Author: Kirk

Blue Angels In The Sky

Boy people patent some wacky things!

For example, any guy who stayed in a college dorm knows what a “Blue Angel” is – young men like to light their intestinal gas on fire and marvel at their innate ability to produce fire. It’s Neanderthalic, its moronic, its free entertainment. Dorm food doesn’t help matters.

Oh sure there are horror stories you hear about how the flame travels up inside and burns a guy, or the explosion is so violent that, well, you get the idea. So two men thought it would be a good idea to patent an idea behind what could possibly be the weirdest “rocket” I’ve ever heard of:

A recreational activity practiced by some individuals is ignition of one’s own flatus. This is performed by using a lit match or candle, or a cigarette lighter. So widespread is this activity that there are web sites on the Internet devoted exclusively to explaining proper lighting techniques.

OK, I’ll take your word on that good sirs.

A major drawback of this popular practice is that it usually involves the hazardous coupling of fire, combustible gases and inebriated participants. Reports of serious burns to body parts are not uncommon, this being especially true when the
participants remove their clothing.

Indeed, you can’t argue with that reasoning. So these two fellows offer up a novel invention to help those poor inebriated firebugs:

A toy gas-fired missile and launcher assembly whose missile is composed of a soft head and a tail extending therefrom formed by a piston. … To operate the assembly, the operator places the inlet tube with its valve open adjacent his anal region from which a colonic gas is discharged. The piston is then withdrawn to a degree producing a negative pressure to inhale the gas into the combustion chamber to intermix with the air therein to create a combustible mixture. The ignitor is then activated to explode the mixture in the chamber and fire the missile into space.

Translation: you launch a rocket by releasing and lighting your “flatus” in this contraption. Yup – someone paid to patent this. I honestly see a market for it too – don’t you?

Polaris Music Prize – Awards Based On Merit? What The?!

As a Canadian I am aware that we hold the annual Juno Awards to reward the top artists in Canadian music. However I have to admit that I am often puzzled by the nominees for the Junos: they always seem to be big names in music with the little names getting a brief spotlight as up and comers or some such. The music is typically radio-friendly and bland. Frankly I don’t bother with the awards at all – they seem far too “ersatz“. But what is the Juno Award replacing, or standing in for?

Well, finally Canadians have an answer to this question – The Polaris Music Prize. Their mission statement:

The operation of a not-for-profit organization that annually honours, celebrates and rewards creativity and diversity in Canadian recorded music by recognizing, then marketing the albums of the highest artistic integrity, without regard to musical genre, professional affiliation, or sales history, as judged by a panel of selected critics and experts. (link)

Whodathunkit? A music award based on artistic merit? What will us crazy Canucks think of next?!

Recent Additions To The Gallery

For those of you keeping score at home, there have been two recent additions to the picture gallery:

We love comments, so feel free to leave ’em (in the photo gallery of course, so we know what picture you’re talking about)!

Dear Internet: Oopsie! Love AOL.

Earlier this month AOL released to the public a sizable chunk of data. The data was in the form of the verbatim search queries submitted by AOL subscribers from March to May 2006. Their intention was purportedly to aide academic researchers in creating new search-based tools by providing them with some real-life data to work with. AOL knew they did not want to violate their subscriber’s privacy so they changed the identifying information in the log lines to unique numbers. So kbridger could become, for example, user 3402937.

What they failed to realize – and this is a major stumbling block in artificial intelligence today – is that there is some information in the context of the data as well. For example look at this “anonymous user’s” search history:

17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 wife killer
17556639 how to kill a wife
17556639 poop
17556639 dead people
17556639 pictures of dead people
17556639 killed people
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 murder photo
17556639 steak and cheese
17556639 photo of death
17556639 photo of death
17556639 death
17556639 dead people photos
17556639 photo of dead people
17556639 www.murderdpeople.com
17556639 decapatated photos
17556639 decapatated photos
17556639 car crashes3
17556639 car crashes3
17556639 car crash photo

Continue reading Dear Internet: Oopsie! Love AOL.

