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.
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.
"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.
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.
...as seen on Kotaku.
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 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)
Note: Each track may be played thrice. Tracking method likely by IP.
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.
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.
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?

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.
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.
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.
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.”
Dumbass
Best one:
17. Don’t waste your breath proclaiming what’s really important to you. How you spend your time says it all.
Sugarshock (2 3): A webcomic by Joss Whedon.
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.
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.
Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.
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.



