UNCONVENTIONAL WORLD RECORDS

Hi-Tech Study Fails to Find Nessie (the Loch Ness Monster)

Tue Jul 29, 8:32 AM ET Add Top Stories - AP to My Yahoo!

By SUE LEEMAN, Associated Press Writer

LONDON - The Loch Ness monster is a Loch Ness myth.

At least according to the British Broadcasting Corp., which says a team which trawled the loch for any signs of the famous monster came up with nothing more than a buoy moored several yards below the surface.

The team used 600 separate sonar beams and satellite navigation technology to trawl the loch, but found no trace of any monster, the BBC said in a television program broadcast Sunday.

Previous reported sightings of a large beast in the gray waters of the lake led to speculation that the loch may contain a plesiosaur, a marine reptile which died out with the dinosaurs.

The BBC researchers said they looked at the habits of modern marine reptiles, such as crocodiles and leatherback turtles, to try to work out how a plesiosaur might have behaved.

They hoped the air in Nessie’s lungs would reflect a distorted signal back to their sonar sensors.

“We went from shoreline to shoreline, top to bottom on this one, we have covered everything in this loch and we saw no signs of any large living animal in the loch,” said Ian Florence, one of the specialists who carried out the survey for the BBC.

His colleague Hugh MacKay added: “We got some good clear data of the loch, steep sided, flat bottomed � nothing unusual I’m afraid. There was an anticipation that we would come up with a large sonar anomaly that could have been a monster, but it wasn’t to be.”

The BBC team said the only explanation for the persistence of the monster myth � and regular “sightings” � is that people see what they want to see.

To test this, the researchers hid a fence post beneath the surface of the loch and raised it in view of coach full of tourists.

Interviewed afterward, most said they had observed a square object but when asked to sketch what they had seen, several drew monster-shaped heads, the BBC said.

There have been reports of sightings of a “monster” in the loch since the time of St. Columba in the 6th century.

Many who have reported sightings have described a beast similar to a plesiosaur, but experts say it is 65 million years since the last fossil record of plesiosaurs. Loch Ness is only 10,000 years old, so anything living there must be much younger.

BBC TV plans to broadcast a documentary on the investigation, “Searching For The Loch Ness Monster.”

Badminton, World Championships 2003, Birmingham

Well, what can I say but syabas Wong Choon Hann. He became the first Malaysian ever to emerge runner-up of such a prestigious event. The final was very close, could’ve gone either way. Well, there’s always a chance to get Xia Xuanze next time, perhaps at KK 2-7 September

The furthest any Malaysian had gone before was the quarterfinals - Rashid Sidek and Ong Ewe Hock a few years ago.

Swimming, World Championships 2003

Michael Phelps, 18 (1.93m, 87kg) outdoes not only Ian Thorpe (20 yrs old, 1.95m, 102kg) but the great Mark Spitz (shorter and lighter - 78kg only) at the World Swimming Championships in Barcelona. He won 3 golds (?), the same as Ian Thorpe (?) but Thorpe did NOT break any world records this time round. Phelps, in contrast broke 5 individual world records, including 2 in one magical night (about 1 hour apart!). The most broken by Spitz in a single championships was 4 set at the ‘72 Olympics. But what we will all eagerly wait for is to see if Phelps can break Spitz’s other famous record of 7 Olympic gold medals next summer in Athens. For the record, Ian Thorpe also broke 4 world records (but were they individual recs) at the 2001 world championships in Fukuoka, Japan.

This meet also established Kosuke Kitajima as the greatest Asian swimmer ever, and the world’s greatest breaststroker, breaking 2 world records in this stroke.

Tour de France, 2003

July 2003
Yes he did it again! Lance Armstrong wins Tour de France for the 5th year running, becoming only the 3rd man to do so, and the first since Miguel Indurain achieved the penta in 1991-1995. Armstrong, 31 won his toughest race ever. Tour de France is the ultimate long distance cycle race.

The Gutenberg Bible is now online, courtesy of Ransom Center, University of Texas.

Original news source: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=528&ncid=528&e=4&u=/ap/20030723/ap_on_hi_te/digital_scripture_2

The Ransom Center edition is not the first to go digital. Gutenberg Bibles in England and Japan already have been posted on the Internet and the Library of Congress (news - web sites) has one available on CD-ROM, said Richard Oram, head librarian at the university’s Harry Ransom Center, one of the world’s top cultural archives.

