Photo: TACD
It's the three bears of alarms: the sprinkler bell, the smoke bell, and the ever-mysterious "trouble" bell! Hm .... I wonder what that one would be for!
Alex Santoso's Blog Posts
Those large orange balloons are a portable biogas system called Supergas by Superflex and Unversity of Tropical Agriculture in Cambodia.
Supergas is designed to produce 4 cubic meter of gas - enough for a day's worth of cooking and to run a gas lamp for one night for one family - from dung of 2 to 3 cattle. The set-up above was made from $50 worth of material - but it seems that until today the system has yet to be commercialized.
My old car stereo doesn't work too good anymore, but it still works for AM - and I've been listening to Michael Josephson's commentary on ethics while driving to and from work.
This one is from a while ago, but it's a goodie. Here's a story that someone told him about stealing:
More than 50 years ago, when I was five, I was at my granddaddy's house in a dress and white gloves. He told me I could go into the kitchen and get a cookie. Next to the cookie jar was a stack of quarters. I knew I shouldn't have, but I took one.
I must have looked guilty when I returned because my granddaddy looked at me funny and asked me to show him my white gloves. I had the quarter in my right hand so I held out my left.
"Show me the other hand," he said. When he saw the quarter, he looked at me sadly.
He hugged me and said, "Darlin', you can have anything in the world I have, but it breaks my heart that you'd ever steal it."
I'll never forget the shame, and I never stole anything again.
Michael has a pretty good commentary on why the grandfather's approach worked better in instilling the sense of right and wrong in the then-little girl: Link
Jorge Cham of PhD Comics (stands for Piled Higher and Deeper, a cheeky acronym for the graduate student comic strip) nailed the essence of the vicious cycle of staying up late. It's ironic because I'm staying up late to do this post ... Link
Previously on Neatorama: Newton's Law of Graduation
My wife throws away perfectly good food when they reach the expiration date stamped on the package - as if they know that - ding! - it's time to go bad.
Jonathan Maitland of the Daily Mail has a similar problem with his wife, so he decided to embark on a two-week experiment of eating increasingly out-of-date supermarket food in attempt to discover the truth about use-by and best-before dates:
One Asda 'smart price' Chicken Breast Fillet. My wife, realising the meat was six days past its Use-By date, reacted like a vampire seeing a crucifix. I devoured it. Granted, it lacked a little tenderness, but that may have been because I had roasted the living daylights out of it. Ill-effects: none.
Cooking, or the lack of it, is crucial in all this. Microbiologist Doctor Lee Humpheson, who runs a food-testing laboratory, says: 'There is a 100 per cent greater risk from food that hasn't been cooked or prepared properly, even if it is really fresh, than from food which is past its Use-By date, but which has been cooked and prepared properly.'
In other words, wash your hands when handling food, don't use the raw meat knife to spread butter and follow cooking instructions to a 'T'. Then, even though your sausages are, say, three days out of date, you will be fine.
Expiry dates are there for a reason, but, according to Dr David Jukes, a senior lecturer in Food Bioscience at Reading University: 'The longer you leave food after its Use-By date has expired, the more its bacteria will multiply, posing a greater risk to your health.'
But how do manufacturers decide on an expiry date in the first place?
When new products come on the market, tests are run to see at what stage bacteria in the food become harmful. More tests are then carried out, taking into account the effect of variables such as packaging, transportation and storage temperatures.
Dr Jukes says many supermarkets will err on the side of caution when deciding on an expiry date. 'Inevitably, the food industry plays safe. Use-By dates have a degree of safety built in, in order to protect the industry.' So how great is that degree of safety? Quite big, if my experience is anything to go by.
Link (Photo: Les Wilson/ITV)
Hah - Miss Cellania posted a list of the 24 things that changed since college. A sneak peek:
17. You're the one calling the police because those damn kids next door won't turn down the music.
18. You get out of bed in the morning even if it's raining.
19. Older relatives feel comfortable telling sex jokes around you.
20. You always know where you are when you wake up.
21. Your car insurance goes down and your car payments go up.
How many of them do you agree with? Link
Hope the Maltese puppy was born without front legs, so orthotist David Turnbill made her a wheeled-device (out of airplane model parts) that lets her skate through life!
Emily Bregel of the Times Free Press has the story: Link - via Scribal Terror
(Photo: Tim Barber)
I bet you dollar to donuts that Bryn Mickle of The Flint Journal had a lot of fun writing that headline and lede ;) http://www.mlive.com/flintjournal/index.ssf/2008/06/new_flint_chief_david_dicks_or.html - via Super Punch
Apparently sagging jeans is the new menace - last year, authorities in Mansfield, Louisiana, also .. er, cracked down, on the fashion phenomenon.
