Eric Covener’s Journal

http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/2007/11/24/adr-for-property-damage-in-china

In China, after a minor accident people usually settle the matter on the street, in cash. This routine has become a standard part of life–once, I saw two small children playing a game in which they repeatedly rammed their bikes and shouted, “Pei qian! Pei qian!” – “Compensate! Compensate!”

Billions of jellyfish wipe out N. Irish salmon farm

The Northern Salmon Co. Ltd. said billions of jellyfish — in a dense pack of about 10 square miles and 35 feet deep — overwhelmed the fish last week in two net pens about a mile off the coast of the Glens of Antrim, north of Belfast.

Managing director John Russell said the company’s dozen workers tried to rescue the salmon, but their three boats struggled for hours to push their way through the mass of jellyfish. All the fish were dead or dying from stings and stress by the time the boats reached the pens, he said.

In a related story, the whereabouts of Hui’s bathtub are still unknown.

Thanksgiving turkey didn’t make you tired

The reason turkey gets blamed for making people sleepy is because it contains tryptophan, an amino acid that produces the brain chemical serotonin, which promotes calm and sleepiness. But as part of a big dinner, the tryptophan has a hard time reaching the brain.

Even if it did, “you’d have to ingest quite a number of turkeys” for it to have an effect, she said.

So one more time, enough about the t-word!

‘I saw both of the bombs and lived’

Anyone who survived the world’s first atom bomb blast must have felt the worst was past. But Kazuko Sadamaru was caught up in the second explosion too. That she did so and is still alive today is perhaps the most uniquely improbable story of all.

The road north of Hiroshima, winding through rice paddies and cedar green mountains, leads to the quintessentially Japanese home of Mrs Sadamaru. This unassuming woman, sitting cross-legged and wearing slippers on a tatami mat by the veranda, is among a handful of people alive who witnessed both the Hiroshima bomb and the obliteration of Nagasaki three days later.

Sitting near her golden Buddhist shrine and pouring iced green tea, Mrs Sadamaru, now 80, explained that she left her hospital in Nagasaki on 5 August 1945 to accompany a soldier to a town near Hiroshima, some 260 miles away. The following day, she was on a train approaching the city when ‘Little Boy’ exploded at 8.15am.

Pastor in Microsoft ‘gay rights’ share bid

Gizmodo:

He is rallying his megachurch, which has 3,500 worshipers, to buy stocks in Microsoft to vote down their gay-friendly policies. He hopes to get homophobic dicks from all religions — Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Miscellaneous — to join him on his crusade. That’s a video of him making all sorts of scary threats at the last Microsoft shareholder’s meeting.

telegraph:

An advocate of a “biblical stance” against divorce and homosexuality, Mr Hutcherson, 55, is asking millions of evangelical activists, as well as Orthodox Jewish and other allies, to buy up Microsoft shares and demand a return to traditional values.

Ken Hutcherson at Microsoft shareholders meeting:

Amazon Customers Vote FAQ

How does Amazon Customers Vote work?

Customers vote for the deal they want in each of six rounds. Whichever deal gets the most votes will be offered to a limited number of randomly selected customers who voted for that particular deal.

This year’s potential winning deals include a Nintendo Wii for $79, a Panasonic HD camcorder for $299, and a Razor electric scooter for $29. See the Product Pricing and Availability section for the full list.

And by “it” I mean a re-opening of her famous rape allegations, previously thought to be a hoax.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/11/18/tawana.brawley.ap/index.html

This case is usually mentioned as one of three big gaffes for Al Sharpton, the others being inciting a riot in Crown Heights and his awful haircut.

So there’s a plasma TV on the market now, the Pioneer Kuro, that house every other consumer TV in every benchmark by a sizeable margin. Even to the point where it beats top of the line LCDs in tasks where LCDs are better then plasmas.

It’s currently $6k for the 60″ model, but the technology should trickle down soon. I’m sure we’ll quickly figure out how to measure new things that TVs suck at, like motion resolution

An interesting article on some other enhancements in the pipes (discrete LEDs on LCDs instead of a massive backlight, etc) http://popsci.typepad.com/popsci/2007/10/black-is-the-ne.html”<