The Mosquito: A Yob Repeller

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Shami Chakrabarti, of the human rights group Liberty, called for the Government to ban the technology, saying: “These untested, unregulated devices are at best a dog whistle and at worst a sonic weapon directed against young people.”But Tory MP Philip Davies said: “The good professor needs to come down from his ivory tower and see what it’s like living in the real world.”My constituents are sick to the back teeth of unruly yobs and the Mosquito device, deployed properly, is hugely successful and a brilliant piece of technology that should be more widely implemented.

“In my village we had an Indian restaurant owner who was plagued by a gang of yobs outside his restaurant intimidating his customers and yelling racist abuse.

“The police installed one of the devices and it solved the problem instantly.”

David Davies, Tory MP for Monmouth, said: “Maybe Professor Aynsley-Green would like to have a group of 50 youths swearing and drinking outside his front door, and see how he likes it.

“In my work as a special constable in Abergavenny I see these louts terrorising law-abiding people and it’s disgraceful. I once confiscated some alcohol from some boys and poured it in the gutter when to my astonishment the lad got down on his hands and knees to lap it up.

“The Mosquito device is an excellent deterrent for gangs congregating and hanging around and should definitely not be banned.”

Source: ThisIsLondon

Click image to enlarge. Louts? Yobs? Gutter lapping? I saw no such things when I visited London a few years ago.

Shock Horror for Would-Be Power Cable Thief

February 13th, 2008

Police in central England are hunting for a badly scorched would-be copper power cable thief after finding a hacksaw embedded in an 11,000 volt power cable on Saturday night.The thief, who also left a lit blow torch at the scene, is expected to be badly charred, spiky haired and not exactly the brightest bulb in the socket.

“The sheer stupidity of cutting through power cables should be glaringly obvious to everyone,” said Phil Wilson, customer operations manager with local power company Central Networks.

“At the very least putting the hacksaw through the cable would have created an almighty bang and the line would have burned for quite a few seconds, showering them with molten copper… We can only assume they left in a great hurry or they were injured and were dragged away by an accomplice.”

But searches of local hospitals have so far not found the culprit, a spokeswoman for Derbyshire Police said on Tuesday.

Source: Stuff

No, wait, look a little closer. See that little globule right below the hack saw? That’s all that is left of him.

Amazing moment the world’s biggest Christ was struck by lightning

This was the dramatic scene as the world’s largest statue of Jesus was hit by lightning.

The bolt parted the thunderclouds over Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to strike Christ the Redeemer.

The statue is 130ft tall, is made of 700 tons of reinforced concrete and stands atop the 2,296ft Corcovado mountain overlooking the city.

Source: DailyMail

…

One commenter on that site writes:

It means Jesus has come back! He was obviously born at the exact moment the lightning hit the statue. He was born in the slum of Rio. Brazil is the world’s largest Catholic country. Finally, he’s back! Out of the slums he will rise to perform miracles among the poor and hopeless. Amen!

OR, maybe it’s just because lightning tends to strike the tallest object in a given area. Either way, my rosaries are on overdrive

Man arrested at gunpoint after police mistake his MP3 player for a gun

Armed police held an innocent mechanic at gunpoint when they mistook his MP3 player for a pistol. Darren Nixon, 28, was arrested and put in police cell for simply listening to music on his way home from work. The shocked garage worker was then swabbed for a DNA sample, had his mugshot taken and was fingerprinted.The armed officers swooped on Mr Nixon when a woman thought she saw him carrying a handgun and called the police.Mr Nixon, from Stoke-on-Trent, has now received an apology from Staffordshire Police but said the mistake was still a “stain on his character”.

He had finished work at midday on Saturday (Jan 26), turned on his black 4GB Phillips MP3 player and started walking to get the bus home.

Mr Nixon, a mechanic for Olympus Engineering, who has no previous convictions, said: “I walked to the bus station.

“Obviously I didn’t know this at the time but someone saw my MP3 player in my pocket and mistook it for a gun.

“The police found me on CCTV and followed me. I got on the bus and the police followed. I was listening to my music so I didn’t really notice all the cars behind the bus.

