January 2008 Archives

To promote an upcoming monster movie, Sony Pictures installed a holographic rig in Tokyo Bay that projects the monster onto a haze of water. What you're seeing in the video wasn't added after the fact--that's actually what it looks like in real life.

Isabella Rossellini has made a series of short films in which she dresses up like insects (always the males, for some reason) and acts out bug sex. You'll find a quartet of stills at the link.

"There's no Brad Pitt of smell," Herz says. "Body odor is an external manifestation of the immune system, and the smells we think are attractive come from the people who are most genetically compatible with us."

"Not only does kissing serve the utilitarian purpose of providing a sample of MHC, but it also magnifies the other attraction signals--if only as a result of proximity." -- Time Magazine

But sometimes the tastes and scents can trick us, or other factors, such as the "divorce pill" make us think something is right for us when it may not be so. These insights found in a pile of stinky t-shirts.

Cover stories this month in both Psychology Today and Time magazine reveal why we kiss, why we flirt, why women's menstrual cycles sync, and many other keys to attraction. It's all so...romantic.

A BMW M5 crash that occurred in Ocala, Florida over the weekend. (video - with a car advertisement opening, ironically). The five teenagers in the car flew 200 feet off an airport runway, then hit a tree, splitting the car in half. The driver, Josh Ammirato, was an active member of m5board.com, an online BMW M5 forum community. He was known as AmericanM5, he had posted only a day before the crash, asking about rough shifts when exceeding 140MPH. The thread about his crash. Edmunds Inside Line has full details of story, including map of the accident.

Spanish artist Juan Francisco Casas creates his large artworks using just a blue ballpoint pen.

The "I Pirate Music" t-shirt, $28, is also available in red.

Would you vote for an articulate horizontal-thinking Canadian? Race and religion in America defined through obfuscation.

A proposal for the monetization of the file sharing of music from the Songwriters and Recording Artists of Canada. "Most Canadians are aware that the Internet and mobile phone networks have become major sources of music. What they may not know is that songwriters and performers typically receive no compensation of any kind when their music is shared or illegally downloaded... We believe the time has come to put in place a reasonable and unobtrusive system of compensation for creators of music in regard to this popular and growing use of their work."

Popcards.fr is a collection of kitschy French postcards from the 50's, 60's and 70's. Kitschy barely does justice to this collection. Categories abound, including pets, humor (and I use the term loosely), lovers, cuisine and perhaps the two most interesting sections, guys and gals.

The Washington Post publishes a fine array of puzzles. You are given four sets of seven tiles-each of which spells a six or seven letter word.

The following Scrabble Gram ran last week on Friday. Can you find the hidden word in the first set of tiles? (You can click on the image to make it larger, if you need).

The set of first tiles seem to suggest a very dirty answer. I'm not sure how it got past their editor. (The real answer, of course, is entirely G-rated). Click here to get the "real" answer.

The 25 Greatest Duets Of All Time (with embedded YouTube videos of each). Duets, by nature, are a corny type of song. Sure, there's a handful that we recognize here that are also some of best tunes ever recorded, but there's something inherently cheesy and fun about duets that make them a fun guilty pleasure for millions to enjoy.

Lego wrangler Lwelyk has put together a little blog featuring his video game Lego creations. Each piece is an exact recreation of the original 2D sprite artwork where one pixel equals one square Lego block. Aside from Mother Brain we also get Phanto, Mushroom Block, Flying Shy Guy, Tingle and tons of others. The Mother Brain is by far the most impressive but the Twinrova piece definitely gets an honorable mention.
...as seen on Kotaku.

The National Post looks on with mild horror as American linguists report on the growing trend in the American south to use "Canadian" as a masking euphemism for black people, so that white racists can say socially inappropriate things without tipping listeners off about the cancer in their souls.

Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati going by the name CincyBlurg reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. "She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn't understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else," the blogger wrote.

"After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her co-workers. He told her that 'Canadian' was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to [with the N-word.]"

A similar case in Kansas City was reported last year on a Listserv, or electronic mailing list, used by linguistics experts. A University of Kansas linguist said that a waitress friend reported that "fellow workers used to use a name for inner-city families that were known to not leave a tip: Canadians. 'Hey, we have a table of Canadians.... They're all yours.' "

The rules of the contest are simple: create the best Steampunk version of a Star Wars vehicle. Out of Legos.

Couch for sale.

A 17-gigabyte file purporting to contain more than half a million images lifted from private MySpace profiles has shown up on BitTorrent, potentially making it the biggest privacy breach yet on the top social networking site.  
 
