Wednesday - July 27, 2005

Head-On Collision

Believe it or not, this is not a PhotoShop image. Space shuttle Discovery whacked a bird on takeoff. Al-Qaeda immediately claimed responsiblity in a statement from their web site praising the bird for its sacrifice in their war against the infidel spacemen ....

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/27/2005 at 04:15 AM   
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Onward & Upward

_{Corky Trinidad, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin}

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/27/2005 at 04:00 AM   
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   Tuesday - July 26, 2005

Confidence Is High

_{Clay Bennett, The Christian Science Monitor}

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/26/2005 at 04:00 AM   
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   Sunday - July 24, 2005

Automatic Human Washing Machine

From Gizmodo, we learn of the latest technical innovation from Japan, the land of high-tech cleanliness and low-tech English ....

Those who see showering as an inefficient process in obvious need of technical innovation should be delighted by the Avant “Santelubain 999” automatic personal washing machine. Upon slipping inside the clamshell-chic device, users will find a variety of functions at their fingertips including everything from “Body Shampoo & Shower,” and “Sound Therapy,” to the decidedly Japanese “Seaweed Pack.”

Japanese beauty and health site iSpot.jp has published a first-hand report of the washer which, when run through google translate, results in a perfectly appropriate engrish account of the experience:

“The ah which is true. The smut it is, don’t you think? it is is. The ho it is with the washer we would like to see!”

“With just 1 time appears only the effect of that appearance, but when some time over again, because metabolism is improved, not only the body effect, you can improve also cold characteristic and the solid seeing, so is.”

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/24/2005 at 01:50 PM   
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   Friday - July 22, 2005

Morning Quiz

Q: What resembles a slimey worm and eats escargot (snails)?

A: A Frenchman?

Well, that too .. but in this case it’s Hyposmocoma molluscivora.

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/22/2005 at 08:31 AM   
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   Thursday - July 21, 2005

The Final Frontier

Scotty’s Ashes To Hit Outer Space

(BBC)—The ashes of Star Trek actor James Doohan, who died on Wednesday, are to be sent into space at his request. The Space Services Inc company said Doohan’s ashes could be on a Falcon 1 rocket launching from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, tentatively scheduled for launch in September. The ashes of Star Trek writer John Meredyth Lucas, who died in 2002, are also set to be on the flight.

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/21/2005 at 04:41 AM   
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Headline Of The Day

28,000-year-old Phallus Found in Germany

(AFP)—A stone phallus 28,000-years-old has been discovered in a cave in Baden-Wuertemberg in southern Germany, the University of Tubingen said on Wednesday. In assembling 14 stone fragments found last year in the Hohle Fels cave, archeologists rebuilt the phallus, which is 20 centimetres long and three centimeters wide.

It will be on display at the prehistoric museum in Blaubeuren from Monday. The caves in the Blaubeuren region, which sheltered Neanderthal man, are among the most important archeological sites in Europe. The oldest object representing a bird, dating back 32,000 years, was discovered a few years ago in the same cave.

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/21/2005 at 03:36 AM   
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   Wednesday - July 20, 2005

What’s it made of again?

Too Cool

In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Happy lunar surfing.

These guys are having too much fun.  Zoom in as far as you can on one of the landing sites.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/20/2005 at 10:30 AM   
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   Tuesday - July 19, 2005

Home-Brew

Investigators have determined the explosives used in the London bombings was TATP, which anyone can make at home with easily obtainable chemicals. Provided you don’t clap your hands around it or step on it after you mix the crap up ....

(US News) A key component in the explosives used in last week’s London bombings is triacetone triperoxide (TATP), a U.S. law enforcement official tells U.S. News. TATP is a sophisticated or “high yield” explosive that’s easily mixed at home with recipes available on the Internet.

It was used by suicide bombers in Israel and chosen as a detonator in 2001 by would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid. Reid, who attempted to bomb a plane as it crossed the Atlantic Ocean, has claimed he used an Internet recipe to make his sneaker bomb. The ingredients in TATP—hydrogen peroxide obtained from local pharmacies, the paint thinner acetone, and a little hydrochloric or sulphuric acid — can be mixed to manufacture TATP, which packs the same punch as plastic explosives such as RDX.

TATP, used by terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere, is considered so unstable that it can be set off by clapping one’s hands to detonate it or stomping on it with one’s foot and usually is used with other ingredients as a booster or detonator component.

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/19/2005 at 09:54 AM   
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   Monday - July 18, 2005

Going back for a donut

Movement into the past gets one step less improbable.

One of the major difficulties of travelling backwards in time has just been solved, according to an Israeli theoretical physicist. And the solution, he says, is doughnut-shaped.

Mmmmmmmm. Donuts

Although it is difficult to describe what this would look or be like in real life, Ori says the mathematics reveal that every period of time between when the doughnut was created and the present moment would be somewhere in the vacuum inside the doughnut. All you need to do is work out how to get there.

Oh, is that all?

There are still difficulties to overcome with the doughnut model, however.