The Mystery That Is The Common Traffic Light

People today seem to have only a vague notion of how traffic lights detect that they are sitting in their car at an intersection waiting for the light to change. I’m happy to report that once again we see the power of the magnetic field being harnessed in a simple and effective manner (unless you happen to not have a lot of metal, like, say bicycles). I mentioned before that I think magnetic fields are cool – but here’s an example we come across almost every day without realizing it.

No, your car’s weight does not trigger the light – its your car’s metal content. Here’s an article from Howstuffworks that explains it for those of you interested. Now armed with this information you can start looking at intersections for those induction coils hidden in the road (black ribbons about an inch wide, usually a circle or square). You’d be surprised how easy it is to always get the advance turn filter once you know where to stop in the lane….

Want To Virtually Visit Moscow?

A friendly Moscow webcam is the best I can offer my intrepid friends. That and a return to the saga that was our trip there some years ago.

You can control this webcam directly on the webpage – if you select the preset position called Downtown you can see some on the onion domes and massive architecture in downtime Moscow. You can also click anywhere on the visible picture and it will be centered on that location for you.

Note that anyone with an Internet connection can control this, so don’t be surprised if it suddenly moves somewhere you didn’t ask it to. Pretty darned cool though – brings up good memories of our days in Moscow.

A Better BBQ?

I consider myself a BBQ enthusiast. I enjoy BBQ’d food as much if not more so than any other random person you’d stop on the street. I sometimes take it even further when I go camping – the BBQ morphs into a small portable stove and everything is cooked either in a pot over the flame or literally over the campfire flame. I love that stuff.

So now I hear things about this new technology for BBQs – one that uses wood fuel and batteries. Interested? I was too. Check out the Woodflame technology.

I have no idea how much these cost, but I see Rona is a reseller so you can bet I’m going to check it out when i’m next in there. Pretty cool stuff!

Artificial Sperm – The Next Step, But Towards What?

We’ve all heard the joke about how medical breakthroughs in medical genetics and reproductive technology will eventually make either men or women (depending on who’s telling the story) obsolete. Funny most of the time – until you hear about how they have now successfully created sperm cells that were grown outside of a male body, implanted into a female, and produced viable offspring. Suddenly the term artificial insemination takes on a totally new meaning.

In all honesty I’m sure not everyone is surprised about this. It really is the next step, and a preliminary one at that. The offspring suffered, with one dying before reaching adulthood. As the article notes:

“There are currently many things we don’t know about how sperm are formed let alone why it sometimes goes wrong and leads to infertility in some men.

But he added: “It is more difficult to say whether artificial sperm produced this way could ultimately be used as a new treatment for male infertility. There are many technical, ethical and safety issues to be confronted before this could even be considered.”

At this point in reading the article I stopped and mentally noted that not a single person voiced the first question that came to my mind: Should we? Certainly they make all sorts of sabre-rattling efforts, claiming that various aspects of ethical, cultural and societal impacts need to be assessed along the way. I can hear the white-mustached man clearing his throat, lowering his bushy white eyebrows and declaring that analysis needs to be done. Hrumph, harumph, we’ll do this right!

And yet, I believe we need to look at things a little differently. Just because we can, doesn’t necessarily mean we should. That’s my personal belief.

Many people decry that we are messing with God’s work here, creating life in a way that should never be done. I think these people often follow this experiment to its natural conclusion: same-sex couples being able to have biological children together. Then the scientists step in and say that God’s desire is to have humans grow and stretch ourselves – that if s/he hadn’t meant us to do this we wouldn’t be able to do it.

I find these arguments rather pointless, as beliefs are not universal and really can’t be used as a cultural solution. But I do think we should ask ourselves why this is needed in today’s world, what the ramifications will be, and whether we really do need to follow this path to its completion. These questions may result in ‘yes’ – who can say? Nobody’s really ever figured it out.

Another example of science leading society down a road it may not even be aware of, let alone be thinking about critically. What does that road means to the culture, society, and people on the trip? Do we even care anymore? Is it progress for progress’s sake?