I was convinced when I watched this video it wasn’t real, just very cleverly done CGI. Well let me just eat my hat, because you can buy the bloody things on various sites. Have a watch of the video, but if your credit card is near your computer, be prepared for an instant impulse buy. Firebox has a customer submitted pic. The main problem with them is the 4-5 minute flight time per charge.

Where does the real world end and the internet start? Cell phones are bridging the gap between here and there, and this wired article talks about grafedia and stuff like that that is tying real world locations to the internet. Full article. and www.grafedia.net.

If You Are Reading This, You Had Better Fucking Hate Horses!!!

This guy really hates horses. I Hate Horses.

The laws of physics seem to allow time travel, but no one has had much hope of building an actual time machine because it would take such exotic conditions and materials.

Now, physicist Amos Ori of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa has come up with a potentially more practical time machine design. Unlike most previous proposals, this one requires only normal matter and the vacuum known to exist in space, says Ori.

Click.

A nice forum post. A guys pet praying mantis (wiki) lays its eggs on top of his monitor and he keeps the forum updated about the whole thing, right through to pics of all the little baby mantises. You have to dig around a bit through the pages of the thread for the pics if that’s all your interested in.Click.

25 yr old Dub’ Collie has been rapping for de guts of 3 years now. In de summer of ‘02, he put together a demo of an album’s worth of material depicting a very graphic view of Dublin, from nightlife to de joys of waiting for de bus.

Have a click to listen to MP3s from Collie. Also, check out eggireland.com for another Irish hip hop group. These links all come from this boards.ie thread, where they have opened my eyes to Irish hip hop culture. Irish Beats, the ugliest web site in the universe, seems to be your one stop shop for all this kind of thing with a decent set of mp3s on loads of mc’s.

An old [1999] article that statistically proves why it’s exceptionally unlikely that a guy will ever find a girlfriend.

Not the author, though. I, for one, refuse to spend my life brooding over my lack of luck with women. While I’ll be the first to admit that my chances of ever entering into a meaningful relationship with someone special are practically non-existent, I staunchly refuse to admit that it has anything to do with some inherent problem with me. Instead, I am convinced that the situation can be readily explained in purely scientific terms, using nothing more than demographics and some elementary statistical calculus.

Lest anyone suspect that my standards for women are too high, let me allay those fears by enumerating in advance my three criteria for the match. First, the potential girlfriend must be approximately my age — let’s say 21 plus or minus three or four years. Second, the girl must be beautiful (and I use that term all-encompassingly to refer to both inner and outer beauty). Third, she must also be reasonably intelligent — she doesn’t have to be Mensa material, but the ability to carry on a witty, insightful argument would be nice. So there they are — three simple demands, which I’m sure everyone will agree are anything but unreasonable.

Be sure to read the email he receives from a girl - linked to at the end of the article. Have a click.

Coca-Cola is planning to launch Enviga, a soda that is said to burn 50 to 100 calories just by drinking a 12-oz. serving, next year, per one executive.

Enviga, a green tea-based, caffeinated, carbonated drink, is in clinical testing and is said to speed up the user’s metabolism. The beverage will target active lifestyle consumers. A Coke rep said, “Some [of our projects] may find their way to market and some may not.” Studies have shown that drinking green tea may promote weight loss by stimulating the body to burn calories.

It can’t be that simple. Full story.

Play it with the music on full blast. Excellent. I have it running in the background as I type this. Crazy game: The Arrow Game. (via.)

Slightly disturbing, ultra violent game, Dad n’ Me. You play a weird evil kid who just basically goes round beating the fuck out of other kids.

Dolores McNamara from Garryowen, County Limerick, scooped £77m (112m euros) in the National Lottery Euromillions draw.

She checked her ticket in a pub on Friday night to discover she had won the prize, accumulated after nine successive roll-overs.

Full story. Previous TCAL post.

For the last 21 years, at various times, I have been a writer, photographer and observer of the graff art scene in any part of the world that I have travelled in. My travels have mainly focused on London and Dublin

Nicely done flash site with photos of graffiti art from Ireland and elsewhere: Spraysaints.com.

What if a few thousand like minded individuals got together online with the purpose of setting up a business, applying the open source development model more commonly used for software development. Well thats roughly whats happening at http://www.thebusinessexperiment.com/.
The premise is that there are alot of people who have great ideas but never get to realise them due to their circumstances. People who register on the website get an opportunity to put their ideas forward. Each idea is put to a poll and the winning idea then becomes the business experiment. All key decisions are voted upon by site members based upon the philosophy of the ‘wisdom of the crowds’. The person who suggests the winning idea gets 10% of the company and each member gets a share based on participation levels.
Sounds like a fascinating experiment. I have seen lots of business ideas so far and they are practically all brilliant ones. They are still taking in members, I would strongly recommend getting involved if you are interested in business startups and open source philosophy.

Irishblogs.info is a new Top 100 Irish Blogs aggregator. TCAL is number 1 at the moment, but I assume that will change once slugger etc. get wind of it. So lets enjoy it while it lasts. Woohoo, Yippee, We’re the best, Yay, Deadly, Brilliant, Great. Feel free to head on over to the site and give us a vote.

Genetically engineered stem cells can help rats’ severed spinal cords grow back together, according to a study published Tuesday.

Rats given the treatment, using stem cells taken from rat embryos, could move their legs again after their spines were severed in the lab, said the researchers’ report in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Great stuff. Full article. (via.)

What’s the correct term for really bouncy little balls? They called em superballs on bb. We always called them pingpong balls as kids. Anyway, someone has done one of my lifetime dreams [well actually, I wanted to flood my school with them on the last day], dropped 10,000 of these little guys onto a street in san francisco. Flickr shots: #1 & #2. I want video. Will update when I find it.

A new planet has been discovered at the edge of the solar system.

“It’s definitely bigger than Pluto.” So says Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology who announced today the discovery of a new planet in the outer solar system.

Full article. (via.)

A little confusing at first, but stick with it and note your blueprints at the bottom left and get going. Addictive. Stackopolis.

Very Fifth Element styled city quicktime vr and a few images to view and stuff. Neat. Click.

Dragonfellow is a legendary story that takes place in a magical kingdom of fairy-tale lands and winged dragons. The star of our folk song, Dragonfellow, was sadly not able to fly high above the earth with his friends - he had no wings.

Hmm. I’ll understand if people can’t be bothered watching this to the end, as I did, and at no point was there loads of violence. In fact, young children may enjoy this short animation. I’ll have to go sell my soul to the devil by playing GTA again to get back to balance. DragonFellow.