Welcome to ...

The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Saturday, January 3, 2009

I Drove All Night


Cyndi Lauper

Question and Answer

Question: What is the difference between Elvis and a smart Blond?

Answer: Elvis has been sighted.

We're An American Band


Grand Funk Railroad

Elephant and Dog


This is cute.

Did you know ...

You can make a mountain out of a molehill - literally!

In fact, in the state of Virginia in 1949 the town of Molehill changed to the town of Mountain.

Sports News

For all you Golf addicts out there ...

Are you aware that the earliest known game of Golf (for which records exist) was played on Bruntsfield Links in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1456.

Players hit balls made of wood around the course.

Holy Smoke

He Tieheng is a Chinese mystic who appears to be able to cook food simply by imagining it.

He recently appeared before about 7000 people in a theater in Guangzhou, China, and proceeded to concentrate mightily on the fish he was holding.
Soon, the fish was smoking and then charred.
"His hand has black soot on it," said witness Met Lee.

Tieheng calls himself the Fire God and says the power of the mind is able to conquer natural forces. He says he can cook things by envisioning a gas range that reaches temperatures of 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

Our newest readers

Carolina Naturally
proudly welcomes readers from our 159th country:
Lichtenstein.

Village Idiots


Monty Python

Ethanol you can brew at home

Man fuels car with EFuel100 MicroFueler

If you're done drinking for a while, why not turn your extra libations into fuel? Rachel Dornhelm explores a machine that turns alcohol and sugar waste into food for your car, and whether it can save you money over the long haul.

See and hear more of this story here.

Utter Failure

Another voice stating the obvious ...

From Reuters:

Former U.S.-installed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has denounced the policies of president George W. Bush as an "utter failure" that gave rise to the sectarian venom that ravaged his country.

..."Yes, Bush's policies failed utterly," said Allawi, describing the U.S. administration that once backed him. "Utter failure. failure of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, including fighting terrorism and economic policy."

Full story at Reuters

Deciphering Dolphin Language With Picture Words

Songs From the Sea

“In an important breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language, researchers in Great Britain and the United States have imaged the first high definition imprints that dolphin sounds make in water. The key to this technique is the CymaScope, a new instrument that reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially. Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer, John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to image, for the first time, the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water. The resulting “CymaGlyphs,” as they have been named, are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin ‘picture word.’

Certain sounds made by dolphins have long been suspected to represent language but the complexity of the sounds has made their analysis difficult. Previous techniques, using the spectrograph, display cetacean (dolphins, whales and porpoises) sounds only as graphs of frequency and amplitude. The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin’s natural environment-water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time.

Within the field of cetacean research, theory states that dolphins have evolved the ability to translate dimensional information from their echolocation sonic beam. The CymaScope has the ability to visualize dimensional structure within sound. CymaGlyph patterns may resemble what the creatures perceive from their own returning sound beams and from the sound beams of other dolphins. Reid said that the technique has similarities to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. “Jean-Francois Champollion and Thomas Young used the Rosetta Stone to discover key elements of the primer that allowed the Egyptian language to be deciphered. The CymaGlyphs produced on the CymaScope can be likened to the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone. Now that dolphin chirps, click-trains and whistles can be converted into CymaGlyphs, we have an important tool for deciphering their meaning.”

From Red Orbit

CymaScope’s Website

The Legend of Rockabye Point


Chilly Willy