Police Quiz Child over Baguette Attack

February 13th, 2008

A pupil has been arrested for attacking a classmate with a baguette. The 15-year-old attacker was questioned by police after arming himself with the French [bread] stick at a secondary school. The unusual weapon was one of 80 seized by cops from schools in Sussex over the last two years.A 13-year-old was warned by police officers after an assault with a pillow, a 14-year-old attacked another with an egg and a tomato and a 15-year-old was cautioned for common assault using a baguette. One incident involved a 13-year-old armed with a piano stool and a xylophone. Sussex Police, which released the figures following a freedom of information act request, said despite the numbers there was not an issue around weapons in the county’s schools.

Source: The Argus

We must DO something! Ban all objects in schools!

Sound Shield: Technology for Totally Silent Vehicles?

February 13th, 2008

Scientists have figured out a way to bend sound waves around an object and, can even prevent the escape of all sounds created inside a given area…. Recently, Steve Cummer, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University announced that it is theoretically possible to create … a sound shield. Building on research demonstrating how light waves can be bent around an object to make it appear invisible, Cummer and his collaborators used mathematical analysis to show how to do the same thing with sound. They established that it is possible to create a material that bends sound waves around walls, pillars, or any enclosed area, where the sound waves emerge as if nothing had been in their way. It would be like someone in the bedroom being able to hear what someone in the living room said, but as if there were no wall between them. A side effect of this discovery is that sound waves generated inside the enclosed area would never escape.Source: LiveScience

This was sort of hidden in the article about Fairy Tales, but I thought this was the most interesting part. Large silent maneuverable craft have been seen in the skies for many years. Perhaps those alien ships do make a lot of noise, but they stop all the sound with a sound shield! I hope we have that same technology some day for our cars, jets, etc. Where does all the sound energy trapped in a sound shield go? Does it just bounce around in there until it runs out of steam? Perhaps it could be recaptured to increase the energy of the system.

World’s Most Romantic Restaurants

February 13th, 2008

Our 12 restaurant picks from around the world have all the right elements—a seductive view, an unhurried atmosphere, terrific food…

Source: Concierge

Mach 50 is 38,060 mph. Could anything move that fast?

February 13th, 2008The idea of modifying the front end of a hypersonic vehicle is not new and dates at least to the late 1950s but at that time proposed methods included forward-facing rocket exhaust and water. Revived in the 1980s from physics brought to wider attention through the SDI programme, tests conducted at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, demonstrate enormous benefits t rout such a system. Tests confirm that a plasma torch could provide in oblique shock that would give an air vehicle traveling at Mach 25 an aerothermal environment equivalent to the conditions a conventional aircraft would experience at Mach 3. However, an aero-lens vehicle, or flying saucer, has even more potent capability. The saucer-shape aero-lens can control the precise angle of deflection of the oblique paraboloid to adjust it so that the shock wall passes over the rim of the saucer at 1/20th of its diameter. By doing this, the air between the shock wall and the rim of the vehicle is compressed, increasing the density on the forward-facing surface of the rim and accelerating it significantly as it flows across the edge to the rear face of the rim. This energy can be used to propel the vehicle at enormous rates of acceleration, supplementing onboard propulsion.

In a novel way, the plasma spike and aero-lens vehicle combine to optimize the shape and the flow pattern for magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) propulsion, a true hyper-velocity airrider capable of speeds in excess of Mach 50. If fitted with a rectenna on its inner surface, protected by a shell transparent to microwaves, the aero-lens craft could pulse electric power through ionized air and propel itself via superconducting magnets placed around the circumference of the ring to accelerate air rapidly over the lip of the edge. Silent, the vehicle would emit a bright, incandescent plasma glow as it accelerated, dodged and weaved at anything up to Mach 50+ in the dense air of low altitude or the rarefied atmosphere at the edge of space. As yet little has been done to determine the effects of superheated air itself becoming a plasma ball within the expanding electric sheath - and serious effects may be experienced which would modify the aerothermal environment in which the craft is operating. Rensselaer’s Leik Myrabo has worked intensively on the plasma spike with Moscow’s crack mathematician Yuri Raizer from the Russian Academy of Sciences and believes pulse detonation wave engines (PDWEs), researched heavily and tested by the SDI Office during the 1980s, would find application here. PDWEs could be employed to accelerate the aero-lens vehicle to supersonic speed at which point the MHD fan engine would cut in to raise rim pressure by at least 35 atmospheres and literally explode the air at the rim of the craft and kick it to super-drive with a potential velocity of Mach 50. …

