techyum ::

NASA announced today that it had awarded the contract on the upper stage of the Ares I rocket to Boeing in Huntsville, Alabama, with final assembly to be performed at the NASA facility in New Orleans.
The Ares I is a two-stage rocket is designed to carry the Orion exploration vehicle to low Earth orbit. The Orion is the successor to the space shuttle for NASA’s manned space exploration program. While the Ares first stage is a solid rocket, Boeing’s second stage is fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Both are part of NASA’s Constellation Program, which includes such sparklies as the Lunar Access Service Module.
NASA’s Constellation Page has a bunch of amazing videos and artist’s conceptions, well worth the browsing for space geeks.
Link.
Image from NASA.gov

According to BBC News, the Vatican has launched a budget airline with the intention of providing low-cost travel for pilgrims.
Called Mistral Air, the airline is a charter operated by the Itlian post office. The first flight leaves Rome for Lourdes, France at 9:30 Greenwich Mean Time Monday. Planning to transport 150,000 pilgrims the first year, Mistral Air will also operate flights to Catholic shrines in Poland, Spain, and the Middle East.
The airline’s planes are painted in the Vatican’s yellow and white color scheme, and the interiors bear sacred inscriptions like “I search for your face, Lord.”
Link.
Vatican coat of arms via Wikipedia.

Much of the coffee sprayed out my nose recently has been as a result of The Groovy Age of Horror, which has brightened my life with some hillarious distillations of some bizarre Italian horror-sex comix like Il Computer di Carne (“The Computer of Sex”), Il Laido Fantasma (“The Dirty Ghost”) and Pazzia Elettronica (“Electronic Madness”).
Having spent many posts in the last few months on vintage crime fiction from the likes of Charles Runyon, David Goodis and Australian sleazemaster Carter Brown, Groovy’s Curt Purcell has announced the launch of “Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror,” in which he’ll no longer concentrate his attentions on vintage horror comix; instead he’ll focus on whatever he feels like reading — pulp noir seemingly on the top of this list. I’m therefore not complaining, even though it’ll be hard to make it through the week without my fix of Italian comic book dames getting possessed by Satan and giving rimjobs to rodents. Sometimes sacrifices must be made.
Link.
Image from Il Computer di Carne via Groovy Age.

I don’t know WTF I have been emaling about, but Gmail’s adver-tastic sidebar (which tailors the ads it shows you to keywords in your mail) has been telling me for days now that playing Didjeridoo helps sleep apnea.
The website refers to articles in respected peer-reviewed journals like the British Medical Journal and Men’s Health (which also helpfully wants to tell me “The Best Places to Have Sex”) which suggest that playing the didj helps reduce daytime sleepiness in patients with sleep apnea.
In case you didn’t know, the didgeridoo, didjeridoo or “didj” is a musical instrument constructed by the aboriginal people of Australia from a 1-2 meter eucalyptus log hollowed out by termites, with wax added to the mouthpiece to build a seal between the instrument and the player’s lips. The didj creates a low drone somewhere between Tibetan chant, Tuvan throat-singing and the fencepost moaning of a metaphysical two-stroke in heat, high on moonshine and begging for some back-alley magical moped love.
Playing Didjeridoo requires the use of “circular breathing,” in which one inhales through the nose while exhaling through the mouth. The BMJ article, which adorably spells it “apnoea” (a little too foetal of them for my comfort) describes a Swiss study in which didj playing helped men with sleep apnea, a disease where the back of your throat collapses while you sleep, leading to choking sounds, gasping, possible heart failure and guaranteed kidney punches from your bedmates. The working hypothesis is that didj playing prevents the collapse of those airways, though it may also cause kidney punches, these ones from your neighbors.
Modern didj players don’t always stick to eucalyptus for their instruments; in addition to other varieties of log, some have been known to use plastic, including a housemate I once had who waxed the end of huge PVC pipes. Other modern varieties include the Didjeribone, a slidey cross between the didj and the trombone, and a variety invented by someone named Dr. Didj that features a variation on saxophone keys.
Incidentally, as a sleep apnea sufferer, I have never been able to play didjeridoo, no matter how stoned I get.
Link.
Strangely Lovecraftian Didjeridoo via Wikipedia.

