Pic of the day 6.29.08

Waiting for the bus, downtown Seattle.

I Got One

Its in the mail. From my favorite DJ shop turntablelab.

I Want One

more here

Undiscovered Tribe a Hoax?

I posted earlier about an undiscovered tribe of people in the Brazilian jungle. Turns out its not as impressive as it sounds. It might even be a hoax. More over at Boing Boing.

Tiny Origami

These are surgical tools manipulated by a person.

Ice? wOOt!

The Mars Rover discovered water ice on the surface of Mars. This is one of the biggest discoveries in the history of the space program I would have to imagine. Start here at the LAist for the story, including why I used wOOt in the title.

When do I get an apology? Highest disapproval rating ever!

When I make a mistake, I eventually swallow my pride and own up to it. When will myself and the other (more than) half of the country get an apology from all those people that voted for Bush, elected him, and even worse, voted for him again??

His approval ratings are now at an all time low according to polls, bottoming out at 24%. That is one point away from the all time lowest ever recorded low for Truman, but we've still got some time left. But, his disapproval rating have already shattered records, with an all time of recorded history high of 69%. Some of this is detailed in this Gallup video.

Question: who exactly are these 24% of the population that somehow haven't accepted the fact that Bush will almost undoubtedly go down as the worst American president ever? Maybe the top 1% that got their taxes reduced under, but everyone else? I suspect they are those people that haven't swallowed their pride, and admitted that they quite seriously screwed the pooch.

FYI. We won't hold it against you, if you won't do it again with McBush.

5 superpowers that could be yours!

Apparently, according to this very trustworthy site (ahem), science will give us five superpowers in our lifetime. A number of them have to do with my favorite past time, Nanotechnology (coincidence? I think not). The list, modeled closely after the abilities of some of your favorite super heroes, is pretty entertaining. Can you guess the superhero?
5. Technologically advanced battle suit
4. Telekinesis
3. Web slinging and wall climbing (too easy)
2. Fast healing wounds via tissue regeneration
1. Invisibility

Check out the explanations.

Funnel cloud

Crazy picture taken by a woman in Iowa during the recent storms. See more on the NYT blog.

Buyer's Market?

Frank Lloyd Wright's Bowler house is for sale. Anyone have a cool $2.5 million?

Balls

It's almost like they just wanted an excuse to create and adult size ball pit, a la Chucky Cheese, but the LA DWP is actually trying to prevent the growth of toxic bromate by pouring 400,000 black balls into a reservoir in Silver Lake. Check out the video. They are closing the reservoir in a few years in favor of the modern standard, non pissable into, covered reservoir. This is where your drinking water comes from. I gotta go see this for myself...

Chili nanotubes

Thanks to the beauty of carbon nanotubes, they can now objectively measure the hotness or certain chili peppers. It used to be decided by some random group of people's taste buds.

Professor Richard Compton of the University of Oxford has been experimenting with the world's hottest pepper sauces. Given their fiery pungency, he's careful not to taste undiluted. Instead, thanks to carbon nanotubes and adsorptive stripping voltammetry, he's developed an objective method to measure that intense heat.
The heat level in chillies is usually measured using the Scoville organoleptic (sensory) test. Developed by American scientist Wilbur Scoville in 1912, it uses a series of dilutions with taste volunteers - a mild chilli pepper has a rating of 2,500-8,000 Scoville units. How we feel the "heat" is also well understood: compounds known as capsaicinoids trigger chemoreceptor nerve endings in the skin.
Compton's academic expertise lies in electrochemistry and sensors. Why does he use carbon nanotubes for sensing chilli heat? "It's as trivial as having a huge surface area for conductivity," says Compton. A carbon nanotube is an arrangement of carbon atoms in a hollow tube 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. The multi-walled nanotubes used by Compton are like tubes within tubes to give the right surface area.

Find the rest of the story here.

Bio Fuels

My roommate and I have been looking at old Benzos converted to run on veggie oil. Wonder why? See below.
Not sure if you can read those little numbers, but that dark red all over California corresponds to $4.50 a gallon. That's tops in the country.

Intellectual pursuit of the day

The headline is inflammatory, but the story, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" from this month's The Atlantic is a comprehensive look at how communication and media has shifted society and the structure of the human brain throughout history. Its a beast at over 4 full Internet pages of text only (what? Does that ever happen anymore?), but chock full of history. Its an interesting look at the ability of the human brain to rewire itself based on how it interacts with information and how the Internet, by monitoring and hosting our perceptions of the world, is turning our brains from a dense forest of information and reasoning to a "flat pancake" of processing tasks refined to track down information (Googling info). In other words, go read a book this weekend.

