February 2008 Archives

Experience the thrills of amateur surgery as you play Amateur Surgeon over at Adult Swim . You'll be performing transplants with a chainsaw, suturing wounds with staples and shocking patients back to life with a car battery.

I've been playing this all week. Uber fun

Haha, hot chick, but damn, test fire with blanks first so you dont blow somebodys head off with that damn thing.

Bathroom Rules with Owen Benjamin

As much I find Iron Man and his glib alter ego Tony Stark to be intolerable characters, I have to admit that Jon Favreau looks to have made a decent adaptation of the source material. And with a non-stop barrage of hard rock (AC/DC, Audioslave, Black Sabbath's "Iron Man", of course), constant alcohol imbibing, and the flagrant use of sports cars as backdrops, Iron Man looks to be the first superhero movie to fully capture the sensibilities of Maxim Magazine. The biggest surprise isn't that this looks like a surefire hit but that they didn't put Gwyneth Paltrow in a bikini. Make sure to watch this if you're a male 13 to 35. Otherwise, you're totally going to look like a gay..

 

Bacon Cups are sure to make your next party a hit.

Tampires - The tampons that want to suck your blood.

Dogs that have failed at being dogs.

Quantum Mechanics: Myths and Facts (pdf), a recently-updated paper on the Cornell arXiv peer-review site. By Hrvoje Nikolić of the Rudjer Bošković Institute in Croatia.
Note: the presence of a paper on arXiv does not necessarily mean it has been reviewed and is not equivalent to having been published in a journal.

Stare at the dot for 30 seconds. Then, without moving your eyes, move the mouse over the image. The image will look like it's in color until you move your eyes. (How make your own | More examples)

David Horvitz will do things for money.
Though I really doubt anyone will send money for the larger things, the things he offers are pretty interesting.

The Winners of the 10th Annual Independent Games Festival were announced Wednesday night at this year's GDC. Finalists in the Student Showcase included Crayon Physics Deluxe, Flip Side and Empyreal Nocturne, as well as a 2-D platformer named Polarity, developed by the same team behind Bandology and Skyrates.

The Amber Room found? German treasure hunters using electromagnetic pulse measurements are "90% sure" the Russian "Eighth Wonder of the World" was buried by the Nazi's in a man-made cavern 20 meters underground near the village of Deutschneudorf (map), but it will take "..until Easter to get into the chamber because it may contain booby traps and has to be secured by explosives experts.. The chamber is likely to be part of a labyrinth of storage rooms that the Nazis built." Russia is eyeing its return, "If, hypothetically speaking, the room still exists."

21 years ago, Andy Warhol died of complications from gallbladder surgery. Lou Reed and John Cale, two founding members of the Velvet Underground -- Warhol's Factory house band -- paid tribute to their mentor on the 1990 album Songs for Drella. Edward Lachman's recording of a 1991 performance is available on YouTube: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15.

New York Times review; Rolling Stone review (that curiously only credits Reed for the album); Cale-centric commentary on the album; a look back from Brooklyn Heights Blog. Bonus Reed/Cale performances from Saturday Night Live and Letterman.

Over 400 classical images of Death [warning: embedded music]

When I think of death The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson always pops into my head. 

Half a league half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred: 'Forward, the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns' he said: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. 'Forward, the Light Brigade!' Was there a man dismay'd ? Not tho' the soldier knew Some one had blunder'd: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do & die, Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them Volley'd & thunder'd; Storm'd at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare, Flash'd as they turn'd in air Sabring the gunners there, Charging an army while All the world wonder'd: Plunged in the battery-smoke Right thro' the line they broke; Cossack & Russian Reel'd from the sabre-stroke, Shatter'd & sunder'd. Then they rode back, but not Not the six hundred. Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon behind them Volley'd and thunder'd; Storm'd at with shot and shell, While horse & hero fell, They that had fought so well Came thro' the jaws of Death, Back from the mouth of Hell, All that was left of them, Left of six hundred. When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made! All the world wonder'd. Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred!

Security researchers are noticing an uptick in help-wanted ads for malware programmers who can write grammatically in many languages so that they can help send out targeted, plausible spam:

Advertisements for virus authors fluent in languages from Japanese to Portuguese are increasingly showing up online. Such recruiting efforts are finding traction thanks partly to the economic conditions in nations like China and Russia. Both countries have a surplus of skilled coders who lack regular work, or possibly any work at all. Laws against cybercrime are also more lax in these and other developing nations... If you're going to host malicious servers in another country, it only makes sense to offer its citizens the gifts of herbal enhancements and Nigerian banking deals that make the rest of us so happy--but if you're going to bring such presents to another nation, you have to know the local language. The Russian Mafia's interest in cybercrime is also reportedly growing--a fact that could have significant repercussions for the future of malware business on a global scale.