According to a BBC News report, Somali pirates have turned over a Danish cargo ship, the Danica White, to a French military vessel. The ship’s five crew were reported safe. The pirates, said to be Islamic militants, had held the ship and its crew since early June when they seized the vessel, loaded with building materials and headed for Mombasa, Kenya. Kenyan maritime officials said the pirates had demanded a $1.5 million ransom for the ship and its crew, but BBC news was unclear whether the ransom had been paid.
A few days after the ship was seized, a United States warship gave chase, fired warning shots across the bow of the commandeered ship, and destroyed three of the pirate boats. The US ship backed off when the Danica White fled into Somali waters.
The waters off the Somali coast are currently considered the most pirate-infested in the world. In November of 2005, the German ship Seabourn Spirit was attacked in that region by pirates in two speedboats, who used machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. Though several RPGs struck the ship, the weapons had apparently been kept in a state of disrepair and miraculously none of them went off — not even the one wedged into the wall of a stateroom, whose elderly occupant was taking a shower at the time, according to a History Channel documentary on the subject.
The Seabourn Spirit‘s crew fought back against the pirates by using a long range acoustic device, or LRAD, a high-tech non-lethal weapon that blasts powerful sound waves. The Seabourn Spirit also destroyed one of the pirate boats by running it over. (That’s the spirit!) All 151 passengers escaped injury during the unsuccessful attack, but one crew member was struck by shrapnel while using the LRAD. The pirates reportedly waved at passengers between volleys of gunfire while the old folks snapped a few for their Flickr streams.
The Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia runs a close second to Somali waters in pirate attacks. The International Maritime Board also reports grave concerns about the area near the Basra oil terminal in the south of Iraq and the Bonny River in Nigeria.
Link.
Pirate flag from Wikipedia.

When you’ve leafed through the ladies’ underwear racks at Mervyn’s as much as I have, you know that women love pink.
They also like white, black, red, orange, purple, lime green, white with fuschia polkadots, plus leopard, tiger, zebra and iguana, not to mention clear plastic, chain mail and shiny patent leather.
But Yazhu Ling, psychology research associate at the UK’s Newcastle University, says there’s a measurable female preference for reddish colors, programmed by evolution. Ling co-authored a study published in the science journal Current Biology (covered at Scientific American) in which 98 men and 110 women took computer tests to determine their color preferences. While both genders like blue, the women showed a distinct fondness for reddish colors.
Ling offered the speculation that this comes from hunger-gatherer societies:

“The female, as gatherer, had to pick reddish fruits against green leafy backgrounds, therefore a preference for red against green may have benefited their food gathering and thus gained them evolutionary advantage,” she says. “Evolution may also drive females to prefer redder faces (male faces are ruddier than female faces across all races). A reddish face often [means] good health; this may be a good cue to help the females to select mates.”

Link.
Hey… red faces? I always wondered why chicks dig guys who eat all those little blue breath mints.
Interestingly, 37 members of Ling’s sample were recent immigrants from China; men in that group showed a stronger preference for reddish colors than other men in the sample. In China, the color red has strong associations with happiness, luck, celebration and prosperity.
Image from Jim’s Gun Supply.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: City of Orlando, Florida sponsors a gun amnesty program, “Kicks for Guns,” in which anyone who surrenders a firearm gets him (or her) some designer footwear or fifty clams. According to BBC News, dude brings in a missle launcher.

He told the newspaper he found the 4ft (1.2m) weapon in a shed last week. The unidentified man said he had tried in vain to get rid of the launcher, which is designed to blow aircraft out of the sky. “I took it to three dumps to try to get rid of it and they told me to get lost.”

Link.
So I says to the guy I says to him, “Terrorist?!? You should try my wife’s pot roast!” (ba-dum-cha!)
Actually, the guy traded the ubergat for a pair of kicks for his daughter. Not incidentally, the top two hits when Googling “shoulder fired missile” are Democratic Long Island Representative Steve Israel’s hysterical 2004 screed about legislation he sponsored to require missile countermeasures on commercial airliners, and a 2003 article by the right-wing Heritage Foundation along similar lines. Good to know that right-wingers and slightly left-of-center Dems alike were screaming at the top of their lungs 2-3 years ago about a piece of weaponry that nets this guy the bird from Florida’s trashmen.
Image of Nat’l Guardsmen training with a Stinger shoulder-fired missile launcher from the Department of Defense, via Wikipedia.

CBC.ca reports on the capture by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police of a real, live Sasquatch:

Mounties in eastern Manitoba have nabbed a strange, hairy monster that has been stalking campgrounds in and around the Whiteshell Provincial Park for the past two summers. Police received the call around midnight on July 30 from a woman who had been startled by the beastly creature while camping… “This was further to about 10 calls we had last year of the same incident in the Whiteshell Provincial Park, so the members were aware of the type of person we were looking for,” Staff Sgt. Glen Reitlo told CBC News Wednesday…The creature turned out to be an 18-year-old Winnipeg man wearing a hairy gorilla mask, which Reitlo described as “ugly” and “scary.” …Reitlo said the man was not intoxicated when nabbed by officers; he apparently had been camping in the area over the past two summers and simply enjoyed the prank. His victims were less impressed. The woman who complained gave the man quite a tongue-lashing, Reitlo said.

