techyum ::

King Corn is a documentary opening this week in San Francisco and Berkeley, and throughout November nationwide (it already played in New York, Washington, DC and Boston). Directed by Aaron Woolf, King Corn follows Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis, two Yale friends who discover that their great-grandfathers came from the same small town in Iowa. They decide to move to Greene, Iowa to spend a year farming an acre of corn and make a documentary about it, in the process exploring the powerful but largely unseen role corn has in American life.
Raising an acre of corn — a ludicrously small amount in this age of a farm industry dominated by big companies — requires them to learn from a host of earthy characters, which is all very entertaining, but the science facts of the documentary are what’s really interesting. For example, 150 pounds of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer allows their one acre to grow more than four times the corn their great-grandparents could grow on the same acre. Using modern machinery, in 18 minutes they plant 31,000 kernels of Liberty Link transgenic corn. Why is it significant what brand of corn they plant? Because when weeds show up, our charming college-boy farmers use Liberty brand herbicide. Using the herbicide on non-Liberty Link corn will kill the corn.
But the really freaky stuff is still to come. You see, the college boys’ corn is not an edible variety; rather, it’s the type that is used for industrial processes, primarily as feedstock, to produce ethanol, and to create high-fructose corn syrup. First, they travel to eastern Colorado, where a great percentage of US feedlots are located, to explore the horrible and debilitating effects of corn feed on commercial livestock; it produces systemic acidosis since cattle evolved eating grass, not high-starch foods like corn. This is not news to anyone who’s read much about vegetarian politics, nor, probably, is the fact that nowadays 70% of the antibiotics consumed in the US are given to cattle through their feed, because acidosis causes or aggravates all sorts of infectious diseases. This sort of info has been around since at least my own college days in the ’80s.
But the rise in high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has happened more recently; it’s all but replaced cane sugar in the American sweetner industry. Certain sources assert that this highly-processed substance is more dangerous than other types of sugar in terms of contributing to diabetes and obesity, but the most recent studies (all funded by the corn lobby, by the way) seem to indicate that it is no different nutritionally.

Nonetheless, cheap HFCS has contributed to the cheapness and profitability of junk foods, almost all of which contain the crap. Cheney and Ellis try to tour a high fructose corn syrup factory and instead get to interview a creepy corporate clone who gives them a sales pitch about the stuff and explains that they can’t take a tour because of concerns about the safety of the food supply. Cheney and Ellis then cook up some high fructose corn syrup in their kitchen, which is wildly entertaining for science geeks and tastes oh-so-great, from the looks on their faces when they slurp it down.
The kicker? Despite their earthy Iowa friends’ frequent observations on profitability, Cheney and Ellis only make money on their acre because of government farm subsidies.
King Corn is moderately subtle as a documentary, but I walked away with one simple fact: “Corn is creepy.”
Link.
Middle image by Peter D. via ICanHasCheezburger.

Nothing says ‘happiness’ like a gun around your neck; well, okay, at least this lovely antique-d gun pendant is actually named Happiness and will stay nice and warm against the skin. My friend Addy sent me a link to this piece with a vintage Underwood typewriter like mine*, but alas I found ‘happiness’ instead. Their entire catalog is just brilliant, spend a minute over at Ach Ach Liebling.
* I keep my gorgeous, flea-market obtained, glass-key Underwood on display in my living room and found myself explaining to friends this weekend that it used to be solely what I wrote on, until I got my first iMac in ’98. A suitable transition, someone said.

A few days ago, I was excited to run across this article in my RSS feed on floating island of plastic garbage in the North Pacific Gyre. For a few days, the only thought in my head was taking over the island and starting a new country. Once that passed, I was able to start hunting around for information (either to make my dream a reality or to blog about it, does it matter now?) and was sad to find no pictures of a giant floating island of garbage, just occasional rotting milk cartoons and fish tangled in wire. The more I looked, the more I realized that all of the information on the net about this island of garbage were cross-referencing each other. Though cannibalism is in interesting proposal, I prefer my incest in medeival popes. Neither one should be the only ingredient of the news. All eventual trails to the story of the “island” lead back to a post from Greenpeace, though I can find no real evidence that the vortex has increased from the size of Texas to twice the size of Texas (as mentioned in recent articles on the subject).
The problem does exist, and there is a wonderful article in Harper’s on the subject, but we should all take in the great debris of the internet armed with a healthy dose of skepticism and snark. There is no island and the extent of the problem has not been adequately documented (yet).
If anyone can get me a nice photo from space of the island, or a nice flyby video in Google Earth to prove me wrong, you will be my second in command.

