Month: June 2005

Biology News reports that “Adding a common ingredient in shampoo to paints and varnishes can create self-sanitizing coatings for frequently touched surfaces in public buildings that continue killing germs for months.”

It’s like the movie Evolution where the Selenium in Selsun Blue saves the day! I bet no one saw the movie and I’m on my own here. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss much…

This could just be some sort of guerilla art, but it’s pretty interesting either way.

The MARC commuter trains between Baltimore and DC are sporting these terrornoia posters styled after the heyday of Stalin’s totalitarian regime, when Soviet citizens were exhorted to spy on their neighbors and fink them out for suspicious behavior. And they say irony is dead.

Update: One of the commenters to this article (linked to in the MetaFilter discussion thread) found out that the poster is “the product of a campaign being run by CSX, the freight transportation company which owns the rail lines MARC operates on.” One of the comments in the MetaFilter thread also points out that a poster in London is similarly creepy, while examples in Boston (PDF) and New York are less innocuous.

Worth1000.com’s latest Photoshop Contest mimicing the style and works of M.C. Escher has some cool stuff…

I posted about a page dedicated to math on The Simpsons a while ago, and today I came across a similar idea for Futurama at Mathematics in the Year 3000.

Check out Fast Film, an amazing fourteen-minute animated short film:

What makes Fast Film unique is that all its scenes were taken from 300 different feature films. Director Virgil Widrich captured stills from the 300 movies, and made over 65,000 photocopies of these, then folded them into a variety of shapes and animated them. The result is a completely fresh look at Hollywood – a tour of movie history at breakneck speed.

National Geographic Magazine has a nice feature called Inside Tornadoes, which among other things includes a Flash video presentation depicting the destruction of an F4 tornado via a precariously placed camera package:

A well-placed probe fitted with 7 video cameras—6 with a 60-degree field-of-view designed to achieve a full 360-degree field-of-view (one failed during deployment, resulting in a 300-degree field-of-view) and one pointing upward—captures footage inside a tornado, providing visual data on ground wind speeds where the storm does the greatest damage.

Very cool…

Magnetic AJAX is a web version of magnetic poetry that utilizes the recently introduced AJAX “web development technique.”

According to the book Bat Bomb, the World War II Project X-Ray explored the use of bombs filled with bats:

The basic idea was that a bomb-like canister filled with bats would be dropped from high altitude over the target area. The bats would be in a sort of hibernation, but as the bomb fell (slowed by a parachute) they would warm up and awaken. At the appropriate altitude, the bomb would open and over one thousand bats, each carrying a tiny time-delay napalm incendiary device, would flutter away and roost in various nooks and crannies, many of them in extremely flammable wooden Japanese buildings. The napalm devices would go off more or less simultaneously, and thousands of little fires would start at the same time. Many of them would grow into large fires, and the ability of the Japanese firefighters to contain them would quickly be overwhelmed.

Weird and wild stuff…

I can’t tell whether this is real or not, and the page is scant on details, but the AT-AT Boom Box looks pretty cool…

Having read this article, Wal-Mart is apparently not the only offender when it comes to “enforcing copyrights,” but it is apparently one of the more egregious ones:

Photofinishing labs increasingly are refusing to print professional-looking photographs taken by amateurs.

The reason: Photofinishers are afraid of infringing on professional photographers’ copyrights.
…
It happened to David Watson earlier this year as he tried to get old photos of his mother printed for her funeral. The photos were of his mother, taken years ago by family members, some since deceased.

Like Helmick, he had uploaded them to Walmart.com, then went to pick them up at his local Wal-Mart in Charlotte, Mich. Watson said the manager of the photo department “felt” that three of the photos were possibly taken professionally. One of the photos in question was of his mother 50 years ago.

“I offered to sign anything, but there was just no way around it for them,” Watson said. “They were not going to print them. We left what they had printed there and went on to a real photo printer who had no problem with the printing or use of these photos.”

Having personally seen how the local Wal-Mart treats their negatives, I would never let Wal-Mart work on any of my photography. This kind of arbitrary, draconian enforcement is just too much, as other examples in the article point out. I understand the concerns over copyright infringement, but there has to be a better way than this…