 retrofitted a common housecat to be a mobile bug in the KGB headquarters. They put in advanced listening equipment, replaced its tail with an antenna, and subverted its hunger impulse. After an estimated $20 million invested in the project, dubbed Acoustic Kitty, and extensive tests they went to release the cat on the streets of Moscow near the KGB headquarters only to see it run over by a taxi.
)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/11/04/wcia04.xml in The Telegraph reminded me of the story, although I'd always heard that the cat was run over by a bus. A bus would've been funnier.
Category Archives: Original Duenos
Permafrost no longer
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/us/27newtok.html?ex=1337918400&en=7e93b110d8fc61d0&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss from today's New York Times highlights one of those towns on the edge, Newtok Alaska. Newtok used to be just another small Arctic outpost but now it's an island, cut off from the mainland by erosion. The residents of Newtok have an important story to tell about what it's like to live on the edge. It's a story we should hear.
Photo courtesy of "Greenpeace":http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/climate-change.
Open-source travelling
http://globalfreeloaders.com/ and "Couchsurfing.com":http://www.couchsurfing.com/home.html.
Now I haven't had much experience with either site yet, but I'm going to be doing a bit of traveling over the next couple of weeks and plan on using the services extensively. I'll keep you posted. This could be the greatest revelation since the "homemade Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang":http://duenos.net/article/121/homemade-chitty-chitty-bang-bang.
A long bike journey
One of the biggest things that gets me going is the idea of an epic quest. Ewan McGregor’s “The Long Way Round”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Way_Round, “1,000 Days at Sea”:http://1000daysatsea.blogspot.com/, and Noel Hidalgo’s “Luck of 7 trip”:http://duenos.net/article/229/Anepicopensourcejourney are all very exciting journeys. As epic as their scales are though, “this trip”:http://imagineonbike.com/ might take the lot. Barcelona native Patrick Gaño is on a bicycle trip (no motor!) that he has scheduled over the course of two years, all the way to Alaska. He’s planning on passing through France, Italy Spain, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Greece, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Nepal, China and Japan. According to the “website”:http://imagineonbike.com/ which is unfortunately really bad, he’s already made it through to Turkey and is almost into Iran. Talk about inspiring! The picture was taken on the coast of Croatia.
The great bee caper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_bees and it could be devastating. The biggest problem is that we can't even reach a conclusion as to why so many bees are deserting their hives, but since 1971 half the bees have disappeared in North America alone. A simple "Google search":http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bee+disappearance yields 100's of causes and solutions. Some of the leading causes could be pesticides, genetically modified crops, or even "cell phone radiation":http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/05/03/healthscience/NA-SCI-US-Honeybees-Weird.php.
The solutions being offered are not very impressive in that their scope is wide and various, but "this article":http://environment.guardian.co.uk/conservation/story/0,,2084842,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=29 in The Guardian is the most recent. It suggests that bees should be kept by city dwellers to foster a greater "bee friendly" landscape. Of course at this rate we may have to find a whole new solution. Nanobots?
"Image":http://flickr.com/photos/encinoman/515498886/ from EncinoMan's "Flickr! stream":http://flickr.com/photos/encinoman/.
Ooh, shiny AND toxic
I’ve been busy lately planning for a trip next week but I came across these and thought I’d share. Conspicuous consumption meets garishly bad taste in chrome and sterling silver, respectively:
Of course, if what really revs your engine in auto luxury is that nauseous “new car” smell you might be interested to hear that it’s really just glue mixed with formaldehyde. It kills brain cells, something that may be lots of fun on a Friday night but is really bad behind the wheel. Plus it gives me a monster headache. For more about the “new car” smell and its alleged links to cancer, read this “article”:http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/09/beware_that_new.php from TreeHugger.
(Thanks to “Motor Authority”:http://www.motorauthority.com/cars/bmw/canadas-own-chrome-m3/ and “this strange site”:http://mcfilmfest.com/051117gay-tampa-gossip.html for the pictures)
X-Rated Kentucky Towns
Because deep down we’re all snickering little sixth graders, I figured we could all laugh at the privacy of our computers about cities, towns, and localities in Kentucky that are innuendos. I first heard about Sugartit, KY and thought there might be a story there, but without an official website for the government, newspaper, or really anything on-line, there wasn’t much I could do. I decided to use “Piddleport.com”:http://piddleport.com/index.php to find out places in Kentucky with dirty/laughable names. I’m sure I could’ve made this a bit more extensive had I had the consultation of an 11-year old boy, but we don’t have one on staff here at duenos. Nevertheless, in addition to Sugartit, there’s Beaverlick, two towns called Climax, Dingus, Gays Creek, Goochland & Goochtown (Don’t get those two? Check “here”:http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gooch), Greasy Creek (I just thought that was funny), Hicksville, Hooker, Hot Spot, Knob Lick, Limp, Mackville, Pleasureville, and Poindexter. There are 49 other states to make us feel like kids again, so sit tight.
Gay flamingos raise chick of their own
After years of stealing eggs from the neighbors Carlos and Fernando, the only gay flamingo couple at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Gloucestershire, England, have a chick of the their own. The newly-hatched flamingling was abandoned by its biological parents and so was a logical choice for the gay flamingo couple who have been together for 6 years. I know this sounds like anthropomorphizing, but homosexuality has been observed in a number of species, including penguins, humans, sheep, dolphins, orangutans, beetles, bats and humans. Here’s a picture of the new family, for a larger version and the full story you can read “The Daily Mail”:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=456716&in_page_id=1770.
Apple starts recycling program
We previously covered “Apple’s last place”:http://duenos.net/article/120/greenpeace-releases-latest-green-electronics-rankings environmental record, and then the subsequent “green statement”:http://duenos.net/article/266/AGreenerApple from Steve Jobs, but it seems there is more. Apple announced last week that they were to start a school computer recycling program. Any school (k-12, University, College, etc…) with more than 25 computers to recycle, Macs or PCs, could sign up. After scheduling a pick-up, the rest of the work would be done by Apple who are, it seems, asking for nothing in return. There’s more about this story at “The Apple Insider”:http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/05/18/apple_offers_green_take_backs_for_old_school_computers.html.
Via “The Inquirer”:http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39749
Dissolvable Plastic
One of my favorite “podcasts”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasts, “60-Second Science”:http://sciam.com/podcast/ (available at “Scientific American”:http://sciam.com/ and “iTunes”:http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/), spoke about research being conducted by the “University of Southern Mississippi”:http://www.usm.edu/index.php to make stretch wrap plastic that is dissolvable in saltwater. In a nutshell, by incorporating “hydrophilic molecules”:http://www.wordconstructions.com/articles/technical/hydrophilic.html like “carboxylic acid”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboxylic_acid into the plastic, the saltwater can break it down within 5 months to CO2 and water. The US military is funding the project so that on-board storage of plastic waste can be reduced by safely dumping it overboard after some minor preparations. For a more complete run-through of the application and hurdles of this research, please check out “this article”:http://www.sciencefriday.com/news/040307/news0403071.html from “sciencefriday.com”:http://www.sciencefriday.com/.