There's a street in Macon, Georgia that's named "Lustful Court". Residents are tired of the jokes they hear and want to change it:
Michelle Washington, a resident of Lustful Court, Macon, says the name sparks laughter and confusion when she tells people where she lives.
After listening to residents, commissioners decided they'll consider the change if neighbours start a petition. No one could recall where the name originated.
In related news, a teenager was suspended from Xbox Live because he listed the real name of town in which he lives: Fort Gay, West Virginia.
Nikolaj Arndt, an artist in Germany, made this 3D rendering of a tiger on a sidewalk in the city of Geldern. It was apparently done for a local street art competition.
Claudia Friedlander, a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory, is a professional vocal instructor in New York City. She was recently asked to evaluate the talents of five famous heavy metal singers. Here's what she had to say about the late Ronnie James Dio of Black Sabbath:
Like the first singer, he performs with perfect legato, clear diction, and a consistent, organic vibrancy. He arranges his resonance space to create a shallow snarl without setting up any resistance for his breath. You can tell how healthy his delivery is from the way he moves in and out of brief moments of harmony with the other tracks with impeccable intonation.
Friedlander also evaluated Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden, King Diamond of Mercyful Fate, Rob Halford of Judas Priest, and Ozzy Osborne. She thinks especially highly of Halford.
Okay, that may be overstating it just a bit. But Australian scientists claim to have moved small particles five feet using only light:
The device works by shining a hollow laser beam around tiny glass particles. The air surrounding the particle heats up, while the dark center of the beam stays cool. When the particle starts to drift out of the middle and into the bright laser beam, the force of heated air molecules bouncing around and hitting the particle's surface is enough to nudge it back to the center.
A small amount of light also seeps into the darker middle part of the beam, heating the air on one side of the particle and pushing it along the length of the laser beam. If another such laser is lined up on the opposite side of the beam, the speed and direction the particle moves can be easily manipulated by changing the brightness of the beams.
Street Fighter High is a fan film that was released a few months ago. It showed the characters from that video game as angst-ridden high school students. The film was so successful that the producers made a second, longer version. This time, it's a musical.
Opportunity + Instinct = Profit. A good journalist can sense the moment that a story is developing and seize the moment. That's why when White House correspondent Tony Christopher started having a heart attack, he immediately logged into Twitter and started covering it:
Approximately at 6pm on Sunday afternoon Christopher wrote, “I gotta be me. Livetweeting my heart attack. Beat that!” Presumably a few minutes later the paramedics arrived to tell Christopher he will be stable after his crisis.
An hour later Christopher joked about needing to own a cardiac cat, referencing a viral video in which a cat is trying to revive his dead feline friend. He also updated his followers about the pain he was feeling, “even after the morphine.”
http://wireupdate.com/wires/9456/white-house-correspondent-reports-his-own-heart-attack-on-twitter/ and Link via Jammie Wearing Fool | Screenshot: Mediaite
"Jump the shark" is slang term that refers to the moment when an entertainment franchise starts to go downhill. It specifically refers to an episode of the TV show Happy Days in which Fonzie jumped over a shark tank on waterskis. Now Fred Fox, Jr., the author of that screenplay, has come out in defense of that episode:
All successful shows eventually start to decline, but this was not "Happy Days'" time. Consider: It was the 91st episode and the fifth season. If this was really the beginning of a downward spiral, why did the show stay on the air for six more seasons and shoot an additional 164 episodes? Why did we rank among the Top 25 in five of those six seasons?
That's why, when I first heard the phrase and found out what it meant, I was incredulous. Then my incredulity turned into amazement. I started thinking about the thousands of television shows that had been on the air since the medium began. And out of all of those, the "Happy Days" episode in which Fonzie jumps over a shark is the one to be singled out? This made no sense.
Researchers at MIT noticed that chloroplasts in plant cells have a remarkable ability to regenerate after damage, and wondered if this process could be duplicated to create self-replicating photovoltaic cells:
The disks, carrying the reaction centers, are in a solution where they attach themselves spontaneously to carbon nanotubes — wire-like hollow tubes of carbon atoms that are a few billionths of a meter thick yet stronger than steel and capable of conducting electricity a thousand times better than copper. The nanotubes hold the phospholipid disks in a uniform alignment so that the reaction centers can all be exposed to sunlight at once, and they also act as wires to collect and channel the flow of electrons knocked loose by the reactive molecules.
The system Strano’s team produced is made up of seven different compounds, including the carbon nanotubes, the phospholipids, and the proteins that make up the reaction centers, which under the right conditions spontaneously assemble themselves into a light-harvesting structure that produces an electric current. Strano says he believes this sets a record for the complexity of a self-assembling system.
The above image recently appeared on 4chan. The legion of anonymous users there interpreted it as suggesting that it was necessary to publicly advertise for people to attend an old man's birthday party. The people of 4chan, and later reddit, decided to track down this man and throw him a huge birthday party. They discovered that his name is William Lashua and that he lives in Ashburnham, Massachusetts.
A man claiming to be his grandson started a reddit thread and clarified the situation. Mr. Lashua actually had a large and well-connected family. The poster was put up in a local shop for people who knew him in the immediate community. The grandson offered an address to which people could send cards, but asked that redditors and anonymous respect the family's privacy at the party.
Most did, and no strippers appeared, but here you can view a video from Mr. Lashua's 90th birthday party. He opened cards and presents sent to him from the good people of the internet, and thanked them.
