techyum ::

Image from this great BBC gallery.
In keeping with the Ballard “Crash” theme and my love for racing and things that go fast and go boom, I just came across these BBC images of the Talladega race crash, which was out of control. I’m not a “sports” person, but I do think it’s pretty awesome that the driver got out and *walked* out of his flaming car very pissed off to physically cross the finish line — to a standing ovation. I found the HD version of the crash video (below) and while the announcers are annoying as hell, they play the multi versions of the multiple car wreck that sent a car flipping up into the stands, and it’s just riveting. And it’s only 3:30 minutes long. Check it out:

Discovery News reports that microorganisms known as archea may be used to create methane from atmospheric carbon dioxide. To be fair, their headline is not really accurate — is it really farting if there’s not a funny sound? Can archea even giggle?

It sounds like a gag gift instead of serious science, but a new electrical farting machine could improve fuel cell technology by turning CO2 in the atmosphere into methane.

The technique won’t combat global warming directly, since both CO2 and methane are potent greenhouse gases, but it could help store alternative energies such as wind and solar more efficiently.

It works like this: giving small jolts of electricity to single-celled microorganisms known as archea prompts them to remove C02 from the air and turn it into methane, released as tiny “farts.” The methane, in turn, can be used to power fuel cells or to store the electrical energy chemically until its needed.

“We found that we can directly convert electrical current into methane using a very specific microorganism,” said Bruce Logan, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, who details his discovery in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Link.

I knew they were having fun over there at Penn. It gives new meaning to the term Dutch Oven. Cue rimshot. Oh, I’m slaying myself.

Image: German peasants greet a Papal Bull, from Martin Luther’s 1545 Depictions of the Papacy. From Wikipedia.

Researcher-grad student Adam Wilson at the University of Wisconsin has used a mind-reading machine to post a 23-character message on Twitter. Justin Williams, UW Biomedical Engineering professor and Wilson’s advisor, explained it thusly, referring to previous “mind-reading” experiments that allow users to move a cursor:

We started thinking that moving a cursor on a screen is a good scientific exercise. But when we talk to people who have locked-in syndrome or a spinal-cord injury, their No. 1 concern is communication.

The device he and his colleagues at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, NY created shows the user a keyboard on a screen, and the following happens:

All the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually. And what your brain does is, if you’re looking at the ‘R’ on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, “Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.” And you see a momentary change in brain activity.

Link.

Wilson said the interface is slow, and feels much like sending texts by numeric keypad. With practice users can get up to about eight characters per minute.

According to Discovery News, the message was “USING EEG TO SEND TWEET.” Don’t they teach cyborgs not to shout? Discovery News also reports that although the technology is not yet commercially available, ten patients will soon begin testing it out at home. Said Wilson: “We know it works. The next question is how to integrate it into people’s homes, so that a caretaker could set it up without need for outside help.”

Disappointingly, the “associated stories” at the bottom of the Yahoo story promises to show me a video of the mind reading machine in action, but then sends me to story about how men report more sex partners than women. Psych!

YouTube to the rescue — view the footage of the machine in action here. That little red hat is very fashionable.

Image by Thomas Roche, taken at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Illinois.

