A friend asked about Synthol this weekend. It turns out to be kind of like breast enhancement for guys. It is a way to artificially increase the apparent size of muscles by injecting oil into the muscles.
This video is entitled “Synthol abuse” and contains a (somewhat disturbing) set of pictures that are widely circulating on the web. These are claimed to be photos of people who are using Synthol:
The one characteristic you will notice across all of the photos is the tendency of certain muscles to look big and/or defined even when they are not tensed. This would appear to be the mark of Synthol.
According to this page, Synthol contains “85 % medium-chain triglycerides, 7.5 % lidocaine and 7.5 % benzyl alcohol”. A triglyceride is a fat (see How fats work for details). The generic name for mixtures like synthol is “Site enhancement oil”.
What are the dangers? According to this page, where bodybuilder Guy Grundy talks candidly about his career and experiences, he states:
The main reason you shouldn’t use [Synthol] is that is cheating and looks stupid. I hit a nerve in my triceps and lost feeling and control of my arm for an hour and it was so numb and ached so bad that I couldn’t sleep for three days.
After that my nails all went black and my fingers tips were so sensitive that if I even slightly bumped them it would hurt for hours. That lasted about 4 weeks.
Other sites discuss the risk of injecting Synthol into a vein, which could cause brain damage, heart poroblems and/or death.
The alternative? Implants. They can be inserted into many muscle groups.
Have you been in search of “something for nothing” – the “get rich quick” scheme that causes money to arrive unbidden? This DIY project may be for you.
The idea is to create a vending machine that rewards crows when they find something and bring it to the machine. In this video, Joshua Klein offers a description of crow intelligence and the vending machine:
He also explains a four-step process that teaches crows to bring coins to the vending machine.
Even more interesting – he suggests other things crows could be trained to do in return for peanuts.
If you want to build one of these vending machines yourself as a DIY project, plans are available:
Let’s imagine that you have a military vehicle (a tank, a Humvee, a truck, whatever) and you want to protect it against rocket propelled grenade (RPG) attacks. One of the best tools available to date, at least for tanks, is reactive armor. You cover the tank in explosives that detonate and destroy an incoming RPG. This video has a nice explanation of the origins of reactive armor and a demonstration of its effectiveness:
There is also electromagnetic reactive armor, as seen here.
Reactive armor is not perfect. For example, if you hit the same spot twice, reactive armor can be penetrated. Some vehicles – especially vehicles with windows – don’t accomodate reactive armor.
Now there is a new technology coming online called Iron Curtain:
The U.S. military’s toughest trucks are getting a new layer of protection — against rocket-propelled grenades. The Army recently awarded an $8 million contract to equip MRAP (mine resistant ambush protected) armored trucks with Iron Curtain. It’s a protection system which blasts incoming rockets before they can hit the vehicle. If the system works, it could go all long way towards neutralizing one of the deadliest threats American troops face overseas.
Here is an explanation of Iron Curtain:
Iron Curtain is detecting the RPG as it flies toward the vehicle and then blowing it out of the air with something like a bullet that travels from the roof of the vehicle downward.
How much beer is consumed in America? According to this page: “200 million barrels (6.2 billion gallons) of beer are produced in the USA on an annual basis.”
If you assume that there are 300 million men, women and children in America, that’s 20.6 gallons per person. Not counting imports.
However, not everyone in America drinks. According to this page:
Researchers say the percentage of Americans who say they drink has changed little over time, averaging about 63% since Gallup began surveying Americans about drinking habits in 1939.
And 26% of the population is under the age of 18. So there are only 140 million people in America who could be drinking beer. That means the average drinker is consuming 44.3 gallons of beer per year.
That’s about one 16 ounce can of beer per person per day.
This page points out that beer has been a part of America from the very beginning:
The Mayflower, which was headed south, had to make an unplanned stop near wintry Plymouth because, as William Bradford noted in his journal, “We could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our Beere.”
Beer is made from water, malted barley, yeast and hops, as explained in this video:
What is malted barley? It is barley kernels that have been moistened and allowed to start germinating (to the point where the seed’s first shoot has not quite broken out of the kernel). That increases the sugar content in the kernel, and the yeast will be eating that sugar and turning it into alcohol. This video explains the process of making malted barley:
What is hops? It is the dried flower of the hops plant, as shown in this video:
According to this page there are two main types of beer: ales and lagers:
The two different categories of beer differ in the type of yeast used to brew them and the temperature at which they are brewed. Beer that is classified as lager uses special yeast that ferments best at cooler temperatures. Beer classified as ale uses another type of yeast that ferments best at warmer temperatures. Both lagers and ales contain hops, malted barley, yeast and water.
