1. Nintendo set out to replace their Game Cube in competition with the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. They developed a game system with something new and exciting: a wireless controller that works by motion sensor. Instead of pushing buttons, players can move their bodies as if they were in the game, making it a "virtual sports" controller. The sensors detect both movement and acceleration along three axes, which gives the system six parameters with which to measure the movements of the player.
2. While in development, the Wii was code named Revolution, but it wasn't a secret. It changed to Wii on April 27, 2006. The name was chosen because it is short, simple to pronounce in many languages, and needs no abbreviation. The spelling We was considered first, but Wii was more distinctive.
3. Wii sales were launched in November 2006 in the US and December 2006 in the UK. The timing was either a brilliant marketing scheme or a planning disaster, as Christmas demand led to shortages in both countries. The shortage continued through 2007. Many began to suspect that Nintendo was orchestrating artificial demand for the product. For four holiday seasons (so far), there have not been enough Wii systems in all areas.
4. When the Wii was new, there was incident after incident of broken TVs and monitors caused by flung Wii remotes. Windows and household glassware were also victims. Nintendo urged people to use the strap to secure the remote to their wrists while playing games. The website Wii Have A Problem sprung up to document the damage caused by Wii remotes that "got out of hand", so to speak.
5. Pink and blue Wii remotes were launched for Valentines Day 2010. Sure, it was a gimmick gift, but individual color-coded remotes are handy for families with more than one child, in order to keep track of not only scores, but who lost/damaged the equipment. Remotes now come in quite a few colors, or you can get colored covers for existing remotes.
In the bootleg markets of Shanghai, you can purchase an ePad, a iRobot, or an iPhono. You can even get an MP5 player! But I was really impressed by this guitar peripheral for the Wü game console. See these and more in a gallery of good at Classy Hands. http://www.classy-hands.com/?p=966 -Thanks, Lee!
Sally Davies took pictures of a McDonalds burger and fries for 137 days, and the pictures never changed. It wasn't the first such experiment, but could it be replicated under normal conditions? Some say a Happy Meal will last forever, but YouTube member GitEmSteveDave had very different results. You can skip the first minute if you're in a hurry. -via Breakfast Links
Three-year-old Alannah Merleto of Baulkham Hills, New South Wales, Australia flushes a lot of things down the toilet, as some children do, but her two-day-old kitten was the worst thing she could flush.
Mum Ammie Croft called in the cavalry to her Baulkham Hills home after not being able to find the fourth kitten in a newly-born litter.
""I asked Alannah if she knew where he was and she said 'down the toilet'," Ms Crofts said. "I didn't believe it could be true. I thought, 'she can't have put the kitten down the toilet'." A whimper from the pipes confirmed her fears.
Complete with rescue equipment used in the 1989 Newcastle earthquake disaster, the NSW Fire Brigade arrived and began their quest.
The rescue crew found the kitten by putting a camera down the pipe, and pushed the kitten to an access valve. The eight firefighters worked for five hours to free the kitten. The kitten was reunited with his mother Pusska and was renamed Cain after the firefighter who pulled him from the drain. Link -via Buzzfeed
Shaun the Sheep stars in a cute physics game in which you guide the sheep home. You have obstacles to cross, and three sheep of different mass. While you figure out a strategy, enjoy the artwork and sound effects. Link -via Metafilter
Brian Lee, a 24-year-old design student, submitted an entry to an Australian vehicle competition -and won! His design, the Aid Necessities Transporter (A.N.T.) is built to bring supplies to disaster areas. The design was inspired by the worker insects it is named for.
The ANT responds to the need for getting necessary supplies to victims of disasters as fast as possible. Like the ant, ANT was designed with six wheels (6 legs) and carries its supplies like the ant carries food back to its nest in its center, so does the ANT carry supplies and food on its center.
See the concept vehicle in motion at InventorSpot. Link
A soccer team from Togo traveled to Bahrain to play against the Bahrain national team. Bahrain not only won, they were surprised at their opponent's lack of fitness. When the Togolese soccer authorities heard about the match, they were dumbfounded, because Togo had not sent a team to Bahrain!