The creator of the file says he compiled the photos earlier this month using the MySpace security hole that Wired News reported on last week. That hole, still unacknowledged by the News Corporation-owned site, allowed voyeurs to peek inside the photo galleries of some MySpace users who had set their profiles to "private," despite MySpace's assurances that such images could only be seen by people on a user's friends' list.  
 
"I think the greatest motivator was simply to prove that it could be done," file creator "DMaul" says in an e-mail interview. "I made it public that I was saving these images. However, I am certain there are mischievous individuals using these hacks for nefarious purposes..."  
 
MySpace Bug Leaks 'Private' Teen Photos to Voyeurs (Wired, 17 Jan 2008)  

Horse mask? Check. Wild mushrooms? Check. Improbable thongs and partial nudity? Check. Dancing? Check. Craziest goddamn thing I've ever seen on the internet? Absolutely. As if I even need to say it, this isn't safe for work, for human consumption, or retaining what few shreds of sanity you believe that you may still cling to.

It seems that everyone wants to post their toplists for free game recommendations at the moment. First up is Gnomes' Lair with 100 excellent free games in bloom. Can't forget 1up with 101 Free Games 2008. And last but still well worth checking out is Indiegames' Best Freeware Arcade Games 2007 and Best Freeware Adventure Games 2007. If that isn't enough for you, also worth taking a gander at is Javet's Freeware Game of the Day thread on Tigsource.

Science Daily reports that new research at the University of Chicago finds evidence for a clever way that people manage to alleviate the pain of loneliness: They create people in their surroundings to keep them company.  
 
Social scientists call this tendency "anthropomorphism." As a research topic, the phenomenon carries important therapeutic and societal implications.

Collage artist Stephen Rothwell makes astounding steampunk-scented Victorian apocalyptic fancies that tickle me to my toes. I could look at this stuff all day.

 

Motorized cordless twin rubber band minigun, capable of firing 40 bands per second.

A father sodomized his 18-year-old stepson to avenge the teenager's alleged rape of the man's 8-year-old daughter, police said. 

 

This IS safe for work despite the title. I've never seen a woman touch an organ with quite as much enthusiasm and skill.

Dildo chess set (NSFW, probably). Other suggestive chess sets, part of a small collection of, er, pawnography.

A very rare phenomenon found with the Hubble Space Telescope may offer insights into dark matter, dark energy, the nature of distant galaxies, and even the curvature of the Universe, according to an international team of astronomers who are reporting at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

This effect is created when three (four, if you count ours) galaxies line up perfectly behind each other while being great distances apart, the phenomena is an observable proof of Einstein's general relativity. It's not often you get to see a picture of space-time being warped by gravity, eh?

If you want to watch Nick having sex with a prostitute, he's happy to let you.
 
The 36-year-old bank-security technician drove eight hours from his home in Metz, France, to Big Sister, a Prague brothel where customers peruse a touch-screen menu of blondes, brunettes and redheads available for free. The catch is clients have to let their exploits be filmed and posted on the Internet.

World location quiz a fun little quiz on world locations for a Friday afternoon.

"By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black".

237 reasons why humans have sex (PDF). The research paper referenced in David Buss' contribution to The Edge. NYT comment and analysis.

Improve your Rock Band drumming technique. Rock Band as in the videogame, that is.

Following up on some recent cyclist deaths in Portland where cyclists waiting in bike lanes at red lights were crushed by right-turning trucks the strongcity is introducting 'bike boxes' to encourage bikes to wait out in front of stopped traffic. The city also plans to promote lower-traffic streets as 'bike boulevards' as an alternative to bike lines on high-traffic streets. Last summer when I got smashed by a car taking a right turn without checking his mirror, I was lucky to not be seriously hurt, only my pride/smashed cell phone. The fact that people are dying from the same thing that hit me is a little scary to say the least.

The Wired Science blog posted a YouTube video of a liquid that changes color from clear to yellow to blue over and over again.

In 1973, the spectacular demonstration was perfected by Thomas Briggs and Warren Rauscher, two amazing high school science teachers.

Over thirty-five years later, chemists are still trying to fully understand how it works.

What they do know: Several reactions take place at once. One of them produces iodine, which gives the amber color. Hydrogen peroxide reduces other chemicals into iodide ions. Along with normal iodine, the charged particles interact with starch to create it a blue-black color. The speeds of those transformations are constantly changing. As one overtakes the other, the color suddenly changes.

 

Sir Edmund Hillary died today, aged 88. Best known as the man who "knocked the bastard off", by scaling Mt Everest, Hillary was an adventurer, activist, and all round kiwi bloke. We will miss you.

