Free Republic

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

August 23, 2014 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - In 1200 A.D., a Swedish man named Frederik Ugarph found a hard wood statue only about six inches (15 cm) high of a little person wearing a conical hat in what is now Trondheim, Norway. The statue was standing on a pedestal engraved with the words: “NISSE Riktig Storrelse.” That means, “Gnome, actual height.” Owned and housed today by the Oliv family in Uppsala, Norway, X-ray tests indicate the wooden statue is more than 2,000 years old, perhaps carved from a tree that is no longer known. Another historic account of a “miniature person”...

As archaeologists dug in preparation for a new railway line, they found traces of two rows of wooden pillars in Old Uppsala... One stretched about 1,000 yards and the other was half as long... were likely from the 5th century...

Scientists at Uppsala University have found that the widespread belief that women and children are saved first in maritime disasters is a myth, unless the men are threatened with physical violence like on the Titanic. “It is expected that the crew should rescue passengers, but our results show that captains and crew are more likely to survive than passengers,” said Mikael Elinder at the Department of Economics, Uppsala University and at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) in a statement. “We also found that women and children were more inclined to die than men.” This, the scientists think, indicates...

Why the Announced Test at Uppsala Should Show if Rossi’s E-Cat Claims Are Valid Featured by admin I’m very happy to be able to have another guest post today — this one written by Dr. Johannes Hagel, of Neuss, Germany . Being a physicist I consider the announced test of Andrea Rossis E-Cat at Uppsala as one of the most important of all the series of tests we have been seen so far. This for the following reason: In the announced test for the first time there will be made use of a heat exchanger which transfers the energy of...

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Lars Vilks, the Swedish cartoonist who drew Mohammed as a dog, was recently told that a scheduled lecture on free speech, to be held at Jönköping Högskolan, would be canceled due to "security concerns." This, of course, is a common evasion, intended to protect the brittle sensibilities of Muslim students while supposedly standing four square behind the right of free speech. Alas, the administrators in Jönköping had a point. During a lecture in Uppsala today Vilks was attacked by a pack of feral fundamentalists, one of whom managed to headbutt the artist and break his glasses. Police intervened and waged...

STOCKHOLM – A Swedish artist who angered Muslims by depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a dog was assaulted Tuesday as furious protesters interrupted his university lecture about the limits of free speech. Lars Vilks told The Associated Press a man leaped from the front row and head-butted him as he was delivering his lecture at Uppsala University, breaking Vilks' glasses but leaving him uninjured. Police later said the attacker was stopped before he could reach Vilks and that the artist may have bumped into plain-clothes officers who briskly evacuated him from the room. Three people were detained, but it wasn't...

Via Michael Moynihan at Reason. Remember Lars Vilks? A few years ago he decided to draw Mohammed as a pooch and has been dodging killers ever since, from garden variety Islamist nuts like “Jihad Jane” all the way up to the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Funny thing, though: Not only wasn’t he intimidated, he practically dared the mujahedeen to come and get him, letting CNN cameras film his home and even booby-trapping the place in case the soldiers of Allah paid him an unexpected visit. Quote: Vilks has faced numerous death threats over the controversial cartoon, but said...

SAN FRANCISCO, May 9 - The incident seemed alarming enough: a breach of a Cisco Systems network in which an intruder seized programming instructions for many of the computers that control the flow of the Internet. Now federal officials and computer security investigators have acknowledged that the Cisco break-in last year was only part of a more extensive operation - involving a single intruder or a small band, apparently based in Europe - in which thousands of computer systems were similarly penetrated. Investigators in the United States and Europe say they have spent almost a year pursuing the case involving...