Investigations were launched, and the nation's sports minister muttered to the press about "shadowy handlers" and "mafia groups." After what must have been a grueling piece of detective work, the investigators pinned their suspicions on Tchanile Bana, a former national-team coach who had recently been suspended for taking another fake team to a tournament in Egypt. Bana confessed, apologized, was banned from the game for three years, and insisted—maybe a little too fervently—that he had acted alone.
Of course, there's a lot more to the story, which you can read at Slate. Link -via the Presurfer
Marvin Maxwell once made a guitar from a toilet seat. Now he's reversed that idea and made a toilet seat that looks like a guitar! Or how abut a "piano bench", if that's your taste? Several colors are available from Jammin' Johns. Link
Portable devices go head to head in this parody of Michael Jackson's "Beat It" from Peter Furia, Beau Lewis and David Fine, with vocals by Patrick Dunnam. -via Laughing Squid
Eating food that is known to be poisonous is like playing Russian Roulette. Some people believe the thrill of flirting with death is worth the risk. Then there are those foods that we all eat, but didn't know they were poisonous -like almonds!
The poison is present only in a specific species of almond, namely the “bitter” ones, which are a broader and shorter version of the sweet almond. Although each bitter almond only contains tiny amounts of cyanide, the substance is dangerous enough that it is illegal to sell raw almonds in the US. Nowadays all almonds must be processed through heating in order to eliminate germs and render the poison harmless.
The music in this video is much better than you'd expect. After all, how many slide whistle virtuosos do you know? The kazoo is featured as well, and some guitar work. It's all performed by multiple versions of Joe Penna, also known as YouTube user MysteryGuitarMan. Link
No matter how much effort you put into a costume, it goes south when you find you are one of ten Batmen at a party -or even worse, a costume contest. Geeks Are Sexy has some ideas for costumes taken from movies, games, and literature that will be recognized by other geeks, but you're almost guaranteed to have the only one of its kind. Pictured is an appropriate literary costume most of you will recognize right off. Link
It's the time of year to pull out the movie Ghostbusters and watch it again! If you've done that already, you should do well on today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I scored only 64%, despite the fact that I wrote a post on the movie only a couple of months ago. You will, no doubt, do better. Link
It was only in 1995 that astronomers found measurable evidence of specific exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. Now we have actual images of some exoplanets, as well as artist renderings of the data collected.
We know of nearly 500 other planets orbiting other stars. However, the methods of finding these exoplanets are indirect. We measure their affect on their parent stars, but we didn't directly see the planets themselves... until 2005, when the first image of an actual world orbiting another star was announced.
As of October 2010, only 7 such planets have been imaged, but we'll soon have more. This gallery shows the best of these images, including the first alien solar system to have its picture taken.
The picture shown here is the star HR 8799 with three planets revolving around it! See a much larger image in the gallery. Link-Thanks, Phil!
The medicinal uses of powdered mummy by A.S. Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
Nowadays, powdered mummy may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for many years it was just what the doctor ordered. That’s one of the takeaway messages of Richard Sugg’s study “’Good Physic but Bad Food’: Early Modern Attitudes to Medicinal Cannibalism and its Suppliers.”
Dr. Sugg is a Research Fellow in Literature and Medicine at Durham University. He begins his monograph with an astute observation: “The subject of medicinal cannibalism in mainstream western medicine has received surprisingly little historical attention.”
Sugg tells us that mummy, generally in powdered form, “having originally been a natural mixture of pitch and asphalt, came in the twelfth century to be associated with preserved Egyptian corpses.” It then “emerged as a mainstream western medicine” and remained a standard-issue drug until “opinion began to turn against it in the eighteenth century.”
Physicians pre-scribed powdered mummy for diverse ailments. An English pharmacopeia published in 1721 specifies two ounces of mummy as the proper amount to make a “plaster against ruptures.” Ambroise Paré, royal surgeon to sixteenth century French kings, proclaimed mummy to be “the very first and last medicine of almost all our practitioners” against bruising.