However, Ransom Center officials think their copy is the best of the lot, calling it the most-used version still in existence

Gutenberg’s Bible revolutionized printing in Western civilization. Printed in Mainz, Germany, in the 1450s, the books were the first major Western book printed from movable type.

According to the Ransom Center, only about 200 were produced and only 48 copies exist today, each one of them unique since local artisans were hired to illuminate the letters opening each book.

The Ransom Center acquired its two-volume copy, which includes some illuminations in gold leaf, in 1978. Oram estimated the copy, which is 1,268 pages in two volumes, is worth up to $20 million.

The Texas Gutenberg was used in monasteries in southern Germany as late as the 1760s. It was marked up by monks who scratched out some passages and corrected others. Other markings indicate which sections were to be read aloud or reserved for church services.

“Our copy is the most interesting in the world,” Oram said.

One top scholar agreed.

“This is probably the most extensively annotated and corrected copy surviving,” said Paul Needham of Princeton University’s Scheide Library. “This is a very great treasure.”

Needham said the online access, and the soon-to-be-developed high resolution CD-ROM, will be a boon to scholars who want to look at the Bible without traveling to Austin where it is enclosed in temperature-controlled glass and under the watch of 24-hour security.

Ransom Center staff began digitally scanning the Bible’s linen pages in June 2002. The finished project gives Web viewers 7,000 images and special software was used to allow for full visibility of the text and illuminations.

Now that I’ve hooked onto Rev Jim Jones, the People’s Temple and the tragedy that was Jonestown

Most Peoples Temple Documents Still Sealed

Surviving the Heart of Darkness - Twenty years later, Jackie Speier remembers how her companions and rum helped her endure the night of the Jonestown massacre

Jonestown Memorial Project

If you thought Rev Jim Jones of Jonestown, Guyana was evil (killed 900+ of his own churchmembers in the late 70s), meet Credonia Mwerinde of Uganda, leader of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. No, not even Ahmad Najib Aris can beat her, he only burned 1 woman, but this Priestess of Death burned ALIVE 600+ people at the SAME time, with the fire “so intense their skulls exploded”! The movement’s mass murder/suicide seems to have surpassed Jonestown as the most horrific cult tragedy in recorded history.

The movement was founded in the 80s by Joseph Kibwetere, a prominent Roman Catholic and active in Ugandan politics, but then his mind went cuckoo and was hospitalised for “mental problems”. His powers of persuasion was such that a Catholic priest Dominica Kataribaabo joined the movement and became a leader below Kibwetere. But Joseph Kibwetere’s special revelation led to expulsion and eventual excommunication for both men from the Roman Catholic Church. The past Bishop of Mbarara Diocese said, “Kibwetere claimed that he could talk to God, which was unacceptable.”

Later he merged his leadership with a former prostitute named Credonia Mwerinde often called the “programmer.” Some say Mwerinde, who claimed to have met the Virgin Mary, ultimately eclipsed the cult’s founder in both real importance and power. Fr. Paul Ikazire, a priest and former cult member said she dominated the group and that “Kibwetere was just a figurehead.” He characterized Mwerinde as “a trickster, obsessed with the desire to grab other people’s property.” The Virgin Mary as channeled through Mwerinde proscribed all the rules of the group.

I came across this story by chance, while waiting for the doctor at Pertama Clinic, Towering, I chanced upon an August 2000 issue of Newsweek and there she was, occupying half a page somewhere in the middle pages.

http://www.rickross.com/groups/tencommandments.html

Probably most expensive hotel in the world: Hotel Burj Al Arab, Dubai

Maybe this is one of the 2 seven star hotels in the world
the other one is empire hotel, brunei darussalam

looks like cheapest rate is 800 euros per night!

http://www.firstclasstravel.de/burjalarab.htm

Jul 19 2003

By Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Fancy living another 100 years or more? Some experts said on Saturday that scientific advances will one day enable humans to last decades beyond what is now seen as the natural limit of the human life span.

“I think we are knocking at the door of immortality,” said Michael Zey, a Montclair State University business professor and author of two books on the future. “I think by 2075 we will see it and that’s a conservative estimate.”

Zey spoke on the sidelines of the annual conference of the World Future Society, a group that ponders how the future will look across many different aspects of society.

In a presentation at the meeting in San Francisco, Donald Louria, a professor at New Jersey Medical School in Newark said advances in manipulating cells and genes as well as nanotechnology make it likely humans will live in the future beyond what has been possible in the past.

“What was science fiction a decade ago is no longer science fiction,” he said.

