Hulleye Comes By!

what happens when astronauts go psycho? apparently NASA’s “official and documented” response is duct tape! I LOVE DUCT TAPE!

Brace yourself. James Cameron, the man who brought you ‘The Titanic’ is back with another blockbuster. This time, the ship he’s sinking is Christianity. In a new documentary, Producer Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn’t resurrected –the cornerstone of Christian faith– and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene.

No, it’s not a re-make of “The Da Vinci Codes’. It’s supposed to be true.

Let’s go back 27 years, when Israeli construction workers were gouging out the foundations for a new building in the industrial park in the Talpiyot, a Jerusalem suburb. of Jerusalem. The earth gave way, revealing a 2,000 year old cave with 10 stone caskets. Archologists were summoned, and the stone caskets carted away for examination. It took 20 years for experts to decipher the names on the ten tombs. They were: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua.
Israel’s prominent archeologist Professor Amos Kloner didn’t associate the crypt with the New Testament Jesus. His father, after all, was a humble carpenter who couldn’t afford a luxury crypt for his family. And all were common Jewish names.

Keep reading at the blog for TIME magazine. Also here’s the official website.

forget pigeons, they’re in our mouths now! what do you say about that dr. alvi?

Forgetting to take medicine may be a thing of the past as researchers close in on creating an artificial tooth which automatically releases medicine.

The Intellidrug device is small enough to fit inside two artificial molars in the jaw, the Engineer journal said.

European Commission researchers also believe it will benefit patients, such as those with diabetes and high blood pressure, who need doses in the night.

If human trials prove successful, the device could be available in 2010.

holy flying cyber pigeons batman!

Scientists with the Robot Engineering Technology Research Center of east China’s Shandong University of Science and Technology say they implanted micro electrodes in the brain of a pigeon so they can command it to fly right or left or up or down.

The implants stimulated different areas of the pigeon’s brain according to signals sent by the scientists via computer, and forced the bird to comply with their commands.

“It’s the first such successful experiment on a pigeon in the world,” said the lead researcher, who hopes the work will have “practical use” in the future.

Moritz Waldemeyer created this pong table with embedded LED lights and touchpads to create a truly interactive gaming table.

The Pong table is a dining table made from DuPont Corian with an aluminium base. There are 2500 LEDs integrated into the table top, together with two track pads they recreate the classic Pong game. When turned off, the integrated technology disappears completely, leaving a simple, beautiful and practical dining table.

In the 1980s, a song “867-5309/Jenny” by the band Tommy Tutone sparked a fad of people dialing the phone number asking for the girl named Jenny. A few years back, someone called that number on every single area codes in the United States, and recorded the result.

i think bruce lee and chuck norris have some competition in the best fight scene ever category. this is awesome. thanks pat.

PhysicsWeb reports that a team of scientists in Jerusalem has come up with a method for creating self-assembling 3-dimensional models from a single sheet of paper. The ‘chemical origami’ is created by etching a pattern of monomer onto the paper and then heating it. The chemical’s reaction to the heat causes bends of varying degree in the paper, molding the sheet into the patterned model. A professor in the US with no apparent ties to the study says in the article that the technique could be used to create self-assembling prototypes, or even a printer that prints 3D objects.

eric flint published an essay recently which argues that DRM actually causes piracy.

“Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an ‘economic epidemic’ under certain conditions. Any one of the following: 1) The products they want… are hard to find, and thus valuable. 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there’s a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them. 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with. Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they’re the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises. And… Guess what? It’s precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called ‘online piracy,’ it’s DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward.”

so koala bears are scandalizing the wildlife community in new zealand.

Female koalas indulge in lesbian “sex sessions”, rejecting male suitors and attempting to mate with each other, sometimes up to five at a time, according to researchers.

The furry, eucalyptus-eating creatures appear to develop this tendency for same-sex liaisons when they are in captivity. In the wild, they remain heterosexual.

Scientists monitoring the marsupials with digital cameras counted three homosexual interactions for every heterosexual one.

“Some females rejected the advances of males that were in their enclosures, only to become willing participants in homosexual encounters immediately after,” say the researchers.

“On several occasions more than one pair of females shared the same pole, and multiple females mounted each other simultaneously. At least one multiple encounter involved five female koalas.

anyone who hasn’t switched from windows to an alternative operating system yet, please go ahead and do so. here’s a beginning guide on learning the unix shell for a rainy day when you wake up and figure out that you should be running ubuntu.

click for clarity. official instructions on how to crap. good luck if you didn’t know already. anyone wondering how to cleanse, go here.