Source: Aeronautics

Perhaps there is a good reason for saucer shaped craft. We can now go faster than Mach 3.3, but our technology may imitate the aliens in 50 to 100 years. Even the mysterious Aurora spy plane, if it exists, is believed to cruise at speeds ranging from “only” Mach 5 to Mach 8 at 100,000 ft (30,510 m) -Aerospaceweb. At Mach 50, however, you could fly around the world (24,901) in under an hour, or from LA to London in 8.6 minutes.

Primitive Bats Took to the Wing, but They Didn’t Have That Ping

February 13th, 2008With more than 1,100 species living across the world, bats are the second most numerous type of mammal, after rodents.

Their success comes in large part from two evolutionary jumps more than 50 million years ago. They can fly ” the only mammals that can ” and most also possess the sonarlike ability to locate objects, like the insects they want to eat, by emitting high-pitched sonic pulses and then triangulating the echoes bouncing back to their oversize ears.

The lack of fossils of the earliest bats have left scientists pondering the question of which evolved first: flight or sonar?

Or might the two abilities have evolved in tandem?

Writing in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, scientists led by Nancy B. Simmons of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City describe a bat that lived 52.5 million years ago that strongly suggests flight came first.

Two fossils of the species, named Onychonycteridae finneyi, have been found in the rocks of Wyoming. The fossils date from the same time as the previously oldest-known species, which was discovered in the same area four decades ago.

But the new species clearly is more primitive, the researchers said.

For one, it has claws at the end of every finger. All bats, present and extinct, have a claw at their first finger, the thumb. Some also have a claw on the index finger.

But until now, scientists had not seen claws on the other three fingers of any bat. (The name Onychonycteridae means “clawed bat”; finneyi is a tribute to a fossil collector, Bonnie Finney, who found it in 2003.)

This bat also appears to lack the adaptions that are believed necessary for the sonar ability, also known as echolocation, like an enlarged cochlea, the part of the inner ear that converts sound vibrations into nerve signals.

Instead, its skeleton more closely resembles those of a still-living lineage known as old world fruit bats, which do not echolocate. (Those bats eat fruit or flower nectar, not insects, and thus perhaps have less need for tracking fast-moving objects.)

The primitive features of Onychonycteridae place it close to the base of the bat family tree.

�This discovery basically supports the flight-first hypothesis,� Dr. Simmons said.

The eye sockets of both fossils were crushed, so the scientists could not tell whether the bat had the large eyes of many nocturnal animals. (It very likely was not blind as a bat, however. That idiom is not true; most bats can see quite well.)

Source: NYT

Study: 1 Million Indians Expected to Die from Smoking Annually

One million people in India will die from tobacco-related illnesses every year in the next decade, a new study revealed Thursday. According to the research conducted by a team of doctors and scientists from India, Canada and Britain, one in five of male deaths and one in 20 of all female deaths between the ages of 30 and 69 will be caused by smoking.�The results we found surprised us, because smokers in India start later in life and smoke fewer cigarettes or �bidis� than those in Europe or America, but the risks are as extreme as in the West,� Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto, lead author of the study said quoted by the Associated Press.Bidi is a locally made product comprising tobacco rolled in the leaf of another plant. The study found that regular smoking of cigarettes was more harmful than regular smoking of bidis. The researchers have calculated that on average, men who smoke bidi lose about six years of life. Source: Eflux

Tobacco is millions of times more deadly than terrorism? Yet we have no Department of Lung Security! Sure, we have the American Lung Association, but how many drones with Hellfire missiles do they have? Not one.

Okay, on the other side I see that if Bush doesn’t get Iraq’s oil tens of millions of Americans may be at risk from starvation or that we may be invaded by another country if we don’t have the resources to protect ourselves.