net127

http://participatoryculture.org/contest/

“A challenge for socially-minded graphic designers: design the interface for new, open-source internet TV software. We are a non-profit organization building a software platform that will allow anyone to broadcast and watch channels of high-resolution internet video (learn more). We want to create a serious, independent alternative to commercial television that gives everyone access. If you believe that our technology and approach have a real chance to democratize mass media, then we need you to help us design our software at a level that rivals any proprietary, corporate media platform.”

Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent, Telegraph (UK) via BoingBoing, reports:

Soldiers are facing the undignified prospect of being forced to shout “bang, bang” on military training exercises after an admission by the Army that it is running out of blank ammunition.
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Robert Anglen, The Arizona Republic, reports:

A man who Phoenix police say exhibited bizarre behavior and “incredible strength” died Friday morning after he broke into a Church’s Chicken restaurant, chased out the employees and fought with officers, who shocked him three times with a Taser.

His death marks the second time in a week that someone died after a Taser shock and comes only two days after the mayor of Birmingham, Ala., ordered police there to stop using Tasers because of concerns over the stun gun’s safety.

More than 130 people, including four men in the Valley, have died after police Taser shocks since 1999. Earlier this week, a 17-year-old boy in Texas died after being shocked three times by police responding to a call that the youth was high on drugs.
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From Patricia Doyle, PhD, via Rense, reports:

A US-based Chinese-language news website known as Boxun, or “Abundant News”, has riveted the online medical community over the past month with a series of reports from China’s Qinghai province about an alleged bird flu cover-up. One report - said to be leaked by a Chinese official - claimed that 121 people were dead from avian influenza, or H5N1.
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DHS Truck, via Cryptome.

The Associated Press reports:

Euless — A 17-year-old North Texas boy has died two days after police used a Taser gun three times to stun and subdue him.

Euless police say Kevin Omas of Grapevine had taken two hits of Ecstasy and four of LSD at a party before they were called to a reported disturbance early Sunday.

Police officials say Omas was unruly and charged at officers repeatedly. Police say a supervisor fired all three Taser darts at Omas, zapping him with 50,000 volts of electricity each time, before he was subdued.

Omas was taken to John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, where he went into a coma. He died Tuesday. An autopsy has been ordered, and Euless police are conducting their own investigation.

Three people have died in nearby Fort Worth after they were Tasered by police. The Tarrant County medical examiner ruled cocaine intoxication as the cause of two of those deaths. A ruling is still pending in the other death.
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via BoingBoing:

The Playpump is an ingenious made-in-Africa water pump driven by a childrens’ roundabout. The kids spin, water is pumped.

The Playpumps are specifically designed and patented roundabouts (1) that drive conventional borehole pumps (2), while entertaining children. The revolutionary pump design converts rotational movement to reciprocating linear movement by a driving mechanism consisting of only two working parts.

This makes the pump highly effective, easy to operate and very economical by keeping costs and maintenance to an absolute minimum. The pump is capable of producing 1400 litres per hour at 16 rpm from a depth of 40 metres and is effective up to a depth of 100 metres. A typical hand pump installation cannot compete with this delivery rate, even with substantial effort.

Playing on a roundabout or merry-go-round has always been fun for children, so there is never a shortage of ‘volunteers’. As the children spin, water is pumped from underground (3) into a 2500 litre tank (4), standing seven metres above the ground. A simple tap provides easy access for the mothers and children drawing water (5).

AP in Istanbul, via The Guardian, reports:

First one sheep jumped to its death. Then stunned Turkish shepherds, who had left the herd to graze while they had breakfast, watched as nearly 1,500 others followed, each leaping off the same cliff, Turkish media reported yesterday.
In the end, 450 animals died, the daily newspaper Aksam said.

Those which jumped later were saved as the pile got higher, cushioning the fall.

“There’s nothing we can do. They’re all wasted,” Nevzat Bayhan, a member of one of 26 families whose sheep were grazing together in the herd, told Aksam. The estimated loss to families in the town of Gevas, located in Van province in eastern Turkey, is about 100bn Turkish lira (£43,000), a significant amount in a country where average GDP per person is around £1,550.

The Nightmare, 1781, Henry Fuseli. Founders Society purchase, with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokler and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleischman. Photograph © 1997 The Detroit Institute of Arts

Bruce Bower, Science News Online, reports:

As a college student in 1964, David J. Hufford met the dreaded Night Crusher. Exhausted from a bout of mononucleosis and studying for finals, Hufford retreated one December day to his rented, off-campus room and fell into a deep sleep. An hour later, he awoke with a start to the sound of the bedroom door creaking open—the same door he had locked and bolted before going to bed. Hufford then heard footsteps moving toward his bed and felt an evil presence. Terror gripped the young man, who couldn’t move a muscle, his eyes plastered open in fright.

Without warning, the malevolent entity, whatever it was, jumped onto Hufford’s chest. An oppressive weight compressed his rib cage. Breathing became difficult, and Hufford felt a pair of hands encircle his neck and start to squeeze. “I thought I was going to die,” he says.

