Bathroom Readers' Institute's Blog, page 173
March 24, 2013
Beach Boys KILL ‘I Get Around’
This is unbelievable!
WE have NEVER heard guitar like that! NEVER…
BONUS: We don’t know why THAT. EPIC. PERFORMANCE. would need a bonus, but heck fire, it just got us all hepped up on AWESOME MUSIC! So here’s some more!
March 23, 2013
Billboard in Peru Turns Air Into Drinking Water
Just outside Lima, Peru, a billboard provides drinking water to whomever needs it – mainly, its neighbours.
The panel produces clean water from the humidity in the air, through filters.
Researchers at the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima and advertising agency Mayo Peru DraftFCB joined forces to launch it.
So far it’s made more than 9,000 liters of water – or about 96 liters a day. And it goes into a storage vat that has a tap at street level – so anyone can go up to it and get some water. And they need it—because, even though it’s very humid there (up to 98% humidity in the mornings! ow!), it hardly rains at all! Check this out:
Let’s talk about Lima for a moment, the largest city in Peru and the fifth largest in all of the Americas, with some 7.6 million people (closer to 9 million when you factor in the surrounding metro area). Because it sits along the southern Pacific Ocean, the humidity in the city averages 83% (it’s actually closer to 100% in the mornings). But Lima is also part of what’s called a coastal desert: It lies at the northern edge of the Atacama, the driest desert in the world, meaning the city sees perhaps half an inch of precipitation annually (Lima is the second largest desert city in the world after Cairo). Lima thus depends on drainage from the Andes as well as runoff from glacier melt — both sources on the decline because of climate change.
Crazy! Let’shope they get a lot more of those billboards!
• Here’s a heck of a related UJBR book you might like to take to the bath some day…
March 22, 2013
“WOMAN’S HOUSE BURNT DOWN BY SNAKE SHE SET ON FIRE”
One woman’s extreme reaction to finding a snake in her yard backfired in tragic fashion. After being set on fire, the flaming snake caused the woman’s home to burn down. [...]
“While cleaning up, she saw a snake, threw gasoline on the snake, lit the snake on fire,” Bowie County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Randall Baggett told the station. “The snake went into the brush pile, and the brush pile caught the home on fire.”
And the best possible single sentence EVER in a story about a woman who burnt her house down by setting a snake on fire:
Oddly enough, a local fire department official says the incident isn’t as unique as one might think.
Maybe it’s just us, but we would have thought that having your house burnt down by a snake you set on fire was pretty much the living definition of the word “unique.” But hey, you learn something knew every day!
This site has the transcript of the 911 call:
“We were trying to kill a snake with fire,” the woman said during the 911 call. “It done caught the house.”
“Caught the house?” asked the dispatcher.
“Yes, the house is on fire. Could you hurry up please?”
Uncle John’s advice to homeowners everywhere: If you see a snake in your yard – do NOT try to kill it with fire. Maybe just have a beer instead. And wait for the snake to go away.
P.S. Related UJBR publication.
March 21, 2013
When Celebrities Meet Bad Guys
Former NBA rebounding champion (and all-around weirdo) Dennis Rodman recently made headlines during an ill-advised trip to North Korea to meet its “Supreme Leader,” Kim Jong-un.
While this sounds like a PR stunt or an article from The Onion, Rodman isn’t the first American celebrity to associate themselves with dubious elements. Here are a few more examples.
Patty Hearst yelling commands at bank customers
Patty Hearst. After being kidnapped by a far-left revolutionary group calling itself the “Symbionese Liberation Army,” newspaper heiress Patty Hearst succumbed to the effects of brainwashing and Stockholm Syndrome and willingly helped the SLA rob a San Francisco bank in 1974. Hearst was arrested in 1975 and imprisoned for two years before her sentence was commuted by President Carter.
Oliver Stone. The movie director (JFK, the Doors, Born on the Fourth of July) went to Cuba to meet Cuban dictator Fidel Castro for the HBO documentary Comandante in 2003, just as “El Presidente” was rounding up dissidents and having them executed. HBO then deemed Comandante too pro-Cuba and refused to air it. So Stone went back to Havana to film more footage for another film, Looking for Castro, which was only released on DVD. Not knowing when to say when, the director hung out with Castro again for a third film, Castro in Winter.
Jane Fonda. Younger readers might know Fonda only as a workout video star. Older readers will remember her Oscar-winning turn in Klute, as well as her outspoken support for the Black Panthers, the Civil Rights movement, and her opposition to the Vietnam War. She got the nickname “Hanoi Jane” after she visited the city in July 1972. During a two-week tour of North Vietnam, she met with American POWs, hung out with members of the North Vietnamese Army and denounced U.S.’ military leaders as “war criminals” in a series of radio broadcasts. The most controversial part of her trip, however, involved a photo of Fonda seated on an NVA anti-aircraft battery next to a soldier. Over the past few decades Fonda has frequently apologized for the trip, but antagonism against the actress persists; in 2005, a Navy veteran spit chewing tobacco in her face at a book signing.
March 20, 2013
Humans Have Left the Solar System (Or Not)
.
And no, this is not about Charlie Sheen.
Ba DUMP.
Thank you, no really, thank you! Try the gharghmey!*
Where were we? Oh yeah: Humans have left the Solar System! (Okay, they say “may have left,” but dangit, we’re not scientists, Jim!)
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft — the farthest-flung object created by human hands — has traveled beyond the sun’s sphere of influence and may even have left the solar system forever, a new study suggests.
