"BOSTON (AP) - Karl Schwaerzler wants you to take over Liechtenstein - for your next convention, wedding or bar mitzvah.

His big plans for renting out the tiny country earned him an Ig Nobel Prize on Thursday in an irreverent ceremony at Harvard University.

The annual awards, handed out by the Annals of Improbable Research, a science and humor magazine, are given to real academics and others whose work might tickle people's funny bones. "

'Ig Nobel' Prizes Awarded at Harvard

"A judge in Florida has barred a rock band from holding an onstage suicide during a performance to be broadcast over the internet.

St Petersburg city officials asked Circuit Court Judge John Lenderman for the injunction after the group Hell on Earth announced plans to have a terminally ill person commit suicide during a show on Saturday night."

Oh well...It's the thought that counts.

Judge bars rock group stage suicide stunt

inignoct wrote:
lots of neat stuff in this article, but this is especially cool :

] DuPont Textiles & Interiors and Outlast Technologies are
] rolling out Phase Change Materials (PCMs) that respond to
] your changing body temperature. The fabric coating
] consists of the materials encapsulated into microscopic
] spheres. As you body warms up, the PCM me

Odor free sox? Does that mean you only ever need one pair that never needs washing?

STAIN-RESISTANT PANTS ARE SO ‘LAST WEEK’; TRY THE ODOR-FREE SOCKS

This is a very interesting article on using editing techniques to speed up the WPM of audio recordings without loosing tonality. Its like speed reading a lecture. I wish NPR preprocessed all their audio programming this way.

If PVR's like MythTV had this capability, it could make channels like c-span a little less mind-numbing.

Now Hear This, Quickly

"Three things you can count on in life: death, taxes, and screwing up. Don't feel badly, though. Everyone does it, including your favorites from the worlds of business, television, music, and film. And most likely, no one is looking up your photograph on the web to see how badly you messed up this time! You won't believe whom you'll find with one of those attractive letter boards with the name of the local lockup underneath his or her illustrious chin. Updated daily with at least 10 new Mugshots!"

Mildly entertaining

Mugshots

Mike the usurper wrote::
Way to celebrate WWII guys. Let's wave the swastika on Rosh Hashana. Am I the only one not surprised that this is the state that elected the shrub as governor?"

" The band will still perform the musical composition but it will only have the United States flag on display, he said."-- Nazi flag... US flag... What's the difference these days?

Yahoo! News - School Apologizes for Nazi Display by Band

(U: BTW, the section of this article that deals with prisons is worth the price of admission, but I'll focus on something else...)

] 4. Incandescent Light Bulbs
]
] In reality, these sad devices are heat bulbs.
] Supposedly a lighting technology, they produce nine times
] more raw heat than they do illumination. The light they
] do give, admittedly, is still prettier than the eerie
] glow of compact fluorescents and light-emitting diodes.
] But it's still a far cry from the glories of natural
] daylight.
]
] Plus there's the cost of light bulbs, their
] fragility, the replacement overhead, the vast waste of
] energy, glass, and tungsten, the goofy hassle of running
] air conditioners to do battle with the blazing heat of
] all these round little glass stoves let's face
] it, these gizmos deserve to vanish.
]
] They will be replaced by a superior technology, something
] cheap, cool, and precisely engineered, that emits visible
] wavelengths genuinely suited to a consumer's human
] eyeball. Our descendants will stare at those
] vacuum-shrouded wires as if they were whale-oil lanterns.

So, they are slowly replacing traffic lights with LED lights in atlanta. If LEDs are bright enough for this purpose, one must imagine that you could create a suitable light bulb replacement that:

A. Screws into a socket.
B. Essentially consists of a stick covered in white leds.
C. Has a translucent plastic filter covering it which only emits "lightbulb" wavelengths.

Why is this hard?

(U: Maybe the power transformer you'll need to convert your whopping 120 volts of AC power into 5VDC will create just as much waste heat as your lights did. As almost every device in your house now has an AC to DC power converter, maybe it makes sense to start talking about putting a centralized AC to DC converter in your house and running two circuits, an AC cicuit for major appliances, and a DC circuit for basically everything else. It would reduce a lot of costs, and improve the safety of most home wiring. Of course, cutting over to something like this would be a huge effort that would require widespread coordination from several industries. (For those of you who aren't electronics savvy, basically what I'm saying is that your house ought to have the "power supply" rather then your computer.)

Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die

"Battlefield sites are considered noble places in the landscape of American history. Gettysburg, Bunker Hill, and Normandy stand as monuments honoring the people who fought and died there. Massacre sites, no less a part of our history, are often hidden. Vaguely worded road signs might give some indication of the tragedy, but visitors are not greeted by museums as they are at battlefield sites, and there are no official cemeteries in which the victims lie. Because they are shameful episodes in our past, massacres are not commemorated and the innocent dead are not honored. The Mountain Meadows Massacre, Sand Creek Massacre, and Tulsa Race Riot do not usually come up in history class, but over 500 people were brutally killed in these events. Although they took place long ago, they exemplify the impact--emotional, legal, and political--that the past can have on our own society today."

For better or worse, archaeology is opening the lid on American massacres

"WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union today joined with members of Congress and civil rights groups in welcoming bi-partisan legislation aimed to correct some of the most contentious provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act and other controversial measures adopted post 9/11. At a news conference today, Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Ron Paul (R-TX) unveiled their “Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act.” "

ACLU Welcomes Bi-partisan “True PATRIOT Act,” Measure Seeks to Restore Freedoms Lost Post 9/11

" Riddle me this: What would you get if you crossed a BlackBerry with an iPod? The answer: The future of the music business. Let me explain. Imagine, if you will, an iPod as a wireless digital ladle. It would dip into a nearly bottomless stream of continual music, scooping up any song you wanted, when you wanted, where you wanted. There would be no need for CDs, hard drives, or any other storage device. And trying to capture such music would be about as easy as trapping mist in a jar. Every song would contain a digital expiration date, so, over time, they would evaporate."

A Wireless iPod Can Torpedo the Pirates