Peter Strang had been playing with a friend when the snowball, reported to weigh a quarter of a ton, rolled down a hill and engulfed him.

Police said. There were no suspicious circumstances.

the accident happened in Scotland on Saturday.
so its a regular occurance for enormous snowballs to be flying down hills in Scotland? God definitely has a sense of humour full story here on bbc

Amazing animated short that won an Oscar this year: Ryan. It’s really good, if anyone has a link where you can download it instead of watching it in streaming stutter vision please post it in the comments. Fantastic work.

Ryan. (via.)

Horrifying first person perspective shots of the tsunami, taken by a couple before they perished.

Tsunami Photos recovered. (via.)

As expected their are a few teething problems with Wordpress 1.5. Apologies if your posts/comments don’t appear.

This is good…It’s Irish. It’s Flash. Sex, Booze and a Sheep Named john: Crimescene.

Crimescene.

This reads like a cheap sci-fi novel which crosses over to reality. Eve Online is a massively multiplayer game in a persistant world. It’s set in future space and exploration, mining and commerce is the key of the game. Instead of guilds you have corporations and with that you get capitalism, and everyone knows how that works. (This is the only MMOG I’ve ever payed to play and it was worth it)

The story was slashdotted back in August 2004 but I only picked up on it recently. The story is about a guy who risks everything to scam millions of isk (roughly around $1000 in converted money) from CEOs of large corporations, rich miners, uber nerds who seldom see sunlight with a promise of exclusive ownership of a set of rare and very expensive blueprints. The methods which he uses to gain trust and money from potential investors are not common in normal games. Usually a person would leave his online character in the world from which he logs off - in Eve, it’s constantly around.

[Read the Story] The Great Scam
[In Depth Review] Reactions of the Scam

Excellently bizarre and cool flash game. The how to play instructions are in japanese but it’s not brain surgery.

Crash. (via.)

fuck
n. 1. a desirable burger. 2. an illegal party.
“This fuck is insufficiently desirable!”

There are a near-infinite number of slang words which are still only in hypothetical usage among the youth of today and tomorrow - this service attempts to pre-emptively catalogue them, for the benefit of baby namers, dot-com registrars and other dangerously bored people.

The Infinite Teen Slang Dictionary. (via.)

Great animated short - Balance. The server was a bit slow for me so it had these annoying pauses as I was watching, but its still worth it.

Balance. (via.)

You can watch the full first episode of Battlestar Galactica here. That’s a world first I think, no one has ever legally made available a full tv show available for download. And it has no ads! I like the shaky-camera style of all the cg shots. It was done in SW Episode 2 as well, its a good way of making alright special effects look better by masking the fakeness of it all with jerky motions.

Go watch it.

Wow this guy collects a lot of stuff.

Good article on the Christian Science Monitor about Europeans and God and the contrast and change in belief systems that is occuring.

Two events last year neatly frame the challenge: In the United States, a California man tried to remove “One Nation, Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. Americans cried foul - roughly 90 percent wanted to keep the phrase - and on June 15, the Supreme Court halted the bid on procedural grounds.

Three days later, in Brussels, officials agreed on the final text of the European Union’s new Constitution. The charter made no mention of God, despite calls that it recognize Europe’s Christian roots.

Indeed, its secularism has led to jokes that Europe is one big “blue” state. But Europeans aren’t laughing. Buffeted by the crosscurrents of secularism, Christianity, and Islam - and mindful of a history of religious violence - they are wrestling with their values and identity as never before.

It’s a good read. What place for God in Europe? (via.)

Classic countdown clip.

Unseen Countdown. Thanks si. NSFW, possibly.

TCAL has been successfully upgraded to Wordpress 1.5! There may be teething problems as we sort out the system so we’d appreciate if you’d let us know of any problems you encounter. The comments system has been overhauled which is great news. Basically, the first time you comment it will be held in moderation, but once its ok’d once you should be able to leave comments any time and they show up instantly. Following on from this will be a completely new UI and functionality for TCAL. Stay tuned, space fans!

A note to post-authors: The interface for writing your posts may have changed - pay attention and use the contact form if you have any issues.

Bubble Chambers are used to observe the tracks of subatomic particles at extremely high resolution.

And this website has a java applet that shows the particle movement over time. Run the java app yourself here or just check out the cool gallery. (via.) If you do run the java applet, be sure to leave it for a while and watch the pattern evolve.

Kind of clever I guess. The lokitorrent guy, Ed Webber, who said he was going to fight the legal cases brought against him for his p2p torrent based website apparently hasn’t. Instead, he settled out of court in the early stages of the legal battle, screwing over the worldwide p2p community in the process. None of this has been actually confirmed.

Ed Webber knowingly manipulated the p2p community into donating a large amount of funds while during the same exact time, without the knowledge or agreement of the p2p community, closed a deal that potentially puts each and everyone of his supporting bit torrent community and website visiting members at risk.

During the time that Mr. Webber was accepting funds from the p2p community, and also instructing his lawyers to screw the p2p community, he also found time to try and secretly sell the domain on Sedo.com

t is assumed that the deal between Ed Webber and the MPAA deal was being “cooked” at least 30 days prior to the actual court order which means that Ed Webber began (from the get go) accepting funds from the p2p community when in fact he already knew that he was going to close a deal with the MPAA. In other words, Ed Webber committed FRAUD.

4) Ultimately, Ed Webber accepted the MPAA’s position that BIT TORRENT sites are financially responsible for providing “illegal files” and folded before any legal lawsuit could realize themselves in a court of law. Ed, as trustee of tens of thousands of file sharers dollars, not only sold out the file share community that he represented, but also set a very dangerous precedent for future file share sites who are interested in encouraging community members to donate money to fight the RIAA & MPAA.

Read the full article here. (via.) Previous storys on lokitorrent here, here and here.

Lol, Nickelback get inter-fucked by the interweb. Some guy took their famous song whatever its called and mixed it with their new one, whatever that is. The old one is coming out of the right speaker, the new one out of the left, listen to how they are so different. This is from April 2004 so it’s not new in any sense of being well…new, but it’s still funny.

As if there weren’t already enough reasons to laugh at Nickelback. (via.)

Finally, you can have tasty, sizzling bacon, without all the shopping, planning, and preparation. Just schedule your appointment at baconwhores.com, and our trained experts will come and prepare bacon for you, exactly the way you like it.

Now that’s service.

Bacon Whores. (via.)

Cool Drag Race game with loads of options and cars and all sorts of cool stuff going on.

Drag Racer 3. (via.)

Lejo the finger puppet dj guy. Great stuff.

Lejo DJ @ Anticlown. Oh and there’s more clips of Lejo doing stuff at his website.