The Telegraph informs me that legendary author J.G. Ballard has died. Though the Telegraph obit leads one to believe that he was best known for his biographical novels Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, in fact in my social set he was known as the author of perhaps the most bizarre, challenging, audacious, demented, and visionary apocalyptic fiction ever put to paper or pixels. Take, for example, his works “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race,” “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” and “Plans for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” the titles of which kind of speak for themselves. These were part of his larger work The Atrocity Exhibition, which I believe he originally wrote as a screenplay/multimedia presentation shown simultaneously on three screens. Probably his best-known speculative work is the absolute mindfuck Crash, which concerns the overriding eroticization of car crashes. It was made into what I considered a largely successful film by David Cronenberg, but the gaps of sheer vision between the film and the book are such that one viewing the movie hasn’t the foggiest idea what the book is getting at. It’s a work both bewildering, hilarious and utterly intoxicating. When it was published in 1973, people got kind of worked up about it.
About a year ago I went to see the Thrillpeddlers 2008 Grand Guignol program; as we entered, RE:Search Books publisher V. Vale, who has published many books about and by Ballard, was playing the piano. Before the program started, host Russell Blackwood held a contest, asking “What song was Vale playing when the lights went down?” The Hypnodrome fell silent: you could hear a pin drop.
I am an inveterate music geek. I waited politely to see if anyone else, particularly any of the weird precocious teens in attendance, was enough of a band nerd to have recognized it. Finally, I cried out: “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams!”
Applause! I had won. My reward? A copy of Vale’s RE:Search book Conversations, an amazing collection of interviews and dicussions with J.G. Ballard, handed to me by Vale himself and signed by the V-Man. What the HELL could be more appropriate than winning a J.G. Ballard book from V. Vale at a Grand Guignol performance for recognizing that particular song? It was eerie, I tell you. Eerie.
Upon reading it I said to myself, aloud, “I forgot what a freak this guy is.” Which is my way of calling him a genius.
A year later, I change that “is” to “was,” and the world seems that much smaller. That’s the thing about getting older: the world gets small, not big. We soldier on toward the apocalypse, a doomsday vastly more mundane than any ever dreamed by J.G. Ballard. And without him, it just won’t seem the same.

We’ve all had this problem: You’re all hopped up from fighting zombies. You go to the airport and run head-on into some guy lumbering toward you screaming “Brains!” Thinking he’s a zombie, you whip the gas-powered chainsaw out of your carry-on, pull the zip start and charge, screaming “This one’s for Ben, motherfucker!”
Next thing you know the guy’s in pieces — maybe eight, ten of them — and your daughter’s all “Dad! That’s no zombie! This guy’s from Vogue!”
WTF, how were you supposed to know? Sure, the guy tried to say something, probably “don’t cut me in half, I’m not a zombie,” but chainsaws are loud, and with the screaming and all… and hey, it’s not like the world is short on photographers, right? Am I right?
Well, thank God actor Woody Harrelson is more of a fisticuffs kind of guy, rather than the pragmatic chainsaw type you or I would doubtless prove to be under the circumstances. Otherwise, the TSA might start restricting gas-powered chainsaws in carry-on luggage. Harrelson is being sued by a photographer from TMZ.com for shoving him in the face at LaGuardia. Explains Harrelson:

I wrapped a movie called ‘Zombieland,’ in which I was constantly under assault by zombies, then flew to New York, still very much in character… With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie.

So there you have it: It makes perfect sense to me. Care to lay odds that the photographer actually was a zombie — and the government-media alliance is covering up the details? TSA-TMZ — coincidence?
You can check out the footage here. TMZ is claiming this means there’s no shame in Hollywood, since clearly Harrelson’s comment is intended as a promotion for the film — and if you believe there’s no shame in Hollywood, I’ve got a website for you to read. Another TMZ photographer also filed suit against Harrelson in 2006 for another grab-and-push incident. No word on whether he mistook that one for Javier Bardem.

Forty-six years ago today on April 10, 1963, the nuclear submarine U.S.S. Thresher, while conducting dive tests, sank around 200 miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It imploded at crush depth, killing all 129 officers, crew and civilian contractors on board.
For submarine nerds — yes, there are some of us — the sinking of the Thresher provides fascinating and somewhat ghoulish reading on naval procedures and nuclear reactors. The board of inquiry into the Thresher disaster concluded that salt water pipes on the vessel probably leaked, leading to a shorting-out of control panels and an automatic “scram” (emergency shutdown) of the nuclear reactor; once the reactor had been shut down, the steam tubes providing power to the turbines were vacated and the reactor could not be quickly restarted. The Thresher was already almost at its maximum depth, so it didn’t have far to go before the vessel imploded, killing everyone on board in a second or two. The sinking of the Thresher led the U.S. Navy to completely revise its submarine safety procedures, following much criticism of sub fleet commander Hyman G. Rickover.
Interestingly, one of the vessels searching for the Thresher after it sank was the famous bathyscaphe Trieste, which broke the deep-sea diving record in the Marianas Trench in the Pacific.
The Wikipedia article on the Thresher, from which some of this info is taken, has a fascinating GIF animating the events in the sinking as reconstructed by the board of inquiry. This image is a screencap from that astonishingly geeky animation.