Image via. The Average Fine and Invisible Harp by Salvador Dali.
There have been quite a few breakthroughs in the science of invisibility recently. An invisibilty cloaking device was developed by Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland, though it only works in two dimensions. Researchers at the University of Rochester have developed a cloaking technology which presents the possibility of developing wormholes. Last, but not least, researchers at Princeton University are working with new metamaterials that bend light in unusual ways. The new metamaterials are easier to manufacture than those previously developed, paving the way for affordable invisibility for everyone.
These discoveries arrived just in time, because there have been two more moves by the robots to bring the impending robot apocalypse closer.

Image from Serial Experiments Lain
Wired has a great article on various aspects of Manga, from how they conquered the West to their slow decline in popularity in Japan. The section on how Manga conquered the U.S. is done as an online Manga, complete with the direction of the book being “wrong.”
Embarrassing admission: I am not much of a Manga geek (though I am addicted to Lain and Ghost in the Shell), but you can rest assured that my youngest brother will assault me first thing in the morning with facts, figures and corrections that will shame my tattered geek pride.
Spoiler alert: The Panic in Needle Park is all about how heroin kills puppies.

Just like the Wizard of Oz, but scarier! Snip from BBC:

The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi has died a day after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.
SS Bajwa suffered serious head injuries when he fell from the first-floor terrace of his home on Saturday morning trying to fight off the monkeys.
The city has long struggled to counter its plague of monkeys, which invade government complexes and temples, snatch food and scare passers-by.
The High Court ordered the city to find an answer to the problem last year.

Link.

As an ebook junkie and rabid cheapskate, I monitor the RSS feed of new books posted at Project Gutenberg, and it tickled me in that special way to see George Romero’s 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead posted as a 875-megabyte MPEG. As you may or may not know, the ’68 version of the film lapsed into the public domain in the United States because the theatrical distributor failed to place a copyright label on the prints. (This weirdness in copyright law has since been altered). Night has long been available online and in a couple of dozen commercial DVD editions. The film was remade in 1990 and 2006.
This is the first time I’ve seen a film on Gutenberg, which I use religiously and yet which, quite frankly, I didn’t realize until now even had films. But it does, though I gotta say it does its best to disguise that fact. An advanced search on file type, however, nets some dopeass shizzit: NASA images of Comet Wild 2 and the Apollo 11 landing in Quicktime, the Trinity atomic detonation, the Bikini Atoll ABLE and BAKER blasts, other A-bomb tests, not to mention “Motion Picture of Rotating Earth by United States,” which I’m sure is just fascinating.
All of this, assuredly, could be found elsewhere, but it gives me a strange sense of satisfaction to watch it without having to type the word “tube.”
Author’s note: Yes, horror nerds, I’m aware Romero’s zombies don’t eat brains, and by the way your Hot Pockets are stinking up the microwave.
Link.
Image via Wikipedia.

It’s a test; and for me — I saw both and wasn’t sure what I was seeing, until I read the text which ruined it and I only saw one. Until I concentrated on a certain body part. Any guess as to which part?

Image via.
Justin Quinell, master of the pinhole camera and inventor of the notorious SmileyCam, now offers his DIY technology to the world. You can now purchase a SmileyCam or The Pin Cam Camera home darkroom kit, which includes “a beer can pinhole camera (personally emptied by the artist!).”
Boing Boing reports on some very sad news:

Lady Jaye Breye P-Orridge, wife of industrial music pioneer Genesis P-Orridge and member of Psychic TV, died of heart failure on Tuesday. Lady Jaye and Genesis were in the midst of an ongoing life-art project to make them look more alike through matching breast implants, haircuts, and other body modifications. The aim was to merge their identities to create a single “pandrogynous” being, Breyer P-Orridge.

Goodnight Lady Jaye.

Image via.

Image of the circuit diagram for the Gerassic Organ.
Peter Blasser of Ciat-Lombarde is offering printable templates of circuits from his homemade musical instrument oddities. Sniff around the rest of the Ciat-Lombarde site for an array of odd and wonderful instruments and sound samples. I am saving up my pennies, though Peter does take “food, sound objects or interesting plant specimens.” Though some of us are ashamed to admit we haven’t soldered anything since grade school (guilty), this allows everyone to get back into the game.
A further confession: Actually, I only used the soldering iron to melt my toys.