Elves have come a long way from the not-well-liked pranksters of medieval times. Shakespeare gave elves a boost, and Tolkien made them heroes. Cracked examines the split between toy-making elves and fierce video game elves.
Toward the end of the European renaissance, it appears the elves diverged into two distinct sub-species. The first consisted of the smaller, craftier elves, the kind that enjoy building toys or baking cookies. They maintained their predecessors' small, plump, ugly appearance, but they appear to have moved away from the habits of kidnapping peasant babies and killing livestock.
The guys who brought you An Engineer's Guide to Cats are having a friendly battle with Christmas laser beams. Things turn ugly when the nuclear hairball is deployed! -via Laughing Squid
There's no way of knowing whether the tiger that made a meal for five men was really the last Indochinese tiger in China, but no one has seen any others in years. Kang Wannian of Yunnan Province in China claims he killed the tiger in self-defense last February. Then he ate it.
The only known wild Indochinese tiger in China, photographed in 2007 at the same reserve, has not been seen since Kang's meal, the Yunnan-based newspaper Life News reported earlier this month.
The paper quoted the provincial Forestry Bureau as saying there was no evidence the tiger was the last one in China.
A local court sentenced Kang to 10 years for killing a rare animal plus two years for illegal possession of firearms, the local web portal Yunnan.cn reported. Prosecutors said Kang did not need a gun to gather clams.
Four villagers who helped Kang dismember the tiger and ate its meat were also sentenced from three to four years for "covering up and concealing criminal gains", the report said.
The Indochinese tiger is on the brink of extinction, with small populations in Laos, Vietnam. Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma. Link -via Arbroath
Sarah Reinertsen was born with a birth defect called proximal femoral focal deficiency. Her left leg was small, and wouldn't grow with the rest of her body, so it was amputated when she was seven years old. Still, she always wanted to be an athlete. Reinertsen began running at age eleven, and competed in the Paralympics at age 16. In college, she started running marathons, but that wasn't enough.
She is the first female amputee to win an Ironman competition. She climbed the Great Wall of China and scaled a giant cliff in Vietnam during the 10th season of the CBS television show The Amazing Race. And when she’s not running or biking or swimming, she’s trying on artificial limbs to test the latest body armor for a company that makes prosthetics. She also rallies soldiers who have lost their limbs to war. She is a hometown hero talking to runners who have known her since she was an 11-year-old who climbed into a sneaker and began running for her life.
Read more of Reinertsen's story for a real inspiration. Link -via Digg
A brain-machine interface has been developed that has been successfully tested on a patient with Locked-in Syndrome {wiki}. An unnamed 26-year-old man paralyzed for ten years by a brain stem stroke was implanted with electrodes five years ago. Researchers waited as the brain grew around the electrodes.
Three years after implantation, the researchers began testing the brain-machine interface for real-time synthetic speech production. The system is “telemetric” - it requires no wires or connectors passing through the skin, eliminating the risk of infection. Instead, the electrode amplifies and converts neural signals into frequency modulated (FM) radio signals. These signals are wirelessly transmitted across the scalp to two coils, which are attached to the volunteer’s head using a water-soluble paste. The coils act as receiving antenna for the RF signals. The implanted electrode is powered by an induction power supply via a power coil, which is also attached to the head.
The signals are then routed to an electrophysiological recording system that digitizes and sorts them. The sorted spikes, which contain the relevant data, are sent to a neural decoder that runs on a desktop computer. The neural decoder’s output becomes the input to a speech synthesizer, also running on the computer. Finally, the speech synthesizer generates synthetic speech (in the current study, only three vowel sounds were tested). The entire process takes an average of 50 milliseconds.
The tests on the first patient are quite promising.
To confirm that the neurons in the implanted area were able to carry speech information in the form of formant frequency trajectories, the researchers asked the volunteer to attempt to speak in synchrony with a vowel sequence that was presented auditorily. In later experiments, the volunteer received real-time auditory feedback from the speech synthesizer. During 25 sessions over a five-month period, the volunteer significantly improved the thought-to-speech accuracy. His average hit rate increased from 45% to 70% across sessions, reaching a high of 89% in the last session.
Although the current study focused only on producing a small set of vowels, the researchers think that consonant sounds could be achieved with improvements to the system.
The cookies we all know and love started out as a mistake!
In 1930, a dietitian who owned a tourist lodge was cooking and baking for her guests. Unfortunately, she ran out of the baker’s chocolate she needed for the chocolate cookies that were on the menu. She hurriedly substituted a chocolate bar — cut up into tiny pieces — assuming they would melt. They didn’t — they just softened, instead.
The mistake turned out all right for her in the end, and even brought her a lifetime supply of chocolate! http://www.baconbabble.com/index.php/2009/12/15/the-history-of-the-chocolate-chip-cookie/ -via the Presurfer
Aerospace engineer Kirk Sorensen became interested in nuclear energy by reading records of experiments done by Alvin Weinberg and his team after World War II at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Plant. What really captured Sorenson's attention was the promise of thorium, which has advantages over uranium as a nuclear fuel. Uranium worked best for nuclear weapons, but it is rare, dangerous, and produces lots of nuclear waste.