“Bright Green” eco-blog Treehugger has a great article on 7 Concept Gadgets We Want to See Brought to Market, in which they cover some of the gadget ideas they think could improve sustainability and eco-friendliness if they made it to consumers. Several of these were finalists in the Greener Gadgets 2009 Design Competition.
My very favorite device is the bizarre “green printer” (shown here) that uses coffee grounds or old tea leaves for ink — and requires you to pump the cartridge back and forth as you print. It requires no electric power, and makes your documents smell like coffee or tea.
Another cool gadget is a blooming-flower energy monitor that provides a visual reference of how much energy your house is using. It’s designed to plug into an eco-house’s energy-consumption “dashboard.” When energy consumption is low, the flower blooms; if you’re leaving the lights on, the flower starts to wither. There’s also a clip-on Urban Air Quality Monitor, and a “solar tree” that holds solar panels and points them toward the sun throughout the day to get maximum energy exposure.
Check out the whole list here, and don’t bother saving those coffee grounds yet — none of these products are anywhere near market… we just wish they were.
Image from Core 77.

You know, I’m not saying anyone needs to buy me an Easter present — but were you so inclined, you could do far worse than this adorable Chupacabra plush toy from Toy Vault. Complete with bendy limbs! Goats not included, but that’s easy to solve — I’m sure the little guy would like some goat-friends to play with.

In case you haven’t heard, the chupacabra is a sort of doggy creature said to lope around the countryside drinking the blood from livestock — hence the name, which means “goat sucker.” The legends originate from Puerto Rico, but have since spread all through the Spanish-speaking world and to points North; in 2007 in Texas a dead chupacabra was found — it turned out to be a Mexican hairless dog — and in 2008, CNN published video of a chupacabra — maybe — that looks like a dog.

But the persistent mythology of the chupacabra portrays him as this cute little creature — kind of Baby Dracula crossed with the UFO Lizard People. And now you can cuddle them, as can your goats.

Maybe the Cloth-Cat Towel Holder isn’t as much of a brain rinse as I intended it to be after the zombies-in-real-life post. Because at first you think wow, that’s kind of yucky but funny and cute, and then it sinks in what the repetitive act of putting your towel away looks like. I wonder, is this a good gift for veterinarians? (perpetualkid.com, via Lisanti Quarterly)

My main concern with this news story is — after the nausea — whether or not Patient Zero is being watched closely. Because we all know how this story goes… Snip from Metairie man says stranger chewed, swallowed after taking bite out of his arm:

A Metairie resident is recovering after a stranger bit a chunk of flesh out of his arm and swallowed it Saturday afternoon.
Joseph Lancellotti, 67, told authorities he did not know the suspect, later identified as Mario Vargas, 48, or why he was attacked in his front yard.
Lancellotti was gardening at his home in the 4400 block of Kawanee Avenue about 2 p.m. when he noticed a man walking toward his house, shouting angrily, the report said. Lancellotti said he couldn’t understand the man because he was yelling in Spanish. But when the man got within two feet, he slugged Lancellotti in the head, the report said.
Lancellotti said he tried to defend himself with a garden rake. As the men struggled over the rake, the stranger bent over and bit Lancellotti on his right forearm, the report said. Lancellotti’s flesh ripped away as he fell to the ground. The man then got on top of Lancellotti and began choking him, the report said.
It was then that neighbor Chantal Lorio, a podiatrist and director of the Wound Center at East Jefferson General Hospital, came out to check on Lancellotti. Lorio said Monday that she first thought Lancellotti was having a heart attack and the other man was trying to help him.
The stranger was still gripping Lancellotti as Lorio noticed her neighbor was lying in a pool of blood. She didn’t learn what happened until she began dressing the wound — with the stranger still clutching her neighbor’s shirt.
“He said, ‘He bit my arm, chewed the flesh and swallowed it in front of me, ‘ ” Lorio recalled. She said the bite measured almost 3 by 1 1/2 inches, and was less than 1/4-inch deep. (…read more, nola.com, thanks Jonno!)