Lagers subdivide into pale lager, pilsner, light lager and dark lager. Ales subdivide into brown ale, porter and stout. See the article for descriptions of these seven different types.
In Star Wars, the Death Star is able to destroy an entire planet:
But what if you really wanted to destroy planet earth like that? (where “destroy” is defined as “by any means necessary, to change the Earth into something other than a planet or a dwarf planet.”) Is it technologically possible? This article is fascinating because there are lots of ideas in here that may have never, ever crossed your mind:
Networked surveillance minicopters can’t be kept down – “The helicopter in this video may weigh only 30 grams, but it carries a compass and motion sensors, can change course and warn fellow craft of obstacles it bumps into, and could even carry a small camera. It can also resist what might be called a King Kong attack – if swatted out of the air the tiny craft soon recovers and takes off again…”
Making the first computer virus – “If you’ve ever had to spend a lot of money on antivirus software, you’d be forgiven for wanting to take Dr Fred Cohen aside for, to put it politely, a few choice words…”
Murdoch’s wink – “Of course, there has always been a way to break out of the prison: If a critical mass of newspapers were to opt out of Google’s search engine simultaneously, they would suddenly gain substantial market power. Newspapers are struggling, but they remain, by far, the world’s dominant producers of hard news. That gives them, as a group, a great deal of leverage over companies like Google who depend on a steady stream of good, fresh online content. Google needs newspapers at least as much as newspapers need Google – a fact that’s been largely hidden up to now…”
How the Large Hadron Collider Works:
Paper-thin Batteries Made from Algae – “Imagine wrapping paper that could be a gift in and of itself because it lights up with words like “Happy Birthday.” That is one potential application of a new biodegradable battery made of cellulose, the stuff of paper…”
Blind man fitted with ‘bionic’ eye sees for first time in 30 years – “A blind man who thought he would never be able to read again has had his vision partially restored after being fitted with a ‘bionic’ eye. Peter Lane, 51, is one of the first people in the world to have electronic receivers implanted into his eye which send signals mounted in a pair of glasses to the brain….”
Weight loss drug targets body not brain – “Medical researchers in Sydney say they have developed a weight loss drug that could change the way the body uses fat. Scientists from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research say the new drug can control weight gain in mice by stopping the body from receiving certain signals from the brain…”
From solar energy to hydrogen: there’s no step two – “Researchers have figured out how to directly couple a cheap and simple photovoltaic system to an equally cheap and simple catalyst that can split water, releasing hydrogen that can be used as fuel…”
Spin success for silicon – “Replacing electron charge with electron spin paves the way for a new mode of computing…”
8-bit device quenches iPhone envy – “The demo video embedded after the break details the device playing video, rendering 3D objects, and displaying pictures and ebooks with touch scrolling. All of this is running at 60 fps for a smooth picture. The whole thing is no larger than the 320×240 LCD that he salvaged from a broken MP3 player. An Atmel AVR ATmega644 microcontroller ties together the display, a resistive touch screen, and a microSD card for storage. The chip also controls the backlight, a Lithium Polymer battery, and uses USB for PC connectivity, charging, and even a mouse or keyboard interface. He etched the PCB himself for surface mount components and managed to do it with just four jumpers needed on the underside…” Demo:
Solar Power Costs 50% Lower than Last Year – “New research by leading alternative energy research firm New Energy Finance finds that solar power will cost less by about 50% at the end of 2009 compared to the end of 2008…”
50 Style Thoughts – “With any rule, there is at least one exception, except for #1, #3 and #8 above…”
The Billion-Year Technology Gap: Could One Exist – “Are we the lone sentient life in the universe? So far, we have no evidence to the contrary, and yet the odds that not one single other planet has evolved intelligent life would appear, from a statistical standpoint, to be quite small. There are an estimated 250 billion (2.5 x 10¹¹ ) stars in the Milky Way alone, and over 70 sextillion (7 x 10²² ) in the visible universe, and many of them are surrounded by multiple planets…”
Tracking a trail of trash in the Pacific Northwest – “O’Connor and Shannon Cheng are volunteers in a study tracking their trash — and giving them the opportunity to reflect on what they use and discard. The tracking devices are about the size of small cell phones and allow for near-real-time tracking of thousands of pieces of garbage…”
Smartphones Could Form Chemical Detection Networks -”A NASA scientist has unveiled a postage-stamp-sized sensor that can plug into an iPhone and convert Apple’s beloved product into a mobile chemical detector…”
The ’00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell – “Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era…”
Food Stamp Use Soars, and Stigma Fades – “With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children…”
Are We Going to Let John Die? – “John’s story is not so unusual. A Harvard study, to be published next month in the American Journal of Public Health, suggests that almost 45,000 Americans die prematurely each year as a consequence of not having insurance. John may become one of them…”
