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Posted

If we're going to look at trees... I shall combine that with eco-friendly burials..

 

Distractify - Human now, Tree Later

 

 

 

Capsula Mundi is an eco-friendly alternative to being buried in a coffin.


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These revolutionary "seeds" were developed in the hopes of offering a more practical burial.
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It seemed highly impractical that a coffin made of wood would typically only be of use for about 3 days, when it normally takes 30-40 years for a tree to grow.

 

Like a coffin, these egg-shaped pods are designed to each house a deceased human body for burial.

The body is seated in the fetal position within the biodegradable pod and buried in the ground.


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From there, a tree is planted above it, allowing its roots to soak nutrients and grow.

Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, the duo behind Capsula Mundi, explain: "The tree is chosen when the person is alive, relatives and friends look after it when death occurs."

Here is the basic outline of the process:


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The appeal of these burial pods is that the human body can not only serve as a source of life to a tree, but also provide an organic form for living loved ones to visit.


Unlike a traditional cemetery filled with cold, hard tombstones, this method of burial offers a forest of growing life.

It provides an organic monument dedicated to each human life, while contributing to the health of the earth.

Though an Italian company introduced this innovative method, the burial procedure is currently banned in Italy. Citelli and Bretzel are working to change burial legislation to allow people to have more alternative options.

 

You can read more about Capsula Mundi's initiative on its website and follow their progress on Facebook.  

 

 

 


 

  • Like 2

"Cuius testiculos habeas, habeas cardia et cerebellum."

Posted (edited)

Woman On Welfare Wants Taxpayers To Pay For $15,000 Wedding, Being A Bride Is A ‘Basic Human Right’. (link)

 

She is overweight and can't work, collected benefits for years, and now we need to finance her "Dream wedding", including a castle party, a designer dress, a horse and carriage, and a honeymoon , because "I deserve.." !!!

 

Oh really?! please someone tell me its a hoax, to calm that angry eye tic I got.

Edited by Tort
Posted (edited)

 

A "BUFF" making like a crab (at 0:35).

Edited by Agiel
  • Like 1
Quote
“Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not to kill.”
 
-Jonathan Littell <<Les Bienveillantes>>
Quote

"The chancellor, the late chancellor, was only partly correct. He was obsolete. But so is the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, entity, or ideology becomes obsolete when it stockpiles the wrong weapons: when it captures territories, but not minds; when it enslaves millions, but convinces nobody. When it is naked, yet puts on armor and calls it faith, while in the Eyes of God it has no faith at all. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man...that state is obsolete."

-Rod Serling

 

Posted

Just for the random interest...

 

Wonders and Marvels - Greatest Detectives

 

The world’s greatest detectives do their secret work in a grand, wood-paneled Victorian dining room in the shadow of Independence Hall. They meet monthly in Philadelphia from around the world, Scotland Yard and Interpol agents, FBI, NYPD, Egyptian army captains, mafia-busters, Al Qaeda hunters, investigators of the JFK and RFK assassinations, the finest collection of forensic specialists ever assembled — CSI to the tenth power, and real.

 

After a four-course white-tablecloth lunch, the fifth course is a murder. The bloodied victim appears on a power-point screen, and the room falls hushed. Each month it is a daunting case that has gone cold for years, a sad tale of embarrassed cops, suffering families, and unrepentant killers too smart for the system. Until now.

 

They are the Vidocq Society, the private club of pro bono crime-fighting avengers who assist police and families because the world has gone mad and somebody has to do something. For twenty years they have worked quietly as both armchair detectives and field agents redeeming the suffering and routing fugitive killers, putting them behind bars.

 

In a shadowy corner a bronze bust, the visage wide and arrogant, of the 19th Century detective Eugene Francois watches the proceedings.

 

I spent seven years reporting their story for the nonfiction book, The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases. I was stunned at the passion for justice that animated these 82 men and women – one for each year of Vidocq’s life. I saw them laboring in the present for a better future and thought I had captured the story.

I was wrong. The Vidocq Society derives its magic from the past, from Vidocq himself, whose mad genius changed us all. E.F. Vidocq was the burly, swashbuckling soldier, highway robber, killer, con-man, ladies man, master of disguise and thief-turned-detective whose unlikely story animates Napoleonic Paris like a red lantern. It is to Vidocq we owe debt for the first state detective agency (forerunner of the Yard and FBI) and the private detective agency, as well as advances in fingerprinting, invisible inks, plaster food casts, and systematic record-keeping of crimes and criminals. His status as “The Father of Forensic Science” is well-documented.

 

Yet Vidocq is one of those larger-than-life characters who draws contemporary snickers because he is simply “too much.” When I hear such snickers I know am in the presence of a healthy skeptic who may well be right, or, just as likely, a cynic who chooses to be blind to wonders and marvels.

 

Vidocq’s greatest marvel may be the detective novel. His memoirs, allegedly written by his friend Balzac, were a smash 1830s bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Though largely fictionalized, they inspired Edgar Allen Poe, in Philadelphia in the 1840s, to write The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the first detective story, in which he introduces C. August Dupin, the first fictional sleuth – a brilliant, shadowy amateur whose story is told by a more conventional assistant and admirer. Vidocq’s influence on Sherlock Holmes’ is clear and acknowledged by Arthur Conan Doyle; it continues from Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin to the cop-buddy teams of today’s movies and thrillers.