Hmmmm.  Keep working on it boys.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/18/2005 at 09:53 PM   
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   Wednesday - July 06, 2005

Sympathy For The Vampire

Creatures of the night. Blood suckers. Poisoned by sunlight. Driven off by garlic. Think of all the myths and legends you have read about vampires. Did you know that it all can be explained by science ....?

Stories of vampires date back thousands of years. Our modern concept stems from Bram Stoker’s quirky classic Dracula and Hollywood’s Bela Lugosi--the romantic, sexually charged, blood-sucking outcast with a fatal susceptibility to sunlight and an abhorrence of garlic and crosses. In contrast, vampires of folklore cut a pathetic figure and were also known as the undead. In searching for some underlying truth in vampire stories, researchers have speculated that the tales may have been inspired by real people who suffered from a rare blood disease, porphyria. And in seeking treatments for this disorder, scientists have stumbled on a new way to attack other, more common serious ills.

Porphyria is actually a collection of related diseases in which pigments called porphyrins accumulate in the skin, bones and teeth. Many porphyrins are benign in the dark but are transformed by sunlight into caustic, flesh-eating toxins. Without treatment, the worst forms of the disease (such as congenital erythropoietic porphyria) can be grotesque, ultimately exacting the kind of hideous disfigurement one might expect of the undead. The victims’ ears and nose get eaten away. Their lips and gums erode to reveal red, fanglike teeth. Their skin acquires a patchwork of scars, dense pigmentation and deathly pale hues, reflecting underlying anemia. Because anemia can be treated with blood transfusions, some historians speculate that in the dark ages people with porphyria might have tried drinking blood as a folk remedy. Whatever the truth of this claim, those with congenital erythropoietic porphyria would certainly have learned not to venture outside during the day. They might have learned to avoid garlic, too, for some chemicals in garlic are thought to exacerbate the symptoms of the disease porphyria, turning a mild attack into an agonizing reaction.

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/06/2005 at 12:26 PM   
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   Sunday - July 03, 2005

Spam From Outer Space

OK, show of hands here, people. How many of you have received at least one or more e-mail phishing scams from some Nigerian government official who needs your help getting millions of dollars out of that country? Let’s see .... 1-2-3-20-50-430-5300- ....... OK, put your hands down. I see nearly everyone out there has gotten this crap from our Nigerian friends.

Now, how many of you can name the only remaining Commie superpower in the world (hint: see post below this one). Great! Now what do you think would happen if these two countries got together ....? Well, in my opinion, we’re all in deep s**t now because the Commies are going to build and launch a satellite for the Nigerian spammers ....

CHINA PRESS: China To Build, Launch Satellite For Nigeria
07-03-05 06:56 AM EST

BEIJING -(Dow Jones)- China Great Wall Industry Corp. will build and launch in orbit at the beginning of 2007 a communication satellite expecially designed for Nigeria, the China Daily reported Sunday.

The satellite, named NIGCOMSAT-I, will make China both a manufacturer and a launcher of satellites for foreign customers, the paper reported, citing Great Wall president Wang Haibo.

China has so far never manufactured a satellite for other countries, the report said.

China Great Wall Industry is the only Chinese company allowed to launch satellites.

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/03/2005 at 10:47 AM   
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GODZILLA !

Vapor billows from grayish mud that is rising up from the bottom of the ocean near where a 1 kilometer- (3,300-foot) high column of water vapor shot up in the Pacific Ocean, on Sunday July 3, 2005. Japanese coast guard officials said Sunday after an aerial survey that they believe an underwater eruption has caused a 1 kilometer- (3,300-foot) high column of water vapor to shoot up from the Pacific Ocean near Iwo Jima. The location is known as Fukutokuoka-no-ba, an undersea volcano which last erupted in 1986 for three days, Sato said. The coast guard aircraft ended the day’s survey after less than two hours due to safety concerns, but plan to return to the site as early as Monday for further monitoring. The service issued an international warning for vessels, urging them to stay away from the waters.(AP Photo/Kyodo News)

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/03/2005 at 09:48 AM   
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   Thursday - June 30, 2005

The Crack Down The Middle

It turns out OldCatMan was right in his “no LEFT or RIGHT, just a CRACK DOWN THE MIDDLE” observation. Cornell University scientists have determined that the human brain does not work in a sequential “1’s and 0’s” mode like a computer does but has its own method which involves parallel processing in several gray zones at once ....

“For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary symbols—like a digital computer,” said Spivey. “More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties—like a biological organism.”

The computer metaphor describes cognition as being in a particular discrete state, for example, “on or off” or in values of either zero or one, and in a static state until moving on. If there was ambiguity, the model assumed that the mind jumps the gun to one state or the other, and if it realizes it is wrong, it then makes a correction.

“In thinking of cognition as working as a biological organism does, on the other hand, you do not have to be in one state or another like a computer, but can have values in between—you can be partially in one state and another, and then eventually gravitate to a unique interpretation, as in finally recognizing a spoken word,” Spivey said.

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/30/2005 at 10:02 AM   
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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