Famous photos recreated with Legos

This guy has created a flickr set of photos recreating famous images from history (or recreating the scenes of famous photos and then photographing them). I picked this awesome shot of Diego Maradona's 'Hand of God' goal from the World Cup back in the day to illustrate, but there is more.

Epic video

If you're not smiling by 1:25, you may want to try therapy.

Pic of the day 6.6.08

Night game!

Blek Le Rat

Taken by my friend V in silver lake. A new work.

Haunting Beauty

Why is it that when we see extraordinarily strange things, we often describe them as beautiful? Im referring to those glowing organisms in the deep ocean or intricate flowers in the jungles (basically everything featured on Planet Earth). This is also true with humans as well, as the extremes of the human race - the worlds tallest, smallest, blackest and whitest people are consistently ranked on pop culture's ubiquitous benchmark of beauty.

Inanimate objects are subject to this too, in fact it was a series of extrodinary shots of one of the most peculiar buildings I've seen recently that got me thinking on this path.

I couldn't say it much better than the guys over at Pruned. So if you find the images striking, are interested in how they relate to the US Government's now defunct Safeguard program, the site's architectural influence and other musings, definitely read more here.

Also check the actual site visual on google maps.

We're Nice! kinda.

Ahahahaa! I keep telling people about Minnesota Nice (without the mean connotation implied by the link's entries) and it always takes some explaining and elicits some dubious responses. But hey Internet, now it's in Wikipedia, so you know it's true!

Thanks sis!

Beverages Bonanza

Mostly I drink water as my beverage of choice throughout the day, but sometimes at lunch I'll grab a vitamin water or a suicide fountain soda (yesterday it was sprite, fanta orange and raspberry ice tea) and when I'm feeling spendy (or traveling on the company dime) I grab one of these. Suffice it to say I was surprised to see this story from Men's Health that addresses some of the most unhealthy drinks in the market and this blog that shows the health differences between similar drinks. There were some definite surprises.

Worst "Healthy" Drink

Glaceau VitaminWater (any flavor; 20 oz bottle) 130 calories 33 grams sugar

(who knew! I'm not drinking this stuff anymore-sorry Josh!)

Beer

Drink This: Guinness 126 calories10 g carbohydrates
Not That: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale 200 calories12 g carbohydrates

Iced Tea

Drink This: Honest Green Dragon Tea (16 oz) 60 calories10 g sugar

Not That: Arizona Iced Tea (16 oz) 200 calories 25 g sugar

Jet car

and for those of us who are not as fond of VW beetles

Nanocleansers

I have to admit, I'm completely fascinated with anything related to nano-technologies. Today's gnarly-nano moment comes courtesy of potassium manganese oxide fibers (wtf?). Scientists at MIT have crafted sheets of this stuff which acts like a paper towel for oil and basically sucks up oil and nothing else (even pulling it from water). It was designed to pick up oil from the oceans and does so remarkably well - it can hold up to 20 times its weight in oil. Oil that can later be extracted and used. Plus, it's apparently affordable to produce and it's recyclable.

Stellacci explained that there are other materials that can absorb oils from water, "but their selectivity is not as high as ours." In other words, conventional materials still absorb some water, making them less efficient at capturing the contaminant.

The new material appears to be completely impervious to water. "Our material can be left in water a month or two, and when you take it out it's still dry," Stellacci said. "But at the same time, if that water contains some hydrophobic contaminants, they will get absorbed."

Made of potassium manganese oxide, the nanowires are stable at high temperatures. As a result, oil within a loaded membrane can be removed by heating above the boiling point of oil. The oil evaporates, and can be condensed back into a liquid. The membrane--and oil--can be used again.

Link to MIT News which has a short video
Link to the post on gizmodo

If you have a nano fetish like me, you may also like the blog behind my first post ever - io9

Undiscovered Tribes

News flash of the day - there are tribes of people living in the Brazilian and Peruvian jungle that are currently "undiscovered," i.e. that have not had contact with the outside world (presumably). National Geographic posted a story and the above image of what they believe was one of these tribes, shooting arrows at an airplane. Pretty strange situation. What surprised me the most was learning who usually finds these hidden communities. In my mind I've placed archaeologists at the far reaches of the globe, exploring, digging and studying ancient cultures and undiscovered lands (did I mention all of my friends went to see Indiana Jones this weekend?). Well, apparently I'm ignorant. Its not kind-hearted archaeologists that are finding these undiscovered tribes. It's oil company speculators. Not only oil company scientists, but logging companies and energy researchers. No wonder they paint themselves black and red and attack anything that is not a part of their tribe.

Another possible undiscovered tribe here.