Manchester Riots: Scenes From Whalley Range

Hilarious!

The Horroble Truth Behind Whipped Cream

The Rubes

Social Conscious Sign Art

A feller by the name of Norm Magnusson makes these signs as a form of art, and apparently, because he claims they're art, the city can't (or maybe won't) stop him from putting them up around town. Read the story here.

Yahoo's Ridiculous 'Religious Section'

Twenty five stories on religion featured at Yahoo's 'Religious Section' today, and every one of them in the negative. Tells me all I need to know about these yahoos.

How To Cut-up a Chicken Like a Meat Cutter

The way a meat cutter cuts a chicken is a little different from restaurants where they typically leave the backbone on the breast and thighs. I was a meat cutter from 1978 to 1993. I left this video for a friend, but I hope someone else will get some use out of it.

By the way, I noticed that when watching this video in 360p, it tends to hang up around 4:45 in. Just click on the "360p" and you'll get a choice of other settings. The others don't hang up, and the higher the setting, the better the quality. You can go all the way up to full HD at 1080p! Looks great at full screen if you have the bandwidth for it.

Kary Mullis, John Bardeen, and the Invention of the Transistor

Kary Mullis, the chemist who won a Noble in 1993 for inventing PCR (it made the Human Genome Project possible), has a fun paper available at his site called: "Conversation With John Bardeen." Bardeen was the guy who invented the transistor, for which he was awarded the Noble Prize in physics back in 1956. (He actually won a second Noble during the early 70s for his theories on super-conductivity.) If you know anything about Mullis, he's interested in just about everything. One day in 1987, Mullis was reading about Bardeen when he realized that he was still alive and living in Carbondale, Illinois. He says the following:

On a long shot, I called Carbondale information for his number. It was listed. The phone number of the father of the Electronic Age was listed. The manager of our local Circuit City has an unlisted number. John Bardeen's wife answered and said "Yes, he's sitting here at the table", and put him on the phone without asking who was calling. I told him I wanted to talk to him about the invention of the transistor, was it a convenient time? Was he in a comfortable chair? He said fine, so we talked for about an hour. He never asked me who I was or why I wanted to talk.

I guess his paper won't interest just a whole lot of people, but I thought it was nice. You can read it here: Conversation With John Bardeen

You can also see a short documentary on Bardeen here:

Avira Anti-virus Software And Why You Should Uninstall It

No matter which one you choose, it seems every good, free anti-virus & anti-spyware program goes over to the dark side at some point and becomes unusable. Many of us used a combination of AVG-Free and Lavasoft's AdAware-free for years until both went sour and started using adverts and bundling useless software. After that, many of us went to Avira and SuperAntiSpyware. The latter is still a good spyware app, although it updates very slowly these days (it didn't always). But Avira has now began bundling an Ask.com Toolbar with their products. In the past, Avira actually blocked this toolbar whenever anyone tried to pawn it off on you, considering it to be malware. And now they're actually partnering with it!

You can choose not to install the toolbar, but then you won't get use of Avira's WebGuard feature. Avira tries to instill fear in their users (and potential users) by making bold statements about this, making it look as though WebGuard is an essential feature that you shouldn't be without. Truth be told, it's a mostly useless feature that does nothing but slow both computer and web surfing performance. It's their sleazy tactics that have everybody up in arms. To which I can only say, "Bye-bye Avira."

I just downloaded Avast, which is getting good ratings presently. One thing I like about it is that it has a "gaming mode" that you can use when not surfing the web, but rather, are doing something with your computer that requires a lot of power such as gaming or using video and graphics programs. In Gaming Mode, Avast barely registers in system resources. Sounds like a real winner. I'll post a follow-up in a month or so.