Suburban Auto Group in Sandy, Oregon has a great series of "Trunk Monkey" commercials created by r-west.

 

More things need to come equipped with some kind of monkey activation button.

Design and the Elastic Mind is a MOMA exhibit of cool objects, gadgets, websites and ideas. Some personal favorites are The PainStation, The Religious Helmet, Body Modification for Love, The Minutine Space and Lightweeds.

Sushi Science and Hamburger Science: I had always regarded science as universal and believed there are no differences in science at all between countries. But I was wrong. People with different cultures think in different ways, and therefore their science also may well be different. In this essay, I will describe differences I have observed between Western science and Eastern science. Let me start with a parable......

  I love tshirthell.com

Playing Kreigspiel on a LAN. Guy Debord created a board game in 1977 called Kriegspiel, a war game ostensibly based on the principles of Clausewitz as articulated in On War. An online version of this game was recently created by the Radical Software Group, and released online. The rules seem slightly more complicated than chess.

Retro Sabotage is a collection of recreations of classic video games. Or is it?
Hint: It's not, but to explain them would be to spoil it. If a button needs to be pressed, it's the space bar unless it's explained otherwise. My advice is to try the Pac-Man and Space Invaders ones first, but Pong 2.0 is a highlight.

"SurveillanceSaver is an OS X screensaver that shows live images of over 400 network surveillance cameras worldwide." There is also a Windows version. Or check out the camera feeds without installing a screensaver.

This beer-barrel R2D2 sculpture comes from Deviant Art's Amoebabloke, who's hoping to find a buyer who isn't just a rich collector.

antique d2 project 8 by ~amoebabloke on deviantART

Design a paper airplane and then see how far you can fling it. (Sound warning).

From Spaceballs.ca:

View, comment, recommend, and email my friends post on blogTO! BookArtBookArtBook

For 2008 I aim to build up my portfolio of published work. To submit to blogto, I learned how to hyperlink and I set up a flickr account. While I generally carry around a pen and notebook, I'm going to start carrying around my camera as well, the Canon SD1000.

This is a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff white people like. They are pretty predictable. (from the About section.)

A Scottish man became the fastest to cycle around the world yesterday when he arrived in Paris after nearly seven months on the road. Mark Beaumont, 25, completed the trip in 195 days and six hours - beating the current record of 276 days.  
 
After almost seven months of dodging drivers, sleeping rough and struggling to get enough to eat, Beaumont is expected to enter the Guinness Book of Records, once the feat is verified.

Scientific American's JR Minkel interviewed CalTech physicist H. Jeff Kimble about quantum teleportation. In the article, Kimble explains in simple terms why recent experiments in quantum teleportation have nothing to do with the Star Trek transporter. As Minkel sums it up, the phenomenon "turns out to be more relevant to computing than to commuiting." From the interview:

Scientific American: What's the biggest misconception about teleportation?
Jeff Kimble: That the object itself is being sent. We're not sending around material stuff. If I wanted to send you a Boeing 757, I could send you all the parts, or I could send you a blueprint showing all the parts, and it's much easier to send a blueprint. Teleportation is a protocol about how to send a quantum state--a wave function--from one place to another.

A 14-day-old Samoan infant died in DHS detention at Honolulu airport earlier this week, and American Samoa's delegate to Congress is calling for an investigation:

The baby had been flown to Honolulu for emergency heart surgery. He died while detained inside a customs' room at the Honolulu airport with his mother and a nurse.

The Unwise Microwave Experiment guy shows how to melt a beer bottle in a microwave oven. You have to prep the bottle by using a blowtorch to make a red hot spot on the bottle. Stick around for the end of the demo to hear his explanation of how it works.

The body of a man believed to have been dead for more than five years has been found in a Bristol flat where a tenant continued to live.  
 
The corpse was discovered by council workers on a sofa in the lounge after neighbours reported a foul smell.

It's one of life's greatest mysteries: Two socks enter the washing machine, one sock leaves, its mate gobbled up by laundry goblins. Besides suffer the sartorial indignity of wearing mismatched pairs, what else can you do with an orphan sock that's all by its lonesome? Here are some ideas:  
 
1. Sew a pet bed  
 
2. Make a chew toy  
 
3. Make an animal puppet  
 
4. Protect fragile holiday ornaments when you put them away for the year  
 
5. Sew a sock monkey  
 
Most of the ideas link to instructions!

Here's a roundup of students' how-to-cheat YouTube videos. The best one is definitely the guy who scans the label off a Coke bottle, replaces the nutritional information with cheaty stuff, prints it, and glues it around a bottle (presumes that your teacher lets you bring Coke into class -- I suppose this works best in schools where Coke has struck a deal requiring their products to be available at all times and in all places.)