Link.
The Canadian Sasquatch, better known in the US as Bigfoot, is thought by believers to be representative of a species (or several species) of gigantic bipedal hominids distributed throughout the world, and known by many names, including the “Almas” in Mongolia, the “Barmanou” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the “Skunk Ape” in Florida, and of course the ever-popular “Yeti” or “Abominable Snowman” in Tibet and Orange County.
The unnamed and “not intoxicated” man might want to watch what he wears, if the fate of Don Martin’s Fester Bestertester is any indication — the esteemed Mr. Bestertester got his ass kicked by abominable snowmen for the promotion of National Gorilla Suit Day. Of course, that’s only one of the hazards facing counterfeit Sasquatches. This debate over at the Sasquatch Research Initiative is a straight-faced discussion of “to shoot or not to shoot,” in which they’re not talking about photography.
Image of Bigfoot Sculpture by Cameron Gainer of Queens at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, NY via Wikipedia.

About a month ago, I commented on the wedding of the world’s then-tallest man, 7-foot-9-inch Bao Xishun, in the north Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (just a hop skip and a jump from where lake monsters were videotaped not long after, in what certainly could not have been a coincidence… OR COULD IT?)
Xishun had made headlines in 2006 when he reached into two dolphins’ gullets to pull out plastic debris that was threatening to kill the li’l critters, and on 17 July, when he met Mr. Pingping, the world’s shortest man.
Anyway, little did I or Xishun know that soon our Mongolian giant would be unseated from his tallest-guy throne by a Ukranian, 37-year-old veterinarian Leonid Stadnyk, who stands 8 feet 5 inches tall according to an August 8 statement from the Guinness Book of World Records (PDF warning).
For some years, Mr. Stadnyk had claimed to be the tallest man alive. His claim, sad to say, was rejected by the arbiters of tallness because he wouldn’t let Guinness measure him. I and a planet packed with tallest-man geeks thumbed our noses at him. We figured Mr. Stadnyk, who claimed he was trying to avoid publicity, was in reality trying to avoid being found out as a fraudulent challenger to the Mongolian throne.
I stand humbled before the now certifiably tall Mr. Stadnyk, whom I politely ask not to step on me.
Link.
Photo of Stadnyk with Ukranian President Victor Yuschenko, via President.gov.ua.

Image of Virus via Pipistrel.si.
NASA has named the winners of the Personal Air Vehicle Challenge to promote “personal aircraft for fast, safe, efficient, affordable, environmentally-friendly, and comfortable on-demand transportation as a future solution to America’s mobility needs.”
In case you thought “personal aircraft” meant jetpacks, as I did, you’d be only slightly disappointed, since we’re actually talking about flying cars.
Says the website of the CAFE Foundation, which allied with NASA to sponsor the Challenge:

Personal Air Vehicles (PAVs) are a new generation of small aircraft that can extend personal air travel to a much larger segment of the American population…. Near all-weather STOL [short take-off and landing] PAVs will be able to transport people to within just a few miles of their doorstep destination at trip speeds three to four times faster than airlines or cars. NASA predicts that up to 45% of all miles traveled in the future may be in PAVs. This will relieve congestion at metropolitan hub airports and the freeways that surround them, reduce the need to build new highways and save much of the 6.8 billion gallons of fuel wasted in surface gridlock each year.

Then again, the CAFE Foundation website also informs us that “Aircraft are submarines that swim in a sea of air,” so I’m not sure how seriously to take them.
For the Challenge, four teams completed for overall best performance and prizes for noise reduction, handling, efficiency, short takeoff, and top speed. The contest took place Aug. 4-12 at Charles M. Schultz Airport in Sonoma, California. I don’t know if anyone submitted a flying doghouse, but the winner in five out of seven categories is a Pipistrel Virus, a Slovenian-manufactured production airplane that to me pretty much looks like an ultralight, rather than a flying car.
Flying cars, also known as “roadable aircraft,” have had a long and storied development history, with six or seven major designs currently claiming to be in active prototype. Sadly, none of the prototypes look like they’ll have me cruising at 100 over I-80 on a Tuesday rush hour flipping people off any time soon.
The challenges of flying car development aren’t only engineering ones; FAA regulations require anyone flying a light aircraft to have a pilot’s license. Davis, California company Moller International met that challenge in 1999 by promising a fly-by-wire system that didn’t require a pilot’s license; in 2003 Moller was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission by civil fraud (Securities And Exchange Commission v. Moller International, Inc., and Paul S. Moller, Defendants) for making unsubstantiated claims about its Skycar (the company settled for $50,000 and an injunction against future claims).
Other winners in the NASA challenge included a Cessna 172 and an RV-4.
Link to all winners.