Posts from — January 2004

Since WHO has warned that “bird flu” presents a risk of evolving into an efficient and dangerous human pathogen, it makes good sense to go through these detailed FAQs on Avian Influenza (Bird Flu)! Because… as they say… Forewarned is forearmed!!

For the people who dream of finding secret messages hidden inside seemingly innocent and innocuous blocks of text, comes the Cryptographever!!

Just copy-paste in a block of text in the form there and hit the button. In a moment or two, you are shown the secret/hidden message inside your block of text!! … Cool, ain’t it!?

Two of my previous posts apparently had ominous secret messages hidden inside them!!… They were… “the plan is ready we can go” and “we can begin“

Obviously… I’m planning some big thing and now everything is in readiness to proceed!! Wow… I almost want to exclaim, “The game’s afoot, Watson!!“

[link via Metafilter]

If you thought that the judiciary was perhaps the last bastion of righteouness, then it might, perhaps, surprise and dissapoint you to know that an obscure journalist in Gujarat managed to have warrants issued against the President of India (APJ Abdul Kalam), Chief Justice of India (VN Khare) and Supreme Court judges (BP Singh and RK Jain) without any case against them, by bribing a metropolitan magistrate in Ahmedabad through local lawyers.

On being made aware of this bizarre judicial order, Chief Justice Khare said…

“What is happening in Gujarat? By giving Rs 40,000, you can obtain a judicial order? If this is the state of affairs, only God knows what will happen to the country,”

Well… thats the question that every one in India seems to be asking… for a long time now!

A second-by-second account of the final few minutes of the ill-fated Columbia space shuttle. Its a gripping (and yet horrifying) tale of how a seemingly inconsequential piece of foam caused the destruction of one of the most complicated machines ever built!

“The most complicated machine ever built got knocked out of the sky by a pound and a half of foam. I don’t know how any of us could have seen that coming. The message that sends me is, we are walking the razor’s edge. This is a dangerous business and it does not take much to knock you off.”
– Flight director Paul Hill

The account is an extract from a book titled, “Comm Check … The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia,” by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood, which was published yesterday.

[link via Metafilter]

The Golden Arches turned out to be the gateways to hell for Morgan Spurlock who decided to document the effects of spending a month eating only at McDonald’s.

In addition to adding 25 pounds to his 6 foot 2, 185 pounds frame, he suffered lots of other undesirable and harmful effects…

Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors who examined him were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock’s entire body deteriorated.

“It was really crazy - my body basically fell apart over the course of 30 days,” Spurlock told The Post.

His liver became toxic, his cholesterol shot up from a low 165 to 230, his libido flagged and he suffered headaches and depression.

Spurlock has documented his month-long experience in a tongue-in-cheek documentary called, “Super Size Me”, which he’s taken to the Sundance Film Festival.

While one may argue that no one in their right mind would live only off McDonald’s stuff, this experiment by Spurlock does indeed make a strong point against the junk food which is the source of the obesity epidemic that plagues America today.