Why the hammerhead shark got its hammer – “It’s one of evolution’s most eccentric creations: a head shaped like a hammer. Now, a study suggests that the hammerhead shark may have evolved its oddly shaped snout to boost the animal’s vision and hunting prowess…” See also: Hammerhead shark mystery solved
Oceans Absorbing Carbon Dioxide More Slowly, Scientist Finds – “The world’s oceans are absorbing less carbon dioxide (CO2), a Yale geophysicist has found after pooling data taken over the past 50 years. With the oceans currently absorbing over 40 percent of the CO2 emitted by human activity, this could quicken the pace of climate change, according to the study…”
Kiss my cytomegalovirus! – “Mouth to mouth sexual kissing is seen in more than 90% of human cultures. Various theories have been put forward to account for this but none offer a full explanation within an evolutionary framework…”
High-fat diet reduces anxiety and depression – “According to an Australian study performed on young rats, the eating of ‘comfort foods’,–that is, high-fat foods–can likely reverse the damaging effects of early trauma, such as stress, anxiety, and depression, in humans…”
This is a very interesting video that talks about advanced, scientific, computer-generated origami – origami engineering if you will, with an origami expert named Robert Lang. The video includes a detailed discussion of a computer program (called TreeMaker) that can turn almost any shape into a set of origami folds. At the 3:00 point it shows some of the insects designed by Tree Maker (see in particular the bird and the grasshopper at 3:20)(more are shown at 20:45). At the 12:50 point Lang starts explaining how TreeMaker works and how you design a shape with TreeMaker.
There is a pretty amazing tiger with stripes at 21:45, and a huge crane with a 48″ wing span at 22:45 made from a 6-foot square sheet of paper. Human figures start at 24:30. He talks about his book at 27:20. At 29:45 he folds a flying parrot.
Robert Lang also did a TED talk on his advanced origami engineering with a lot of surprising examples. It starts out with how we came to witness this “origami explosion”:
1) The official version – On this page Kellogg’s states:
Kellogg Company recently experienced supply constraints caused by flood damage at our bakery in Atlanta. In addition, we’ve been making significant equipment enhancements and repairs in our largest waffle bakery. Unfortunately, this is taking longer than anticipated.
Kellogg Co. has blamed a nationwide shortage of Eggo frozen waffles on heavy rain that shut down one of its main plants in Atlanta. But that’s only part of the story.
The Atlanta facility was closed during much of September and October to sanitize the plant after inspectors found Listeria monocytogenes — bacteria that can cause serious infection — in a sample of Eggos, according to the Georgia Department of Agriculture.
The obvious question: What is Listeria monocytogenes?
Listeriosis, a serious infection caused by eating food contaminated with the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes, has recently been recognized as an important public health problem in the United States. The disease affects primarily persons of advanced age, pregnant women, newborns, and adults with weakened immune systems. However, persons without these risk factors can also rarely be affected.
Fun fact: Both Listerosis and Listerine are named after Dr. Joseph Lister (1827‐1912), according to this page. Dr. Lister was an “English surgeon who introduced the principals of antisepsis to standard surgical procedures and, thus, greatly reduced postoperative deaths. His principals of antiseptic surgery are practiced worldwide to this day. Before Lister, a patient was as likely to die from post‐op infection as from whatever the surgery was meant to remedy in the first place.”
With Eggos in short supply, what are you going to eat? Many competing companies make frozen waffles, or you can choose your breakfast cereal using this flowchart:
It has been pointed out that the word “Climategate” really did not exist prior to November. Yet today (November 30) there are more than 13,000,000 citations for the word in Google.
Even so, as with the Balloon Boy saga, it is possible that you have missed Climategate because its coverage peaked during the week of Thanksgiving and you may have been doing other things. So here is a recap.
The Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, also known as Climategate, began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England, in the United Kingdom. An unknown individual stole and anonymously disseminated over a thousand e-mails and other documents.
An introduction from CNN:
Apparently this page, posted on November 19, 2009, was the first link to the leaked email messages.
There is currently an investigation taking place to find the source of the leak:
A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” (Note: Delingpole reports via email he got it from WUWT, commenter Bulldust coined the phrase at 3:52PM PST Nov 19th – Anthony) to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit…
3) Why does anyone care about the leaked emails?
Same article:
The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
The most talked-about emails are shown on this page:
In this video you see why some commentators are so excited about the leak:
From the video:
This is a giant scandal. This is Climategate. And it threatens to bring down the entire fraud that is the Coppenhagen treaty that attempts to tax all carbon emissions of first world nations.
That taxation of all carbon emissions is known as “Cap and Trade” and is described here:
4) If these emails do demonstrate fraud and/or a conspiracy, what might have been the motives of the scientists involved in Climategate?