Last week on CBC Radio's national science program, Quirks and Quarks, they broadcast a recording of a fascinating panel discussion on "The Physics of Information: What the Universe Doesn't Want You to Know," held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. In this wide-ranging discussion a panel of distinguished and likable physicists run down such subjects as the universe as a computer, quantum teleportation, the fundamentals of information science, The panelists were in a state of near-hilarity through much of the the event, and that only made the subject better. Included on the panel were: Dr. Leonard Susskind (Stanford), Dr. Seth Lloyd (MIT), Dr. Christopher Fuchs (UNM), Sir Anthony Leggett (Urbana-Champaign), and the moderator, Bob McDonald, host of Quirks and Quarks. Listen yourself.

The Physics of Information was the topic of a recent public forum, sponsored by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, and moderated by Bob McDonald. And Quirks was there to record the event. Do ideas about information and reality inspire fruitful new approaches to the hardest problems of modern physics? What can we learn about the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, the beginning of the universe and our understanding of black holes, by thinking about the very essence of information? Those are some of the questions our panel tackled.

AT&T is considering adding content filters to its network. These will try to figure out if your network connection contains a copyrighted work, and censor any communications that are believed to be infringing.

This strategy will work for approximately 30 seconds -- about as long as it takes for people who like to download copyrighted works to switch to using an encrypted protocol -- and thereafter it will be primarily useful to bullies and schemers who will use it to silence critics (by claiming their works infringe and getting them censored) and prevent competition (by raising the cost of operating an ISP through the inclusion of the spyware and the hardware to run it on).

Of course, AT&T has already shown its commitment to its customers by helping the NSA conduct wholesale warrantless wiretapping on their entire nation -- adding a censorious, expensive, and useless piece of spyware to its network operations is entirely in keeping with its behavior.

“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.

Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.

“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”

A 51-year-old systems administrator from New Jersey has received the longest federal prison sentence for attempting a crime designed to damage a computer system. Yung-Hsun Lin (also known as Andy Lin) was given 30 months in jail for planting code on a company server in 2003 that was supposed to destroy a medical drug database. He was also ordered by US District Judge Jose Linares to pay $81,200 in restitution to his former employer, Medco Health Solutions.

Dumbass

Sweet! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has made a 3D printer that forms objects out of sugar.

50 Things I've Learned in 50 Years.
Best one:

17. Don’t waste your breath proclaiming what’s really important to you. How you spend your time says it all.

"I watched man burn to death, heard others screaming in the fog." A massive, 50-car pileup, the result of three or more crashes on I-4, has led to at least 3 fatalities and 82 injuries in central Florida near Orlando. The smoke and fog were so bad that rescue efforts were hindered. Drivers with no visibility did not know whether to stay in their burning cars or risk running out onto the highway for help.

The Huffington Post's round up of "must see" online videos for the week includes this clip from the TV show Wife Swap, about a spoiled teen and her doting parents.

Sugarshock (2 3): A webcomic by Joss Whedon.

This section shows many different jujitsu moves and techniques from the traditional art of Jujitsu, along with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu ground-fighting moves.  
 
If you are a training student, many of the traditional techniques may be on your own syllabus at your club. There will obviously be some differences since all clubs will train slightly different, giving more emphasis on particular moves.  
 
Solid presentation of some of the basics. I may not know kung-fu, but I'm willing to learn.

Leo Laporte and Martin Sargent of TechTV's "The Screen Savers" discuss an infamous satire article from Adequacy.org

Talking with Americans... love it.

 

A great recipe-oriented blog with very good accompanying photography.

This is why I dont do Roller Coasters

Strong winds brought a roller coaster to a halt at the top of its loop at a fun park in Anhui province in east China, leaving 18 people hanging upside down for about half an hour with six of them falling ill, an official said.

It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life's most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA -- an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought.  
 
Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.

Snippet from CNN:

Members of a Czech art group who hacked into television broadcasting with images of a hoax nuclear explosion were charged and will have to stand trial, a state prosecutor said Thursday.  
 
The six members of the Prague-based Ztohoven group were charged last month with spreading false information and face up to three years in jail if convicted, said Dusan Ondracek, the state prosecutor in the northern town of Trutnov, who is in charge of the case.

Dreams: Night School "The primary function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events, so that threat recognition and avoidance happens faster and more automatically in comparable real situations."

SomethingAwful's Bob "BobServo" Mackey has created this fantastic (and eerily believable) set of RIAA liner notes for this year's CDs. I personally Love the 3rd one.

Burrito Project is an organization which helps feed the hungry and homeless in cities around the world. The organization encourages people "to get together with friends and build burritos to take to the streets". Anyone can start a Burrito Project and the organization encourages everyone to help feed the hungry in their local communities. Haven't heard of the Burrito Project? There's probably a good, albeit very strange, reason why.