500 YEARS?

“There is a dramatic and intensive push so that people can live from 120 to 180 years,” he said. “Some have suggested that there is no limit and that people could live to 200 or 300 or 500 years.”

Outside the conference, many scientists who specialize in aging are skeptical of such claims and say the human body is just not designed to last past about 120 years. Even with healthier lifestyles and less disease, they say failure of the brain and other organs will eventually condemn all humans.

“These people spout off as though a large part of the population is going to be able to do something like this. It’s just way beyond reality,” said Thomas Perls, who leads the New England Centenarian Study, the largest such analysis of the oldest of the old. “It’s just pure science fiction.”

“We are fast approaching what our bodies are capable of achieving,” he said in a telephone interview. “To get even the average person to be 100 or to get them to 180 is like trying to get a space shuttle to Pluto.”

STAMPING OUT DISABILITIES

Any dramatic extension of the human life span would depend on altering the onset of disabilities that accompany the aging process by changing one’s genetic make up, said Harvey Cohen, director of the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development at Duke University Medical Center.

“It’s certainly unlikely any time in the near future,” he said in an interview. “Sure there is a possibility but there is no data currently available to suggest ways that would happen.”

Scientists also differ on what kind of life the super aged might live.

“It remains to be seen if you pass the threshold of say 120, you know; could you be healthy enough to have good quality of life?” said Leonard Poon, director of the University of Georgia Gerontology Center. “Currently people who could get to that point are not in good health at all.”

Poon, who leads a study of more than 150 centenarians in Georgia, cited the case of Jeanne Louise Calment of France, the oldest person on record who died at age 122 in 1997.

“At 122 she was fairly debilitated. I visited her when she was 119 in France and at that time she was pretty much blind and having very much difficulty hearing,” he said.

Hah! At last she publicly admitted what we’ve suspected for so long……….

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Pop princess Britney Spears (news) has admitted that she had sex with former boyfriend Justin Timberlake (news) despite once vowing to remain a virgin until she wed.

In the upcoming issue of W magazine, Spears details her relationship with Timberlake, the most-watched music industry romance since Courtney Love (news) and Kurt Cobain.

“The most painful thing I have ever experienced was that breakup,” Spears told W. “We were together so long and I had this vision. You think you’re going to spend the rest of your life together. Where I come from, the woman is the homemaker, and that’s how I was brought up — you cook for your kids.”

The 21-year-old Spears, whose stratospheric rise from Mouseketeer to pop megastar mirrored Timberlake’s success, revealed that she had sex with the ‘N Sync (news - web sites) boy band singer because she believed they would marry someday.

“I’ve only slept with one person my whole life,” she said. “It was two years into my relationship with Justin, and I thought he was the one. But I was wrong!”

Spears, now cutting an image-shifting, comeback album after an 18-month hiatus, said she now realizes “I need my single time” to learn to “be self loving.”

“I know it sounds cliche and cheesy, but I really believe that if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be,” she said.

For now, Spears said, she’s hunting far afield for a new beau — especially in Australia and Spain where men are less “fuddy duddy.”

As for reports linking Spears to Irish heart throb Colin Farrell (news), she said: “Yes I kissed him. Of course I did! He’s the cutest, hottest thing in the world — wooh! He’s such a bad boy. But it was nothing serious.”

The kiss left her with a “craving” for more of the same. “I haven’t had a boy in a really long time … just a kiss, man. Just a kiss would be nice.”

Countercult on the Internet by Dr Cowan
http://c.faculty.umkc.edu/cowande/ccw.htm

Aircraft cleaner Ahmad Najib Aris, 27, charged with raping Canny Ong, 29, at 7th mile Old Klang Road on June 14, 2003, between 1am and 5am, later strangling her, burning her body, and dumping it in a drain. He’s alleged to have stalked and then abducted her earlier at the covered parking lot of Bangsar Shopping Complex the night before.
Computer engineer Noor Suzaily Mukhtar, 24, on 7 October 2000, was raped and murdered by bus driver, Hanafi Mat Hassan, 34, on the Ekspres Kiara bus at the Klang Bus Stop in Kuala Lumpur, at 8 am. At that time, she was alone on the bus. Her naked body was found on a road divider at a housing project area at Taman Bukit Tinggi, Klang on the same day.

Student Nurul Hanis Kamil, 16, who went home alone along a road, was killed by strangulation with her the string of her schoolbag, her anus violated with a piece of wood, after being raped by her schoolmate aged 17 in a bush near Taman Koperasi Risda, Merlimau, Melaka between 3.15 and 4.15pm on 3 July 2001.