Islamic Artisans Constructed Exotic Nonrepeating Pattern 500 Years Before Mathematicians As early as the 15th century, elaborate symmetrical tile work on medieval Islamic buildings contained patterns straight out of modern math.

Medieval Islamic artisans seem to have developed a procedure for creating jigsawlike mosaics that ultimately led them to an exotic pattern that mathematicians would discover nearly half a millennium later. Researchers report that 15th-century buildings in Iran feature tiles arranged in a so-called quasicrystal, which is symmetric but does not repeat itself regularly.

“Here is evidence it [the pattern] was being used, if not understood, 500 years ahead of when we had any idea what was going on with [it] in the West,” says physics graduate student Peter J. Lu of Harvard University. Lu began poring over photos from Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan after seeing hints of the pattern while traveling in Uzbekistan. The Islamic artisans seem to have spun a wide variety of symmetric traceries from a set of five shapes, according to a report Lu co-authored, published online February 22 in Science.

i previously wrote about daniel tammet as well. here’s another article in the guardian about him.

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it. He speaks seven languages and is even devising his own language. Now scientists are asking whether his exceptional abilities are the key to unlock the secrets of autism.

Daniel Tammet is talking. As he talks, he studies my shirt and counts the stitches. Ever since the age of three, when he suffered an epileptic fit, Tammet has been obsessed with counting. Now he is 26, and a mathematical genius who can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall pi to 22,514 decimal places. He also happens to be autistic, which is why he can’t drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left. He lives with extraordinary ability and disability. Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn’t “calculating”: there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”

Tammet is a “savant”, an individual with an astonishing, extraordinary mental ability. An estimated 10% of the autistic population - and an estimated 1% of the non-autistic population - have savant abilities, but no one knows exactly why. A number of scientists now hope that Tammet might help us to understand better. Professor Allan Snyder, from the Centre for the Mind at the Australian National University in Canberra, explains why Tammet is of particular, and international, scientific interest. “Savants can’t usually tell us how they do what they do,” says Snyder. “It just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That’s why he’s exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone.”

keep reading.

abe lincoln gave the gettysburg address a while ago. today his speech is being used as a test for typing speed. according to it, i’m doing 118 words per minute with no mistakes. i should try doing some other tests to see how accurate this one was. anyone know of any good ones? how are you guys scoring on it? i think this one is too short of an excerpt to get accurate results.

While searching for invisible images,

A Dali-like painting of an invisible elephant by Nguyen Dinh Dang, and a cat who definitely thinks he’s invisible

Beware of the invisible cows of Mauna Kea. Beware of the invisible snowmobiler

“One of the most astonishing sensations in the desert is to walk in the middle of nowhere. Hours, with no mark…

Joe Bagley’s photo of two men in lounge chairs and a self-portrait of an invisible photographer taking a tea break

HG Wells Penguin Mug

This invisible globe is a hollow glass sphere with a spinning LED light ring to create different projections. (Other unique globes by the same globe makers)

An invisible lizard

An optical illusion with six invisible triangles. Can you spot them?

Vanishing Point puzzles

Invisible Suits are interactive suits made from special blue screen fabric (material used for work with video blue screen technique). The intended effect is the virtual “disappearance” of the persons wearing the suits: their bodies merge with the visual environment they inhabit.
The artist Willem Oorebeek prints black ink on black surfaces, and his invisible “Blackout” images can be seen only from a particular angle

The Do’s and Don’t’s of Attending a Mime’s Birthday Party

The lost secret of invisibility by artist Howard Kistler

An invisible painting.

via GOB

so everyone either buys from ikea or copies off it. at least if you’ve just graduated and are single anyway or on a shoestring budget when just married. here’s a website that “hacks” ikea and allows you to use their furniture in creative ways. very fun.

so they found this mer-maid/mer-thing (sting ray?) type thing off the coast of karachi. if you ask me, it’s just a mutated sting ray from all the toxins at keamari. view the video here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8pK_q-_6dw

Worth1000 recently had a fantastic photoshopping contest of cartoon characters in historic art. this one of he-man is one of my favourites. there are some brilliant entries. check them out here.

Can creative writers put their egos to one side and work successfully as a team? That’s the question Penguin and De Montfort University are exploring with a new literary experiment - a collaborative wiki-novel.Based on the principles of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, the novel, called A Million Penguins, is open to anyone to join in, write and edit. None of the words, characters or plot twists will be attributed to any individual and - and this is the element of the project most likely to bruise delicate egos - participants are free to edit, chop and change other writers’ work.