 

When I was a kid, we were obsessed with figuring out methods for cheating -- far more so than with actual cheating itself. We used binary encoding to sneak in long lists of numbers, stitching them up the outer seams of our jeans or cuffs -- a stitch for 1, no stitch for 0 -- that we could read by fingertip. After we learned the resistor color-coding scheme, we started to shave pencils and then decorate them with colored bands that actually contained the same lists of numbers. We tried -- and failed -- to produce a decent tapping code for interactive cheating, though this is certainly possible. One exciting failure was a light-based semaphore wherein the conspirators would flash reflected discs of light up on the wall over the teacher's head using our watch-faces.

The kids in these videos are awfully sanguine about their teachers' YouTube cluelessness. I'm relatively certain that the adorable little English moppet pictured here has never actually succeeded in using his cheat, as it relies on your teachers allowing you to keep playing cards on your desk during the exam. This is surely a purely theoretical cheat.

British scientists are ready to turn female bone marrow into sperm, cutting men out of the process of creating life.  
 
The breakthrough paves the way for lesbian couples to have children that are biologically their own.

Yahoo reports:

Wesley Snipes' attorneys admitted his ideas were crazy - that Americans have no obligation to pay taxes and the IRS cannot legally collect them.  
 
But the star of the "Blade" vampire trilogy was the victim of crooked advisers, promoters of the tax protest movement, they argued, and a jury apparently agreed.  
 
Snipes was acquitted Friday of federal tax fraud and conspiracy, but jurors found him guilty on three misdemeanor counts of failing to file a tax return.

This list will give you links to 40 open source resources to get you started building your own social bookmarking, networking, filesharing or search application.

The allure of blue eyes has long been celebrated. In the Odyssey, Homer gives the goddess Athena "bright blue eyes," and our fascination persists to this day with actors like Brad Pitt and Naomi Watts. Until recently, however, no one could explain the phenomena.
Research focussed on the OCA2 gene, iinvolved in the production of melanin and pigmentation. However, key to blue eyes wasn't on the OCA2 gene but rather on a nearby gene called HERC2, that works like a switch that regulates the behavior of OCA2. Interestingly, the evidence suggests that this mutation is not one that has arisen spontaneously several times, but that all blue-eye people are descendants of a single man.

Can a lightsaber cut through Superman? Through him it cuts, hmmmm?

One dog's story of her journey from bait dog (a non-fighting dog used as a "training dummy" for fighting dogs) to loved pet. She got by with a a little help from her friends.

Mark Khaisman makes incredible art using packing tape on plexiglass.

After years of debating, I finally figured out what I want for a tattoo. Its been a labour of trying to sort it down to the one thing I'd be happy with. And this is it...

 

Orginal:

What I want:

 

Opinions? leave a comment

 

Need a distraction? Check out Faith Fighter, a web-based online game where the friendly animation illustrates the sad reality of ongoing religious conflict. As they use videogames as a political medium, Faith Fighter's creators, a team of Italian designers and game developers want to remind you that if this offends you, don't play. "Faith Fighter is the ultimate fighting game for these dark times. Choose your belief and kick the shit out of your enemies. Give vent to your intolerance! Religious hate has never been so much fun."

Researchers at Clemson University set the record straight in asking the age-old snacking question: Does double dipping encourage the spread of germs? "OUR annual national snacking binge is almost here. It would take a very large bowl indeed to hold all the guacamole mashed from the more than 100 million avocados that are consumed on Super Bowl Sunday. (My rough calculation gives a hemisphere bowl 20 yards in diameter and 3 times the height of the goal post crossbars.) And guacamole is just one of many dips that will be shared around the TV..."

Seriously, she's hot. Messed up as hell, but hot.

 

ARMSFLOW.org is a data visualization project that shows international arms transactions between 1950 and 2006. The site (a big ole Java applet) was created by Jeffrey Warren of Vestal Design, based on data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Octopus Studios' tropical/freshwater fish-tanks assembles into a kind of fishy habitrail, wherein bulbous spheres of water are connected by diagonal tubes.

 

Just Between Us..., a booklet for girls about menstration; published by Beltix Corporation, copyright 1950, 1955, 1961.

To me, it's amazing that the editors of this little booklet allowed the spokesgirl to have freaky swirly eyes -- usually a sign of craziness or dizziness! This is either a stroke of genius or incredibly inappropriate -- I'm not too sure.

Grow your own spare parts. At last we're regenerating properly. Scientists took stem cells from patients fat tissue, cultivated bone cells from them, crafted a nice comfy titanium cage where to grow and put the cage into man's abdomen. After 9 months, install new upper jaw.

Mississippi considers banning people with a BMI higher than 30 from eating in public. Though its author doesn't expect it to pass, House Bill 282 attempts to draw attention to the obesity epidemic, exaggerated or no. Predictably, some are upset.