog stepped up its attack.

The terrifying assault highlighted the US military’s concern that pit bulls would form packs and could attack or even kill soldiers.

It was too dangerous for an unarmed witness to intervene but The Sunday Telegraph flagged down a National Guard truck. Seeing what was happening, a soldier shot the bitch in the head.

The dog paused before resuming the attack. It took two bullets to stop it dead.

Amongst the winners are:

ECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.

CHEMISTRY: Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water?

BIOLOGY: Benjamin Smith of the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Toronto, Canada and the Firmenich perfume company, Geneva, Switzerland, and ChemComm Enterprises, Archamps, France; Craig Williams of James Cook University and the University of South Australia; Michael Tyler of the University of Adelaide; Brian Williams of the University of Adelaide; and Yoji Hayasaka of the Australian Wine Research Institute; for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.

[Quote:]

Ancient Greek and Roman historians recorded that during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, Archimedes (a notably smart person) constructed a burning glass to set the Roman warships, anchored within bow and arrow range, afire. The story has been much debated and oft dismissed as myth.

TV’s MythBusters were not able to replicate the feat and “busted” the myth.

Intrigued by the idea and an intuitive belief that it could work, MIT’s 2.009ers decided to apply the early product development”sketch or soft modeling” process to the problem.

Our goal was not to make a decision on the myth – we just wanted to assess if it was at least possible, and have some fun in the process.

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In 2003, DVB stepped outside its usual domain of specifying modulation schemes for satellite, cable, and terrestrial broadcasts, and undertook a radically different work-item: specifying a far-reaching system of use-restrictions on digital television programming.

This specification is called Content Protection Copy Management (CPCM) and it represents a grave danger to national development priorities, social concepts of the family, competition, customary public rights in copyright, and innovation.

[..]

CPCM is often described as a system for protecting copyright, but CPCM has been designed to protect exclusive rights that are not in any copyright system. Structurally, it does not even attempt to coincide with the concepts of any nation’s copyright law. Instead, it aims to maximize the range and scope of copyright holders’ and broadcasters’ ability to impose restrictions unilaterally, and to allow these restrictions to be as fine-grained as possible. Broadly speaking, CPCM takes rights away from the public and then allows them to be sold back piecemeal.

For example, many national copyright laws contain exemptions for members of the public who make copies of works in order to add assistive information required by people with disabilities. In the audiovisual realm, fans and public-spirited individuals often add subtitles to films to help hearing-impaired people, or narrative audio to help blind people. But within CPCM, the ability to open recorded programmes in a tool used for this purpose is limited by flags (such as the USI “Export Beyond Trust” flag) which rightsholders can apply or withhold at their discretion.

Likewise, the private performance and use of copyrighted works (often including private copying) is generally allowed without special permission from rightsholders. Copyright has traditionally regulated only public uses of works. If you want to bring a recorded TV programme upstairs to watch in the bedroom, or to a friend’s house to watch there, or if you want to pause a movie before leaving for work and pick it up again when you get home, that is no one’s business but your own.

But CPCM is capable of restricting all of these uses. Though a member of the public may have, under the laws of her jurisdiction, every right to time-shift, or space-shift, or use a pause button, there is nothing in the CPCM specification that prevents a rightsholder from unilaterally imposing restrictions on one or more of these activities.

In essence, CPCM allows rightsholders to manufacture new copyrights for themselves and then impose them on the public without regard to national copyright law.

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Pastafarians, this is a hand-crafted Flying Spaghetti Monster brooch pin made from two pieces of interlocking solid sterling silver wire. The eyes are hollow sterling silver beads and the ‘meatballs’ are tiger’s eyes. It has a 3/4 inch (2 cm) bar pin across the back (Not visible in the photo). The overall dimensions are about 1 3/16 inch (3 cm) wide and 3/4 inch (2 cm) high, excluding His Noodly Appendage, which is 9/16 inch (1.5 cm) long. It is about 6/16 inch (1 cm) thick, so it can easily be worn on a shirt or jacket without being overly obtrusive.

The pin has been hand-polished and, in addition, His Noodly Appendage has been smoothed and rounded at the end so that He can Touch you with It without pricking you or having It pull at your clothing fibers.

RAmen.

or make your own

Play memory with pictures from Flikr.