Anyone here understand why people wear jeans down their butt? It sure looks silly to me, but what do I know, I'm a fuddy-duddy.
(Evil mad?) Scientists at the Hirose Fukushima lab in Japan have created our next robotic overlord: the ACM-R5 snakebot that can slither on land and swim gracefully in the water:
The control system of ACM-R5 is an advanced one. Each joint unit has CPU, battery, motors, so they can operate independently. Through communication lines each unit exchanges signals and automatically recognizes its number from the head, and how many units join the system. Thanks to this system operators can remove, add, and exchange units freely and they can operate ACM-R5 flexibly according to situations.
GeekAlerts has the video: Link (awesome!) | Hirose Fukushima Lab website
Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer , Angel, and Firefly series, is bringing his next project straight to the web.
The 3 10-minute webisode (perfect for the Net's short-attention-spanitis) "Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" is "the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he's too shy to talk to."
The series, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day, is set to be released in a the next month or so (can't wait!)
Always Watching has the trailer: http://www.alwayswatching.org/news/neil-patrick-harris-nathan-fillion-joss-whedons-web-series | Joss Whedon's blog
Bad: Not invited to a birthday party
Really bad: Everybody else in school got invited
Neatorama-worthy: The school saw this, and confiscated all of the invitation cards because of discrimination ... which led the father to complain to the Swedish parliament because his "child's rights has been violated."
Here's what happened:
The school, in Lund, southern Sweden, argues that if invitations are handed out on school premises then it must ensure there is no discrimination. [...]
He says the two children were left out because one did not invite his son to his own party and he had fallen out with the other one.
The boy handed out his birthday invitations during class-time and when the teacher spotted that two children had not received one the invitations were confiscated.
"My son has taken it pretty hard," the boy's father told the newspaper Sydsvenskan. "No one has the right to confiscate someone's property in this way, it's like taking someone's post," he added.
Most parents believe that their "bundle of joy" makes their life happy (I certainly do) but is it true that having kids make you happy?
According to the latest research, those parents may actually be - gasp - wrong:
The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term "bundle of joy" may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. "Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," says Florida State University's Robin Simon, a sociology professor who's conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. "In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It's such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not."
Here's an interesting article by Lorraine Ali for NEWSWEEK: Link
Phil Bridge, a 21-year-old university student in the UK, has designed a cardboard bicycle that cost around $30 to make:
Supporting anyone up to 168 pounds, the frame, which costs around $6 to make, is made from the cardboard used in industrial packaging, whilst the wheels and chain are standard bike issue, and will cost around $24.
Phil Bridge, who is studying Industrial Design, came up with the idea as he was researching reasons why people don't use pedal power to get around town. "A typical round town bike can cost several hundred pounds," says Mr Bridge. "That's a large investment for people who aren't sure whether they will use it. The idea of cardboard is to completely devalue the bike".
Photo: Brian Skerry / National Geographic
Ecologist Enric Sala found a 500-year-old gigantic lobe coral in the Kingman Reef that looks like a flying saucer (the species is likely to be new to science).
In the Pacific atolls and islands, there is a 30-mile triangle of coral in a lagoon the size of Manhattan Island called the Kingman Reef. Because of its remoteness, the reef is pristine, "a glittering city of staghorn, mushroom, pillar, and plate corals packed so tightly together there is hardly a patch of bare sand." Small fish and large predators are abound, making it a true underwater Eden.
But the image of a fluorishing and healthy ecosystem may be just a mirage. According to ecologist Enric Sala, Kingman Reef may actually be in big trouble and the culprit is overfishing and pollution:
If predator-dominated Kingman represents the gold standard for coral reefs, how does the removal of large carnivores through fishing affect coral communities elsewhere, such as in Kiritimati? As the report from the Line Islands shows, overfishing can unleash a population boom of smaller fish. The reef might appear luxuriant for a time, but in a matter of decades its ecosystem can unravel from a wonderland of marine diversity into a sediment-choked ecological desert.
"Eliminating the top predators speeds the turnover rate of the entire reef community," Sala says. Through mechanisms not yet fully understood, this acceleration ultimately produces an explosion of microbes, some of which may cause coral death. Fishing out the large herbivores contributes to reef degradation. In the absence of grazers, large algae flourish, and their photosynthetic activity increases the availability of dissolved organic carbon in the system, boosting the growth of bacteria.
Links: Article by Kennedy Warne | Photo Gallery (lots of wonderful photos, and you can also buy prints there) by Brian Skerry
Ryan from Smartkit told us about their new Flash game "Poiser," a hand-drawn physics puzzle game that looks simple ... but it's maddeningly hard (and a lot of fun!)
The concept is simple: stack the boxes until they reach the line ... how high can you go?
Link - Thanks Ryan!
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