On Aug. 25, 2012, 35 years after the Voyager 1 mission launched, Earth’s most distant spacecraft detected a sharp change in the intensity of fast-moving charged particles called cosmic rays, suggesting it had left the outermost reaches of the heliosphere marking the edge of the solar system.
“Within just a few days, the heliospheric intensity of trapped radiation decreased, and the cosmic ray intensity went up as you would expect if it exited the heliosphere,” said Bill Webber, professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, in a statement.
Here’s a helpful graphic from NASA:
Well, sorta helpful. Nice colors, anyway.
And hold up – NASA says, Not so fast:
“The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA’s Voyager 1 has left the solar system,” said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. “It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space. In December 2012, the Voyager science team reported that Voyager 1 is within a new region called ‘the magnetic highway’ where energetic particles changed dramatically. A change in the direction of the magnetic field is the last critical indicator of reaching interstellar space and that change of direction has not yet been observed.”
Well heck. And here we were all ready to have a “Let’s Get Interstellar!’ party. (Guess we’ll have to have it anyway…)
We’ll update when news of more scientist arguments over this arise. There should be plenty…
• Here’s Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy on the dispute.
* Gharghmey means “eel.” In Klingon. It was the closest thing to “veal” we could find.
March 19, 2013
The Tricorder Project: Scientists Try to Bring Star Trek ‘Tricorder’ to Life
Star Trek fans have long wished for a world where they could use a single tool to take multi-faceted measurements of the environment around them, but Dr. Peter Jansen is making it a reality with The Tricorder Project. Started when he was a graduate student at McMaster University, the Project consists of Jansen designing, building, and then open-sourcing designs for actual working Tricorders. The first model, dubbed the Tricorder Mark 1, was a proof-of-concept that allowed Jansen to take atmospheric, electromagnetic, and spatial measurements. He followed that up with the more elaborate Mark 2, which runs Linux, features twin OLED displays, and uses upgradeable sensor boards for easy swapping.
Video:
Jensen’s website. (And “Probably the nerdiest contest you will ever enter.”)
Related: Blackberry Founder Mike Lazaridis starting $100 million project to realize “Star Trek future.” And Qualcomm’s “Tricorrder X Prize” hoeps to see invention of Star Trek’s “medical tricorder.”
Star Treky Bonus: Spock: Teenage Outcast. (Originally from My Star Trek Scrapbook.)
• Awesome Tricorder tape recorder image from over here.
March 18, 2013
Cockroaches on a Bus!!!
ATLANTIC CITY (WABC) — A bus ride from Atlantic City to New York City has the makings of a horror movie as the passengers reported an invasion of roaches.
Crawly…
A caller tells Eyewitness News that 15 minutes into their journey to New York City on Friday afternoon, roaches started coming out of the vents inside the bus.
Creepy creepy…
They were crawling on seats, up the windows, on the side panels, even onto the passengers, the caller said.
Crawly crawly…
“Creepy creepy crawly crawly” reference for those Who need it…
Image from here.
March 15, 2013
Robot Combat: Megabyte v. Brutality
AWESOME:
You know what comes to mind watching that? Someone should tell Michael Vick about robot combat. It has all the excitement of dogfighting without the, you know, awful cruel horribleness and stuff.
EXTRAS:
• These are apparently a category of robot war fighters called spinners. (They’re mentioned on the Wikipedia page, too.)
• The Robot Combat Hall of Fame. (Megabyte is in there!)
• Megabyte website. (Can’t find one for Brutality.)
• “A Brief History of Robot Brutality.” (Which naturally begins with Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.)
• What’s that? You want a story about the fabulously flopperiffic Gyrojet, just for kicks? Well alrighty then.
Habemus Papam! (That’s Latin for “We have a Pope!”)
This week 76-year-old Argentinean Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope on the fifth papal conclave vote. Fun fact: Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, is the first pontiff from Latin America. To mark the occasion, here are a few more bits of pope-culture.
Pope vote: The vote usually doesn’t take long. Over the past century, the conclave has never lasted more than five days. Longest on record: 33 months, spanning 1268 to 1271. An angry mob got so fed up with the indecision that they literally tore the roof off the building the college of cardinals was staying in and limited their meals to bread and water to inspire them to pick up the pace. (They picked Pope Gregory X, who reigned for four years.
Youngest pope. John XII was only 18 when he was named pope in 955. How’d he swing that? He was part of the Theophylact family, which dominated both Roman and Catholic Church politics at the time.
Oldest pope. Pope Celestine III (elected 1191) and Celestine V (1294) were both 84 when they got the job.
Repeat pope. The only man who got to be pope more than once: Benedict IX. Another member of the Theophylacts, his first term lasted from 1032 (when he was 20) to 1044. His political foes forced him out, but he returned to the papacy in 1045. Political controversies led to him being deposed by a church council again in 1046, but allowed him to regain power in 1047, before ultimately being excommunicated a year later.
Clean-shaven pope. Until the reign of Pope Steven VII, from 928-931, all pontiffs had sported long, flowing beards. Steven was the first to break with tradition.
Pope alarm. Most people found out about the new pope from TV news or the Internet. But FOCUS, a Catholic outreach organization, offered to “The Pope Alarm.” The subscription service sent out text and email messages to thousands of users the moment white smoke emerged from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney.
March 14, 2013
Happy Pi Day!
A Pi Day picture puzzle for you:
MMMMM, PLUMB PI!
Highlight the area just under the image for a big clue!
Image from here.