At that point, the lock on Hufford’s muscles gave way. He bolted up and sprinted several blocks to take shelter in the student union. “It was very puzzling,” he recalls with a strained chuckle, “but I told nobody about what happened.”

Hufford’s perspective on his strange encounter was transformed in 1971. He was at that time a young anthropologist studying folklore in Newfoundland, and he heard from some of the region’s inhabitants about their eerily similar nighttime encounters. Locals called the threatening entity the “old hag.” Most cases unfold as follows: A person wakes up paralyzed and perceives an evil presence. A hag or witch then climbs on top of the petrified victim, creating a crushing sensation on his or her chest.

It took Hufford another year to establish that what he and these people of Newfoundland had experienced corresponds to the event, lasting seconds or minutes, that sleep researchers call sleep paralysis. Although widely acknowledged among traditional cultures, sleep paralysis is one of the most prevalent yet least recognized mental phenomena for people in industrialized societies, Hufford says.
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Sabin Russell, (SF) Chronicle Medical Writer, reports:

An outbreak of deadly bird flu among wild geese at a remote mountain lake in China is adding to the international concern about a rogue strain of influenza that could evolve into one capable of killing millions of humans.

Teams of American and Chinese researchers published two separate reports Wednesday on the incident at Qinghai Lake, in central China, where 1,500 birds perished in May from a strain the so-called H5N1 flu that has killed millions of domestic ducks and chickens in Vietnam and Thailand, a thousand miles to the south.

Although H5N1 is a bird disease, it has stricken 108 people in Southeast Asia since December 2003, killing half of them. There is no evidence to date that the bird flu virus can be transmitted readily among humans, but epidemiologists fear that it could easily mutate into one that does.
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BBC News reports:

Methamphetamine has overtaken cocaine as the biggest drug problem in rural and small towns in the US, according to a crime survey of 45 states.

A survey of 500 county law enforcement agencies found meth-related arrests had gone up over the past three years.

More than half of the police, sheriff departments and other agencies polled said the highly addictive substance was their biggest drug problem.

Less than 20% singled out cocaine and fewer still pointed to marijuana.
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Japan Coast Guard/Reuters

The Associated Press reports:

TOKYO (July 3) - Japanese coast guard officials said Sunday they believe an underwater volcanic eruption has caused a 3,300-foot high column of steam to rise from the Pacific Ocean near Iwo Jima.
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Tony Fung watches John Revelli carry inventory away from Revelli Tire, next to Fung’s Autohouse. Both businesses are being evicted. (Chronicle photo by Kurt Rogers)

Jim Herron Zamora, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer, reports:

Last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling approving a Connecticut city’s plan to take private land by eminent domain may seem far away.

But to John Revelli, whose family has operated a tire shop near downtown Oakland for decades, the implications hit home on Friday.

A team of contractors hired by the city of Oakland packed the contents of his small auto shop in a moving van and evicted Revelli from the property his family has owned since 1949.

“I have the perfect location; my customers who work downtown can drop off their cars and walk back here,” said Revelli, 65, pointing at the nearby high- rises. “The city is taking it all away from me to give someone else. It’s not fair.”

The city of Oakland, using eminent domain, seized Revelli Tire and the adjacent property, owner-operated Autohouse, on 20th Street between Telegraph and San Pablo avenues on Friday and evicted the longtime property owners, who have refused to sell to clear the way for a large housing development.
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Hainan special zone newspaper, via Xinhuanet, via Rense, reports: (babelfish translation)

The tens of thousands of only beautiful butterflies in abundance die on the east line highway, this was reporter yesterday morning “the marvelous sight” which saw with own eyes in the east line highway, but butterfly’s cause of death at present Shang Wu authoritative view.
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A family eats at a toilet-themed restaurant in southern Taiwan city of Kaohsiung June 29, 2005. The Martun, or toilet in Chinese, restaurant in Kaohsiung boasts lengthy queues on weekends as diners wait for a toilet seat in its brightly colored tile interior. Food arrives in bowls shaped like Western-style toilets or Asian-style ’squat pots’. (REUTERS/David Lin)

Reuters, via BoingBoing, :

TAIPEI (Reuters) - It may take a strong stomach to eat curry or chocolate ice cream out of a toilet bowl, but a commode-themed restaurant in Taiwan does booming business serving up just that.

The Martun, or toilet in Chinese, restaurant in the southern port city of Kaohsiung boasts lengthy queues on weekends as diners wait for a toilet seat in its brightly colored tile interior.

Food arrives in bowls shaped like Western-style toilets or Asian-style “squat pots.”
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Science Blog, via Slashdot, reports:

Fishermen in northern Thailand have netted a fish as big as a grizzly bear, a 646-pound Mekong giant catfish, the heaviest recorded since Thai officials started keeping records in 1981. The behemoth was caught in the Mekong River and may be the largest freshwater fish ever found.
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