This video, which interviews Former MP Peter Lilley, provides some theories:
From the video:
I think it is an example not so much of a conscious conspiracy but an unconscious conspiracy, by a group of scientists who, from reading the emails, are so loyal to each other that they are determined to agree with each other even more than they are determined to agree with the facts.
He also points out that the scientists feel morally superior (i.e. – leading a crusade), and “they also get large grants from government” for their research.
5) What has been the response from the scientists (and those who support them)?
The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all.
The source of that shame is a toxic mix of institutional laziness and complacency. Too many scientists in academia, industry and government are allowed to get away with concealing or withholding vital information about their data, research methodologies and results. That is unacceptable and must change.
Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data – dubbed Climategate – have agreed to publish their figures in full.
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
However, there are other data sets available, and with open access many people should be able to use the data to either confirm or deny global warming.
Also – there has been a lesser uproar around the software that is interpretting the data as well. Here are two examples:
7) Ignoring the email uproar, what is the scientific consensus on climate change right now?
Here is a show from “The Eyes of Nye” dedicated to global climate change that provides some background. From the video description:
Finally someone insightfully tackles today’s issues from a scientific perspective. In Bill Nye’s new show The Eyes of Nye, Bill shows the science involved in Global Warming, debunks the myth of sun-caused climate change, and how we and our obsession with cars and oil are by far the main contributors, especially in the U.S. The world is getting warmer. Is it our fault? Is the rise in temperature a product of the Industrial Revolution, the burning of fossil fuels, and the modern propensity for driving down to the mini-mart in a car the size of a woolly mammoth? Or is it just part of a natural global cycle? Bill investigates with a visit to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, where scientists identify and evaluate atmospheric gases from 400,000 years ago, and a demonstration of how increased levels of carbon dioxide affect temperatures on Earth.
Have you ever thought about this – why don’t people ride zebras?
Despite the movie Racing Stripes, zebras are not commonly domesticated. But why? People do ride horses. And zebras look a lot like horses – Zebras have four legs, hooves, manes, swishy tales, etc. and look almost exactly like horses with stripes. So why haven’t people domesticated zebras just like they domesticated horses?
There has to be a reason why. And this video explains it:
In part 1, at the 2:45 point, the video explains that there are seven traits that animals must have if they are going to be domesticated:
1) The right diet – the animal needs to be a flexible eater, not a picky eater. So horses and cows eat grass or hay or sileage or grain. Pigs, goats and dogs will eat almost anything, including garbage.
2) Tendency not to panic – Deer tend to panic. Once they do panic they take off at high speed. So they are hard to domesticate.
3) Pleasant disposition – Lions and tigers have a tendency to eat people – making them unlikely candidates for domestication.
4) Social hierarchy – herd animals with alpha hierarchies are ideal, because the other animals will follow a leader and a human can become the leader.
5) Manageable size – Animals that are too large take too much food and are hard to fence in.
6) Fast growth rate – needs to reach adult size in a year or two
7) Will breed in captivity
If you think about domesticated animals, they all have these seven traits, with one noteable exception – cats.
Zebras have all of these traits except one. If you play part two it explains the problem with zebras quite succinctly – Zebras are mean.
Compared to horses, zebras are pretty unpredictable. They can be very aggressive and even vicious as they get older. Plus, their body shape doesn’t take a saddle very well. Trying to train and ride a zebra is pretty dangerous.
Over the years, some zebras have been successfully trained, but as a group they just don’t lend themselves to domestication.
In the photographs on this page you can see the problem with saddling – compared to a horse, zebras tend to be a little too small for a full sized human to ride.
It’s called the “First Else” phone from Emblaze Mobile. Its goal is to change the face of Smart Phones, especially the user interface. Here’s a look at the new phone:
It has the same processor and screen found in the Motorola Droid, as well as a 5 megapixel camera, etc.
Folks, today might be the day when you start to notice how ancient our smartphones have become, even if they only came out in last few months. Blame Else (formerly Emblaze Mobile) for its confusingly-named First Else, a phone “built from scratch” over the last two years and now powered by Access Linux Platform (ALP) 3.0 — a mobile OS thought to have quietly died out since our last sighting in February. Until today’s London launch event, the last we heard of this Israeli company was from October’s Access Day in Japan where it previewed the Else Intuition OS, which we like to think of as inspired by Minority Report. While it’s still too early to tell whether the First Else — launching in Q2 next year — will dodge the path of doom, we were already overwhelmed by the excellence of the device’s user experience, both from its presentation and from our exclusive hands-on opportunity. Do read on to find out how Else is doing it right….
The only problem is the competition (iPhone, Droid, Palm Pre, etc.), including the possibility of a GooglePhone:
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