The Nutlog Archive

5th October
Chaos grips Belgrade. Take a look at the Belgrade uprising in pictures from the BBC. The uprising follows the Yugoslav constitutional court's nullification of the presidential election results.

I find Sony's pet robot dog to be surprisingly cute.

Reuters - 'Serial 'pest' fined for disrupting Olympic marathon.' 'A serial ``pest,'' who has disrupted a number of major events in Australia, was fined $160 for running on to the Olympic marathon course during the men's race.'
He also has also gatecrashed to Australian Open tennis final, the funeral of Michael Hutchence, the Melbourne Cup, and cut the goal net during Australia's 1997 World Cup qualifier match against Iran.

Classic Universal Studios trailers for horror films. Via Lukelog.

New Scientist - 'Dishing the dirt.' 'Industrial plants in the US have been fingered as the main polluters of Nunavut, thousands of kilometres away in the Canadian Arctic. A report on cross-border pollution released this week identifies an incinerator in Iowa as the single biggest source of dioxin pollution in this remote Arctic area.'

New Scientist - 'The drowning wave.' Some scientists speculate that a collapsing volcano in the Canary Isles could create a massive tidal wave which would speed westward across the Atlantic and engulf the east coast of North America.
'Simon Day of the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre at University College London has discovered that a huge chunk of La Palma, the most volcanically active island in the Canaries, is now unstable. "If the flank of the volcano slides into the ocean, the mass of moving rock will push the water in front of it, creating a tsunami wave far larger than any seen in history," says Day. "The wave would then spread out across the Atlantic at the speed of a jet airliner until it strikes coastal areas all around the North Atlantic." '

Discovery - 'Syrian tomb may hold princesses.' 'Archaeologists are puzzling over the skeletons of five adults and three babies unearthed this summer at the site of an ancient city in Syria...'
' "The people buried there could be the elite of one of the earliest urban civilizations in the world. While it is very important that the tomb was untouched, we need to investigate further over the unusual arrangement of the bodies," said Glenn Schwartz of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., who headed the American-Dutch team of archaeologists.'

The genius behind nakedpopethemovie.com (definitely one of the best domain names on the web) has some ideas on reforming the US voting system and introducint a preferential voting system, such as in Australia. A form of preferential voting (where second choices were taken into account if no one candidate won an outright majority in the first round) was used in the London mayoral election this year.
Personally, I think that the points made on this piece apply equally to Britain, and that some form of preferential voting, as opposed to the current 'first past the post' system, would give much fairer and more representative results in our general elections.
I found this link via Not So Soft and Lukelog.

4th October
Memeblog - an interesting British weblog. Read it!

Times - 'Paving stones to fight pollution.' 'Paving stones that soak up pollution are to be tested as a low-cost and politically less fraught way of fighting traffic fumes.'
'The paving stones contain a compound, titanium oxide, that will remove oxides of nitrogen, a key air pollutant that leads to smogs and is linked with breathing difficulties in asthmatics and other vulnerable groups. '
'The pioneering idea is to be tested in London by engineers at Westminister City Council. Likely areas for the trial are Oxford Street and Cromwell Road. '

Take Modern Humorist's tour of the Trask Museum - 'America's finest collection of robber baron art.'

Reuters - 'Former cabbie claims earldom.' 'A Hungarian former taxi driver living in Budapest has emerged as the heir to a Scottish earldom, according to the genealogist who unearthed his claim. '
'Huba Andras Campbell, 55 -- who grew up in poverty in rural communist Hungary and is now a trucker and car importer -- is next in line to the earldom of Breadalbane and Holland, genealogist Robert Noble told the Daily Telegraph Tuesday.'

Korea Herald - 'Loo and behold! Seoul's restrooms looking flush.' South Korea's public toilets are getting cleaner.

BBC - 'UK's 'Garden of Eden' takes root.' On a giant greenhouse in Cornwall. 'A project to create the world's largest greenhouse has taken another step forward with the rooting of a rainforest. '

AP - 'Students told to pen assassination.' 'A high school English teacher is out of a job after assigning his students the mock task of picking an assassination victim and planning the killing without getting caught...'
'Students said the teacher told them to choose a victim from outside Covina High School, detail why they made that choice and how to keep it secret.'

3rd October
Yeti@home. Do something for the Abominable Snowman. Not to be confused with SETI@home.

AP - 'Profs score on Olympic predictions.'
'Two Ivy league professors who used wealth and population figures to predict how many medals some countries would win at the Summer Games put on a gold-medal performance.'
Basically, by considering factors such as population, GDP per head, government funding, 'home field advantage', and past performance, and allowing for the occasional fluke, it seems to be possible to devise a formula to predict to a reasonable level of accuracy how well a country will do at the Olympic games.

Ghosts of the Prairie. Comprehensive site all about haunted America.

2nd October
It seems that some people are finding this page by searching for Svetlana Pesotskaya, the stripping Russian newsreader. Well, you can find out all about her in this Moscow Times article. Pesotskaya apart, her news show sounds very funny and very satirical.

The Trilobite homepage. All about trilobites.

Reuters - 'Feathers fly over school suspension.' 'Feathers flew in a suburban Atlanta school on Thursday as officials faced criticism for suspending a sixth grader for possession of a Tweety Bird wallet that violated a school weapons policy.'

The Sydney Morning Herald on the amazing Wollemi Pine.
'After six years of research scientists have been unable to find any difference between the DNA of one Wollemi Pine and another, leaving the nation's leading plant geneticists completely baffled.'
'Genetic variability is the fuel of evolution, the basis of life and yet the trees are impossibly perfect clones.'
(Well, clearly not _that_ impossible!)

I aspire to dogma 2000 compliance.

1st October
The Tacky Postcard Archive. 'Preserving the bad taste of our era for future generations.' Don't miss the tacky insults.

This Spectred Isle - a guide to the ghosts of Great Britain. My favourite is the blue donkey which supposedly haunts Cobham, in Surrey.

Pluckley, in Kent, claims to be the most haunted village in England.

Read the Buddhist Quote of the Moment.

Send your name to Mars. Here's a chance at a kind of immortality. I was the 1470652nd person to do this.