In an effort to avoid the kinds of “reversion wars” which blight Wikipedia, a “core team” of students from De Montfort’s Creative Writing and New Media course will act as moderators and the ethical guidelines listed on the wiki urge contributors to “be polite” and to treat others’ contributions as they would like their own to be treated. Nonetheless, it is a shot in the dark, as Penguin acknowledge.

A Million Penguins.

A Million Penguins Blog.

Astronomers say they can now compute with great confidence which asteroids pose a threat to our planet. The problem, they told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW), is that preventing a collision would require mounting a not-yet-planned space mission by a not-yet-identified governmental body.The next known close encounter with an asteroid will occur, somewhat ominously, on Friday the 13th of April 2029. Then, Near-Earth Object 99942–also known as Apophis (Greek for “The Demon of Darkness”)–is expected to miss the planet by a mere 30,000 kilometers. The real sweating begins soon after, when astronomers must determine whether Earth’s gravity has steered Apophis onto a course for impact seven years later. Current calculations place the chance of that happening at about one in 30,000.

At 250 meters wide, Apophis is five times larger than the object that hit Earth 50,000 years ago and blew out the 1200-meter-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona. It’s also six times larger than the Tunguska object, which grazed Earth’s atmosphere before exploding over Siberia in 1908, flattening 2100 square kilometers of forest.

the new tmnt is gonna kick ass. and in it’s honour.

so this is how absurd people trying to make money can get. i don’t even know why i’m blogging it here. there’s a plan to spot terrorists in airplane seats now. and when will they realize that airplane threats are totally overdone now. move your focus elsewhere people!

Cameras fitted to seat-backs will record every twitch, blink, facial expression or suspicious movement before sending the data to onboard software which will check it against individual passenger profiles.

[...]

They say that rapid eye movements, blinking excessively, licking lips or ways of stroking hair or ears are classic symptoms of somebody trying to conceal something.

A separate microphone will hear and record even whispered remarks. Islamic suicide bombers are known to whisper texts from the Koran in the moments before they explode bombs.

The software being developed by the scientists will be so sophisticated that it will be able to take account of nervous flyers or people with a natural twitch, helping to ensure there are no false alarms.

it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that aside from false positives, nervous flyers and religious people are shit out of luck. can anyone say big brother real quick?

This tiny girl is wearing what’s called a “Power Jacket”, which is an inflatable exokeleton that weighs only four pounds.

Japanese electronics giant Matsushita Electric Industrial unveils the prototype model for a “power jacket” to help patients recover from partial paralysis during rehabilitation, at the Home Care and Rehabilitation Exhibition in Tokyo.

Man who gutted cellmate had mental problems

By Sara Burnett, Rocky Mountain News
February 12, 2007

The man accused of killing his prison cellmate, then gutting him and hanging his intestines from a clothesline in his cell, has a history of brain injuries and untreated mental problems that would have made it difficult for him to think clearly, plot a murder or “resist impulses,” defense attorneys said today.

Geniuses. Pure brainiacs.

indian highway road signs.

One of the fun things about The Adventures of Asterix comic books is its use of latin phrases. Here’s a website that collects Asterix latin sayings and their translation.

Acta est fabula: It’s all over (lit. the drama has been acted out)
Alea jacta est: The die is cast
Audaces fortuna juvat: Fortune favors the bold
Auri sacra fames: The cursed hunger for gold
Aut Caesar, aut nihil: Either Caesar or nothing
Ave atque vale: Hail and farewell
Ave Caesar morituri te salutant!: Hail, Caesar! Those who are about to die salute you!

How do moths stay aloft? With their antennae, of course. When your wingspan is just three inches across, the slightest breeze becomes a gale, and knowing which way is up becomes a matter of life and death. Now, a research team reports that moths stabilize their flight by using their antennae as gyroscopic sensors.

Rotational inertia keeps a spinning top balancing on its tip: If you try to knock it over, the Coriolis force pushes it to the side instead. The size of that force depends on how fast the top is spinning. Engineers measure the corrective force on calibrated gyroscopes to keep aircraft and ballistic missiles on a level course. And flies stabilize their flight by using their club-shaped hind wings to detect these forces. But no one suspected that moths use a similar strategy. Their antennae are primarily known as super-sensitive odor receptors–used to sniff out females and food from miles away–and researchers had hypothesized that they assist in flight only by acting as air flow sensors. That untested idea had “become part of the lore,” says biologist Sanjay Sane of the University of Washington in Seattle.