When he took over as head of Oak Ridge in 1955, Alvin Weinberg realized that thorium by itself could start to solve these problems. It’s abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn’t require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind.
Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab’s finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.
Sorenson is leading a campaign to revive thorium as a nuclear fuel by bringing scientists and engineers together on his blog called Energy From Thorium. A bill is now before congress to provide funds for thorium research. At least one commercial company is already using thorium. Could this be the element that saves nuclear power? Link -via reddit
Infographics are not new, they are just easier to make and pass around on the internet. BibliOdyssey has a collection of posters, pages, and pamphlets from the Victorian era that make information into an art form. Pictured is the Tableau De L'Histoire Universelle (History of the Universe Chart).
This is a fold-out print depicting all of human history from the time of creation (4693 BC = Adam & Eve; the great flood = 3300 BC) up to the date of publication (1858 by Eug. Pick, Paris). Vignettes of historically significant people, places and buildings etc are arranged along the borders.
The designer has employed something of a metaphorical display choice: civilisations are presented as a series of rivers -- the widths likely imply the comparative population level of each group versus the world's population -- which 'flow' down through history.
See also graphics on geography, biology, astronomy, and more. The pictures are all linked to larger Flickr versions. Link
Lapland, a region of Fenno-Scandinavia that lies mostly within the Arctic Circle, is where tourists go to find Santa Claus, reindeer, dog sledding, skiing, the Northern Lights, and unbelievable scenery. In this post, it's easy to see why Santa Claus wants to live in Lapland -I fell in love with the place just from the author's charming use of English!
A more traditional mode of travel – dog sledding. Here management is not so elementary, because dogs often have their own ideas about the itinerary and you do not have a lot of ways to persuade them to move in the right direction. So it will take all possible strength and agility, but it only makes the trip more interesting.
NORAD has been tracking Santa every year since 1958. In 2007, Google Maps and Google Earth got involved with following Santa's progress on Christmas Eve. As often happens with new projects, something went awry in 2008. Jeff Martin, a senior marketing manager at Google Geo, found himself in hot water quickly.
Inexplicably, as Santa made his way through Toronto that night last year, the mapping software began identifying the city as being in the United States. Instantly, NORAD Santa's dedicated Gmail account "just lit up" with messages from irate Canadians, Martin said, and quickly, the Google team fixed the problem.
But not before Martin's run-in with Canadian Lt. Gen. Marcel Duval. "He said, 'I understand that you have a new American city,'" Martin recalled. "It was a slightly tense moment for me, standing in front of a three-star general explaining to him why one of his cities had been designated as a United States city."
Read more about how the NORAD Santa Tracker came about and the technology used in the program today. Link-Thanks, Vince d'Eon!
If you watched the original British version of The Office, you know how everything ties up at the conclusion of the “documentary.” What do you remember about the Christmas special that wrapped up the series? Yes, it's a chance for BBC viewers to show off in today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss! I had no chance of scoring well, so I will let you take bragging rights. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/43511
Father Tim Jones of the St. Lawrence Church in York, England is getting some flack for advice he preached after his Nativity sermon on Sunday, in which he advocated shoplifting for those in desperate straits.
Delivering his festive lesson, Father Jones told the congregation: 'My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift. I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.
'I would ask that they do not steal from small family businesses, but from large national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.
'I would ask them not to take any more than they need, for any longer than they need.
'I offer the advice with a heavy heart and wish society would recognise that bureaucratic ineptitude and systematic delay has created an invitation and incentive to crime for people struggling to cope.'
He added that he felt society had failed the needy, and said it was far better they shoplift than turn to more degrading or violent options such as prostitution, mugging or burglary.
Both the North Yorkshire police department and local MP Anne McIntosh hav publicly denounced Father Jones' sermon. Link -via Fark
The Kenosha, Wisconsin Police Department recorded their own version of The Twelve Days of Christmas using gifts they are accustomed to.
About 20 members of the Police Department were involved in the making of the video, which was directed by Crime Prevention Officer Jeff Wamboldt and edited by Safety Officer Dennis Walsh. Work on the video began in September with filming throughout the month of October; the video was finished before Thanksgiving.
Members of the department hope it helps people laugh amid the stressful holiday season.
What happens on Facebook doesn't always stay on Facebook, and sometimes those misadventures make the national news. Remember the groom who posted to Facebook during his wedding? Have you heard about the woman who lost her disability benefits over her Facebook pictures? And then there's Rodney Bradford, who was posting to his page at the exact time of a robbery he was accused of.
His defense lawyer, Robert Reuland, told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney, Lindsay Gerdes, about the Facebook entry, which was made at the time of the robbery. The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the status update had actually been typed from acomputer located at 71 West 118th Street in Harlem, as Mr. Bradford said. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped.
Read more stories of how Facebook is affecting the lives of people outside the internet. Link -via Unique Daily