Alice Wismath, a computer science student at Queen's University in Canada, has developed a form of chess in which the type of a given piece on the board is in a state of flux:
In the quantum chess computer game created by undergraduate computer science student Alice Wismath, a piece that should be a knight could simultaneously also be a queen, a pawn or something else. The player doesn't know what the second state might be or which of the two states the piece will choose when it is moved.[...]
Wismath also chose new rules to make the game workable with its quantum twist. For example, her version of quantum chess requires a player to capture the king, which never changes to another piece, instead of merely delivering a checkmate. Also, pieces change states only when they land on black squares.
Artist Jason Hernandez presented this medieval depiction of He-Man, Skeletor, Battle Cat, and Orko. The Latin inscription translates as "I am the master of the world!"
Perry Watkins of Buckinghamshire, UK, may have set a world speed record for a piece of furniture when he piloted a Queen Anne dining table with silver service for four people at 130 MPH:
The table, named "Fast Food", reached a top speed of 130mph and averaged 113.8mph, comfortably eclipsing the 92mph set by a sofa in 2007.
Mr Watkins expects to become the official world record holder for the fastest piece of furniture when his time is accepted by Guinness.
A 1994 Reliant Scimitar Sabre underneath the table, boosted by a nitrous oxide kit, provides the thrust for the makeshift vehicle.
Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have developed a prototype for an artificial kidney:
The device, which would include thousands of microscopic filters as well as a bioreactor to mimic the metabolic and water-balancing roles of a real kidney[...]
The treatment has been proven to work for the sickest patients using a room-sized external model developed by a team member in Michigan. Roy's goal is to apply silicon fabrication technology, along with specially engineered compartments for live kidney cells, to shrink that large-scale technology into a device the size of a coffee cup. The device would then be implanted in the body without the need for immune suppressant medications, allowing the patient to live a more normal life.
The researchers hope to begin clinical trials in five to seven years.
The television show Lost in Space, airing from 1965-1968, presented the adventures of a family in space in the year 1997. In a set of campy stories, the Robinsons clashed with buffoonish pirates, anthropomorphic vegetables, and prospectors from the Old West. The show didn't take itself too seriously, but was took a lighthearted look at the science fiction genre. Let's take a tour of some facts that you might not know about the show.
1. Lost in Space is an obvious parallel to The Swiss Family Robinson novel and Disney movie. But Irwin Allen was specifically inspired by a comic book series called Space Family Robinson, published by Gold Key from 1962-1984. It had a similar premise to Lost in Space: the Robinsons were space explorers. After 1966, the comic book adopted the same Space Family Robinson -- Lost in Space to get attention from the show's fans. The comic book endured long after the show's cancellation until its publisher folded.
2. Carroll O'Connor, who played Archie Bunker on All in the Family, was initially considered to play the role of Dr. Smith.
3. Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet was so popular that Irwin Allen decided to have a robot as a cast member. Robbie himself guest-starred in twoepisodes.
4. The pilot episode cost $600,000. At the time, it was the most expensive TV pilot to date, with the exception of Star Trek's $630,000 first pilot episode “The Cage.”
5. Gene Roddenberry approached CBS with Star Trek when Irwin Allen did so with Lost in Space. CBS decided that one science fiction show was enough, and preferred Lost in Space.
6. When aliens on the show were depicted with pointed ears (e.g. “The Haunted Lighthouse”), the molds were borrowed from the makeup artists at Star Trek.
7. Guy Williams (John Robinson) was a prominent actor, thanks to his title role in the TV series Zorro. He was under the impression that, in Lost in Space, he would have the lead role in a serious drama. But as the show progressed, it became increasingly campy and Williams' role a supporting one. Embittered about this development, he never acted after the series was canceled. Williams retired to Argentina, where Zorro was tremendously popular, shortly after Lost in Space ended.
8. The strongly campy nature of the second and third seasons was, by the way, entirely intentional. A year after Lost in Space debuted, the TV series Batman became a spectacular ratings success. Irwin Allen noticed and attributed its ratings to the show's playful tone. He altered Lost in Space accordingly.
9. Child actor Kurt Russell, later famous for films such as BigTrouble in Little China, made one of his first screen appearances in the episode "The Challenge." In this episode, Russell played a young boy from a warrior culture sent to hunt on the planet as a rite of passage.
10. At the beginning of the series, Bill Mumy (Will) was twelve and Angela Cartwright (Penny) was fourteen. Mumy had a crush his television sister from the beginning and made his move two years later. This was the first romantic relationship for either of them and they dated for six years. For a short time, Mumy and Cartwright were engaged, but they eventually broke it off.
11. Years after the show’s cancellation, Mumy wrote a script for a reunion episode. He arranged casting and got the support of 20th Century Fox and CBS. But Irwin Allen, fearing that Mumy would later have a copyright claim on Lost in Space, refused to even look at the script. The reunion never took place.
12. The cast did, however, have a reunion on a 1984 episode of Family Feud in which they squared off against the cast of Hawaiian Eye. Here's a clip. Sources: Peel, John. The Complete Lost in Space Book. Granada Hills, CA: Schuster and Schuster, 1987. Print. Van Hise, James. Lost in Space 25th Anniversary Tribute Book. Las Vegas: Pioneer Books, 1990. Print. Images: CBS, Gold Key Stories, Paramount, Disney, ABC, CBS, and CBS, respectively.