[Quote:]

Yesterday, the same day New Yorkers were warned there was a “specific threat” of a bombing on their subways, President Bush delivered what the White House promoted as a major address on terrorism. It seemed, on the surface, like a perfect topic for the moment. But his talk was not about the nation’s current challenges. He delivered a reprise of his Sept. 11 rhetoric that suggested an avoidance of today’s reality that seemed downright frightening.

The period right after 9/11, for all its pain, was the high point of the Bush presidency. Four years ago, we hung on every word when Mr. Bush denounced Al Qaeda and made the emotional – but, as it turned out, empty – vow to track down Osama bin Laden. Yesterday, it seemed as if the president was still trying to live in 2001. It was eerie to hear him urge Americans to take terrorism seriously. There wasn’t any reason to worry about that even before subway riders were being told about the threat of a terrorist attack on their commute home.

[..]

The president’s inability to grow beyond his big moment in 2001 is unnerving. But the fact that his handlers continue to encourage him to milk 9/11 is infuriating. For most of us, the memories are fresh and painful. We mourn the people who died on Sept. 11, as we mourn Daniel Pearl and other Americans, not to mention innocents from other countries, who were murdered by terrorists. The administration’s penchant for using them as political cover is offensive. It threatens to turn our wounds, and our current fears, into cynical and desperate spin.

[Quote:]

onegoodmove reader Marcus found the cover of Newsweek unintentionally funny, and with a little cropping he reveals the amusing part. He writes, It appears that Frist has some unfinished business with the prez.

[Quote:]

President Bush’s pick for the second-ranking position at the Justice Department abruptly withdrew his nomination Friday after facing weeks of questions over his ties to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff as well as his role in formulating policies for the treatment of suspected terrorists.

[..]

“Rather than appointing professionals with relevant experience, the Bush administration has promoted a culture of cronyism by tapping political allies and close friends for key positions,” Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in a written statement issued after Mr. Flanigan announced his withdrawal.

“Like Mike Brown at FEMA, Timothy Flanigan has strong credentials as a faithful Republican Party stalwart,” he said. “But just as Mr. Brown did not have the qualifications to lead our nation’s primary disaster response agency, there were serious doubts about Mr. Flanigan’s qualifications to serve as the nation’s second-highest ranking law enforcement officer.”

[Quote:]

Right. Okay. Got one for ya. You’ll like this. Earlier today I wrote a post about my father, who I haven’t had any contact with for almost thirty years. It was a difficult post to write – it had taken me almost two weeks to build up the nerve to write it. After I got it out there, however, a number of people commented almost immediately – uniformly pleasant, supportive, decent posts. I’ll confess, it was nice. As usual some of them were a little more emotional about the whole thing than I felt comfortable with, but generally the whole thing was a positive experience. I felt positive that I’d got the message out, was hopeful that talking about the experience might make such a process easier for someone else to go through, and felt that I’d said enough for the moment. Everyone’s got something out of it. Everyone’s happy.

And then I got a comment from a man called Barry Scott. The comment read as follows:

“Hi Tom, Always remember one thing. Life is very, very short and nothing is worth limiting yourself from seeing the ones you love. I hadn’t seen my father in 15 years until 2 years ago. I was apprehensive but I kept telling myself that no matter how estranged we’d become there was no river to wide to cross. Drop me a line if I can be of any more help. Cheers, Barry”

Sounds fine, doesn’t it? Except that ‘Barry Scott’ isn’t a real person – he’s a marketing vehicle for a brand called Cillit Bang and his weblog is a barely disguised viral marketing platform for the product.

Now clearly, it was pretty difficult to believe that even a marketing / advertising organisation would be comfortable actively promoting their product in a space where someone was reporting their first contact with their father for nearly three decades. I mean, sure, there’s some limited mileage to be gained in getting a link on a number of weblogs – although with all the anti-spam tech in place now they can’t possibly have been hoping for Googlejuice. But still, that’s not an enormous benefit for such a grotesque act.

My view was that any right-thinking person would view trying to market your product on such a post as revolting, corrupt, cynical, disgusting, sick and dishonourable. And to do such thing in such an offhand, casual manner? I mean that’s got to be bordering on sociopathic. And for it to be a trick! It could only be viewed as an attempt by these people to exploit a community’s – and an individual’s – good faith to sell a few bottles of highly corrosive cleaning fluid. And it wasn’t even an automated message operating indiscriminately – this was a hand-written note posted by an individual human being.

Read on to see how Tom Coates nailed Barry Scott….