 

The modern noir detective grew stoic and hard-boiled, with tough-guys Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, but the influence of Vidocq on these haunted loners and unbowed modern knights remains all the way to Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch. And thus it ever will be. For modern police work was invented in the 19th Century as the fact-gathering, rational procedure that it thankfully remains. But the excessively rational, predictable man cannot function in an unpredictable world — and especially cannot penetrate evil- without the eccentric, night-stalking sleuths who reads the dark and senseless heart.

 

This is true in crime fiction and fact. “Facts, even DNA,” says the gaunt, lonely, tobacco-addicted loner Richard Walter, whom Scotland Yard calls “the living Sherlock Holmes,”are meaningless until they are interpreted.”

 

The dour Victorian-styled Walter, one of the greatest forensic psychologists and criminal profilers in the world, founded the Vidocq Society with celebrated forensic artist Frank Bender – who has put mass murderers behind bars with his psychic artistic visions and boasts of sleeping with more than 300 women– and former FBI agent-turned-private eye William Fleisher.

 

Fleisher, who once ran U.S. Customs law enforcement in three states, is the only conventional man of the three founders, yet hardly so. He named the Vidocq Society. He has written a classic book on interrogation, but if you ask him about it he pulls a copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables out of his desk drawer. Hugo was Vidocq’s friend, too, he says, and based both the criminal Valjean and the detective Javert on Vidocq.

 

“My favorite scene in all literature is Bishop Myriel’s forgiveness of Valjean for stealing the bishop’s silver. He says, I have bought your soul for goodness, for God.” Each time he reads the scene, the former FBI agent weeps.

 

“Vidocq’s greatest gift to us was redemption. He was a redeemed man who worked to redeem others. That’s what I want to do with the Vidocq Society. I want to buy souls.”

 

Michael Capuzzo, author of The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases (Gotham, August 10, 2010), is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Close to Shore and a former feature writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Life. He lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

"Cuius testiculos habeas, habeas cardia et cerebellum."

Posted
  • Like 1
Quote
“Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not to kill.”
 
-Jonathan Littell <<Les Bienveillantes>>
Quote

"The chancellor, the late chancellor, was only partly correct. He was obsolete. But so is the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, entity, or ideology becomes obsolete when it stockpiles the wrong weapons: when it captures territories, but not minds; when it enslaves millions, but convinces nobody. When it is naked, yet puts on armor and calls it faith, while in the Eyes of God it has no faith at all. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man...that state is obsolete."

-Rod Serling

 

Posted

 

Congressman from Colorado... who is an AVID player of League of Legends.

  • Like 1

Victor of the 5 year fan fic competition!

 

Kevin Butler will awesome your face off.

Posted

nKZfsTi.jpg

 

What a beautiful machine.

  • Like 1

Swedes, go to: Spel2, for the latest game reviews in swedish!

Posted (edited)

Because I couldn't be (to borrow a British phrase) arsed to find and resurrect the NHL thread

 

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Two American symbols enter, only one leaves.

Edited by Agiel
Quote
“Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not to kill.”
 
-Jonathan Littell <<Les Bienveillantes>>
Quote

"The chancellor, the late chancellor, was only partly correct. He was obsolete. But so is the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, entity, or ideology becomes obsolete when it stockpiles the wrong weapons: when it captures territories, but not minds; when it enslaves millions, but convinces nobody. When it is naked, yet puts on armor and calls it faith, while in the Eyes of God it has no faith at all. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man...that state is obsolete."

-Rod Serling

 

Posted (edited)

Pulptastic - Korean Artist Beautifully Illustrates Real Love

We’re all so used to the grandiose tales of love in the movies — running through a crowded airport, sending love letters every single day for ten years, leaving one’s entire life behind — that anything less than trial by combat just seems lazy.
 
But Korean artist “Puuung” is intent on changing that narrative. “Love is something that everybody can relate to. And Love comes in ways that we can easily overlook in our daily lives.
So, I try to find the meaning of love in our daily lives and make it into artwork,” she writes.
 
With her beautifully-drawn illustrations, Puuung reminds us that when it comes to love, it’s the little things that matter.
Puuung’s works can be found on her grafolio, but here are some of our favorites:

 
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554080f78ad27.jpg Edited by Raithe
  • Like 4

"Cuius testiculos habeas, habeas cardia et cerebellum."

Posted (edited)

What the **** was that.

 

EDIT:

 

 

 

 

 

Why do Korean and Japanese artists/cartoonists so often choose to make their characters look white/Caucasian?

 

Honest question.

 

(This is, after all, the "weird & random" thread ;))

 

 

They don't. They way they visualized themselves in art is just similar to the way we visualized ourselves in art. It's coincidental.

Edited by TrueNeutral
Posted (edited)

https://www.goldenears.philips.com/en/challenge.html#

 

A pretty cool test. Some parts much harder than others: unfortunately, to unlock the next stage of tests, you have to finish the entire first set, which takes some time (and most of the beginning levels are really easy and a waste of time). Hardest ones for me were the last of the spectral balance ones, the MP3 artifacts, and reverberation. Trying to tell the difference between a well-encoded "low quality" 128kbps MP3 and a higher quality file is pretty danged hard.

 

(edit) This is ridiculous.

 

 

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18 different answers to choose from each part of the level...but I'm so close to finishing this...

Edited by Bartimaeus
Quote

How I have existed fills me with horror. For I have failed in everything - spelling, arithmetic, riding, tennis, golf; dancing, singing, acting; wife, mistress, whore, friend. Even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of 'not trying'. I tried with all my heart.

In my dreams, I am not crippled. In my dreams, I dance.

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