Any garbage (namely, plastics) that makes its way into the ocean, be it in South/North Asia, or North America, floats with the ocean currents (sometimes for several years) to be concentrated at this one area, due to the clockwise motion of the ocean currents, in an area referred to as the North Pacific Gyre.

How does it matter? It all adds up in the food we eat.

Check out the series of 12 videos (each approximately 5-6 minute) at
http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1485308505
[The 1st of video summarizes the whole series]

vkontakte.ru, Russia
Click on image to visit site. Site looks like below as of right now, July 11, 2008.

hainei.com, China
Click on image to visit site. Site looks like below as of right now, July 11, 2008.

Kootali, India
Click on image to visit demo site. This company sells software to create Facebook clones! Demo Site looks like below as of right now, July 11, 2008.

Read More

More at www.centennialbulb.org.
Also check out the live “Bulb cam” there.

This year’s event, held last Saturday (26th August) had 100 contestants from countries like Canada, Russia, Belgium; and Finland ofcorse.

Also just learnt about some other interesting contributions from Finland,

• International Wife Carrying Competition, where the “wife” to be carried can be one’s own, the neighbour’s wife or just anyone’s wife, as long as she is over 17; the prize being the wife’s weight in beer. The current world champion, Margo Uusorg, an Estonian, has won this event 5 times, with 4 different “wives”!
• Sauna World Championships

Read more..

Well, what happened was that he called them, wanting to change the address for his credit card & savings accounts. They apparently allow the change of address for a credit card over the phone, but they require him to come down in person (or mail in a signed form) for the savings account. And then they mailed him the form at his new address!

What’s point in mailing a form to the new address if the bank’s system already recorded the new address?

Actually, this is quite common here. Two years ago, my previous phone company was sending my bills, as well as reminders for outstanding bills to my OLD address for 3 months before sending me a threatening letter from their lawyers to my NEW address! And all this despite my calling them up to inform them of my address change, etc.. Needless to say that in addition to paying the outstanding bills, I had to cough up the amount they paid their lawyers for the threatening letter and all this for something that (in my opinion) was their mistake.

The nice people at the Institute for Posttayloristic Studies in Austria have come up with an interesting(?) work around for people who want to watch the world cup but only have access to telnet. A stream of the World Cup in ASCII!

At times there were closeups of some players, here’s one of Radoslaw Sobolewski of Poland (during the Germany Vs Poland match)

But unfortunately, for most part of the game, the match looked like this, (see below)

I’m not sure about others, but 90 minutes of this, 3 times a night, for 30 days, is a sure way to be affected by scroll blindness! There are many other alternatives out there for those without live coverage on TV, one being

However, if you are still keen to give it a try, tomorrow night (early morning actually:)) you can telnet ascii-wm.net 2006. On Windows, you can just key this in cmd (Press ‘Windows-Key’-'R’, type ‘cmd’ and ENTER). The ASCII stream is made available 10 minutes after the start of each match.

That’s exactly what happened the day before in Mumbai, during a suprise check on all pilots in Mumbai airport.. an Air Deccan (an Indian low-cost airline) pilot was found drunk shortly before he was due to fly an aircraft with about 100 passengers on board! [#]

Needless to add in, the pilot was obviously not allowed to fly the aircraft, but highlights a scary situation, which is by no means the first. Here’s a list of some other drunk pilot incidents:

• In August 2004, a Finnair flight carrying 200+ passengers, was delayed for 6 hours in Manchester airport, when the pilot was found to have over twice the legal limit of alcohol in his body. [#]
• In July 2004, a pilot of single engined aircraft, whilst drunk, attempted to land his plane on a highway.. ended up clipping a van and then flipped upside down. [#]
• In July 2002, the pilot of an ASA flight to Atlanta was grounded after a security screener smelled alcohol in his breath. The pilot later resigned. Also in that same month, two America West pilots were fired for drinking before a flight from Miami to Phoenix.[#]
• and the list goes on.. a quick search on google for the keywords “drunk pilot” revealed over 3 million results!

Doing a bit of Math, if I send it to just 5 people and each of them send to 5 people each, I receive US$7300! Wow!

All crap!! You really think he has the inclination to pay people for nothing? Its like those previous lottery scams, which too were promoted and sponsored by eminent personalities like the Sultan of Brunei, Bill Gates of Microsoft and other corporate organisations “to encourage the use of the internet and computers worldwide.”.

And to claim your prize money, all you had to do was to send your contact details and few days/weeks later the 4 Million Euros was yours!

How can it be a fake?

Read the line

When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period.

Tracking any email, would involve having some sort of cookie, (or other code), which simply isn’t possible for email (your Anti Virus software would have quarantined your email if it found any such suspicious looking code).

Secondly, assuming that they did get around a way to do so (I mean track the email), then they’d probably have gone broke by the time the email reached the 163,744,855th person! Why? They announced a revenue of US$39.79 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2005. With approximately US$243 spent per forard, do the Math yourelf

Now, would you still like to be fooled by this miracle email?

Read the email.
Just scroll down to see parts highlit in yellow. Fortunately both versions of the hoax are in this email.