Link to Article: Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (Beer Can House)
Quote: Claim: Photographs show rooms of a townhouse filled with beer cans and boxes.
Status: True.
Dang.
Link to Article: AP Wire | 05/30/2006 | Natchez hospital taking bids on helipad
Quote: NATCHEZ, Miss. – Adams County will take bids in June for construction of a helipad behind Natchez Regional Hospital.
Currently, helicopters transporting patients must land at the Natchez-Adams County Airport – 18 miles away – and transport by ambulance.
This is good news for the region. It’s a long ambulance ride from the airport to the hospital…
Link to Article: Strawjet Project
Quote: The desire to use straw as a building material is as old as the agricultural revolution, but straw based products have always suffered from the apparent lack of strength of the plant itself. Previous technologies from straw bale construction to the recent development of compressed straw-board and straw panels have all begun with crushed, chopped straw. The fundamental advance embodied in the Strawjet technology is the use of the whole undamaged plant stem. The compressive strength of straw when loaded parallel with the stem is impressive. The Strawjet system seeks to use that strength by bundling the plant stems into “cables” about 2 inches in diameter.
So as they harvest the fields, they’re creating these continuous cables, which are cut into 8’ lengths.
(although I would assume this could be changed—I can imagine spooling up the cables and transporting them elsewhere for projects that require different lengths)
So far, they are then typically covered in papercrete (concrete made from cement and paper instead of cement and rock, basically, for a lighter substance that can be sprayed onto forms – something my uncle does).
Basically, you end up with a building substance that is very strong and environmentally friendly. Here’s a picture of a wall-segment for testing:
This is potentially revolutionary. It has been pointed out that, if nothing else, it gives farmers a cheap building material for their own use. It can also provide income for something otherwise viewed as waste.
My only question is in regards to how important plowing the straw back under is for sustaining the land. But I trust someone will be thinking about this… Assuming that’s not a major concern, this could well be very revolutionary.
I don’t know the amount of material that could be made, but surely it could replace a non-trivial percentage of the building materials used. Seems like if it caused less reliance on wood, that couldn’t be a bad thing—assuming that would allow for more mature forests, although a cynical point of view might be that fewer forests of any type (natural vs. renewed) would be the result… Still, that’s merely a cynical point of view, and surely this would be a valuable tool to help the environment.
And surely this would help not just the United States, but other countries as well…
I’m no expert, but I don’t see much of a downside, even trying to be pessimistic.
NOTE: I do NOT recommend anyone download and run this, except maybe geeks on a box you use solely for testing. Unlike beta software, which is usually relatively stable, alpha software is usually very unstable.
Link to Article: mozilla links
Quote: As planned Firefox Alpha 3 (code name Bon Echo) has been released to achieve the goal of having a feature complete build at the alpha level.
I can’t wait for the release! 
Although I suppose…. I will have to wait.
Firefox rocks.
Link to Article: fadtastic – a multi-author web design trends journal » Blog Archive » The end of an era for Times New Roman?
Quote: Earlier this year, Microsoft released betas of Office 2007, and the first thing reviewers noticed, besides the new interface, was that Times New Roman had been deposed as the default font with something called . . . Calibri?
I’m just surprised they didn’t go with Verdana… Of course, my opinion might change once I get my hands on Calibri – I haven’t seen it yet.