Sega is making a gaming interface called "Toirettsu" which the (presumably male) user controls by selectively peeing on different sensors:
This is a teched out version of those little targets found urinals. Not surprising that Toirettsu is intended for restaurants' and retailers' toilets in the hopes that pissing mini-games will result with more customer pee in the urinal and less on the floor. It is also possible for restaurants and retailers to include advertisements on the Toirettsu screen.
Great Scot International, a US importer of Scottish goods, plans to introduce Americans to haggis-flavored potato chips. Haggis, as you may recall, consists of sheep organs ground up and boiled inside a sheep's stomach. This delicacy is available in the UK in potato chip form:
Great Scot International announced this week it would have Mackie's Haggis and Cracked Black Pepper chips on display at its booth at the annual Fancy Food Show in New York next month.
"We know that flavors with a Scottish twist are popular because Haggis and Cracked Black Pepper is our best-selling flavor," Kirstin Mackie, managing director of Mackie's, said in a written statement.
Hongtao Zhou, a sculpture professor at the University of Wisconsin, made a bench out of a thousand leather belts. One end is shaped like a belt buckle and serves as a table and the other is shaped like a bull's head.
Tomas Redigh and Daniel Larsson made this amazing short film entitled "Insert Coin." The end of the video includes a behind-the-scenes look at how it was made. Last year, we featured one of their similar works made with LEGO pieces.
Paul Butler, and intern at Facebook, created this map of the world using ten millions online friendships:
I combined that data with each user's current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.
At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn't handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.
Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.
A couple in Canada loves Bailey, their pet bison, so much that they altered their car to allow him to ride in it. The 1,600-pound animal joins them at bars drinking beer.
British artist Keira Rathbone uses the letters and punctuation marks on typewriters to create landscapes and portraits:
The 27-year-old begins by selecting the image she wants to capture and then decides which of her 30 typewriters is best for the job.
By turning the knob attached to the platen - the roller onto which the paper is loaded - she can deftly move the page around and line up the type guide - where the typebars hit the paper and make the character mark in ink.
Because she uses old manual typewriters, she can control the shades by hitting the keys softer for lighter colours and harder for darker shades.
Keep in mind that early news reports on scientific stories are sometimes wildly inaccurate. But, that said, it appears that doctors claim to have cured an HIV-infected man:
The 'Berlin Patient,' a U.S. citizen named Timothy Ray Brown, underwent a procedure in which HIV-resistant stem cells from an individual with an unusual genetic profile were introduced into his body. The donor patient's CD4 cells lacked the CCR5 co-receptor -- the most common variety of HIV uses CCR5 co-receptors as a "docking station," attaching to it in order to enter and infect CD4 cells. People with this particular genetic mutation are almost completely protected against infection.[...]
Berlin doctors published his detailed case history in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2009. Now they've published a follow-up report in the journal Blood, saying: "It is reasonable to conclude that cure of HIV infection has been achieved in this patient."
The 33-year old space probe Voyager I, now 17.4 billion miles from the Sun, has detected a major drop in the strength of solar wind in its location. This indicates that the probe is about to leave our solar system:
The event is a major milestone in Voyager 1's passage through the heliosheath, the turbulent outer shell of the sun's sphere of influence, and the spacecraft's upcoming departure from our solar system.
"The solar wind has turned the corner," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "Voyager 1 is getting close to interstellar space."
Our sun gives off a stream of charged particles that form a bubble known as the heliosphere around our solar system. The solar wind travels at supersonic speed until it crosses a shockwave called the termination shock. At this point, the solar wind dramatically slows down and heats up in the heliosheath.
This short film by Nathaniel Lindsay is a deadpan parody of Cold War-era nuclear survival guides. Ostensibly, it's a 1981 educational film by the Australian Board of Civil Defense. The narrator advises survivors on proper fashion choices, uses for charred human skulls, and the dangers of mutants.
OK Go, known for its innovative music videos, participated in a project called Dance Through Your City. The band led a group of 100 people on a 8.5-mile journey through Los Angeles. GPS navigation devices tracked their process and inscribed their name in a process resembling "a giant Etch a Sketch."
In his short story collection Sum, neuroscientist David Eagleman imagined forty possible afterlives. An excerpt from it speculates about a world in which a person's life experiences are all grouped together by activity:
In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.
You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.
You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.
But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower.
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307389930&view=excerpt via Kottke | Author's Website | Photo by Flickr user Pop Tech used under Creative Commons license
The classic game show The Dating Game featured a string of celebrity contestants during the 1970s. Margaret Eby of Flavorwire compiled ten of the best or oddest, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vincent Price, and Suzanne Somers. Embedded above is Michael Jackson's appearance to interview three young girls. He asks them how they would respond if he brings his pet snake on their date.
If you're trying to build a mnemonic memory circuit out of stone knives and bearskins, it helps to have someone like Photoshop artist Rabbit Tooth nearby. You can view five more images from classic (and I mean, really classic) Trek at the link.