Dr. Paré harbored doubts about the drug’s efficacy, lamenting that “wee are ... compelled both foolishly and cruelly to devoure the mangled and putride particles of the carcasses of the basest people of Egypt, or such as are hanged.” But Dr. Paré was an unusually driven doubting Thomas — he lamented having “tried mummy ‘an hundred times’ without success.”
The Sugg study explains that “mummy was an important commodity. It is often seen in long lists of merchants’ wares and prices.” The marketplace attracted counterfeiters. Sugg supplies an anecdote: “Tellingly, when Samuel Pepys saw a mummy it was in a merchant’s warehouse; while ‘the abuses of mummy dealers in selling inferior wares’ were especially widespread and notorious by the end of the seventeenth century.”
The best suppliers maintained high standards. The presumably admirable recipe used by 17th century German pharmacologist Johann Schroeder included: “the cadaver of a reddish man (because in such a man the blood is believed lighter and so the flesh is better), whole, fresh without blemish, of around twenty-four years of age, dead of a violent death (not of illness), exposed to the moon’s rays for one day and night, but with a clear sky. Cut the muscular flesh of this man and sprinkle it with powder of myrrh and at least a little bit of aloe, then soak it.” And so forth.
This study removes some, if not all, of the horror from the Stephen Sondheim musical “Sweeney Todd,” in which a London barber of yesteryear murders his customers and recycles them as stuffing for yummy meat pies. Thanks to Dr. Sugg’s research, the play’s main love song gains a soupçon of innocence, especially in its cheerful refrain: “The history of the world, my sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.”
Mummy Powder and Shakespeare
Louise Noble of the University of New England looked at how Shakespeare looked at mummy medicine. Her 2003 study “‘And Make Two Pasties of Your Shameful Heads’: Medicinal Cannibalism and Healing the Body Politic in Titus Andronicus” presents copious details and analysis.
Noble’s 2003 study about Shakespeare’s take on mummy powder.
Noble introduces her subject by reprinting this “astonishingly explicit” recipe from Oswald Croll’s 1609 book Bazilica Chymica and Praxis Chymiatricae or Royal and Practical Chymistry (translated by John Hartman in 1670), which no doubt inspired Dr. Schroeder:
Chuse the Carcase of a red Man (because in them the blood is more sincere, and gentle and therefore more excellent) whole (not maimed) clear without blemishes, of the age of twenty four years, that hath been Hanged, Broke upon a Wheel, or Thrust-through, having been for one day and night exposed to the open Air, in a serene time. This Mumy (that is, Musculous flesh, of the Thighs, Breasts, Armes, and other parts) from the two Luminaries, once illuminate and constellate, cut into small pieces or slices and sprinkle on them Powder of Myrrh, and of Aloes, but a very little (otherwise it will be too bitter) afterward by Macerating, Imbibe them for certain days in Spirit of Wine, hang them up a little, and again imbibe them, then hang them up to dry in the Air, this so dryed will be like Flesh hardned in Smoak, and be without stink.
At the end of her study—which after all centers on the play Titus Andronicus—Noble concludes that
The elaborate rhetorical juggling of medicine and cannibalism in the play is an inevitable consequence of a cultural behavior, wherein the socially accepted medical consumption of human bodies and the foreign, abjected, and forbidden act of eating human flesh are profoundly implicated in one another.
Acknowledgment
Thanks to the Chemical Heritage Foundation for bringing mummy powder to our attention.
References
“’Good Physic but Bad Food’: Early Modern Attitudes to Medicinal Cannibalism and its Suppliers,” Richard Sugg, Social History of Medicine, vol. 19, no. 2, 2006, pp. 225–40.
“’And Make Two Pasties of Your Shameful Heads’: Medicinal Cannibalism and Healing the Body Politic in Titus Andronicus,” Louise Noble, English Literary History, vol. 70, no. 3, Fall 2003, pp. 677–708.
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This article is republished with permission from the January-February 2009 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
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