Entries from February 2007 ↓

An Australian artist, Justine Cooper, created the marketing campaign for a non-existent drug called Havidol for Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder. Both the disease and the drug are made up.
The marketing campaign included billboards, a website, and a booth set up in an art gallery in New York. The website and the booth are obviously parody, but they are done so well that many people have decided that the disease and the drug are real. So many people that pharmacies and doctors have been inundated with calls asking for the drug.
If you go to the website for Havidol you can read all about the symptoms that the drug is supposed to treat. It seems that the drug will fix every possible problem you might have. From physical strength, to popularity.
The claims are so outlandish and fantastic, that people should at least be skeptical. It’s kind of sad that so many people actually believe that the drug is real after going to the website.
You can read the news story here and go to the main site here

I don’t think I would want to have this guy for a neighbor. A lot of the experiments on his site seem a little dangerous. While he clearly has a rather unhealthy obsession with electricity, all of his experiments are very cool. The picture above is real, and I really recommend going to his site and checking out the other pics and experiments he has on there. Besides the pictures of his experiments, he also has detailed instructions and directions on how he did each of his experiments.
Check it out here

You find the strangest things on the net. I was browsing Digg the other day and found a link to this article. It seems that back in the 50s, Chrysler sold cars with a built in record player. Can you imagine the poor quality of the sound? Who thought this would be a good idea? The records would skip on every little bump in the road, and there were issues with records warping from the heat of being stored in the car. They only sold it for one year. So I guess most people saw how stupid this idea was.
You can check out Chrysler’s official page on this here

Ed Felten at Freedom To Tinker, a blog I read pretty regularly, wrote an interesting piece about the use of bandwidth. He questions whether or not we will ever reach a point where we have literally more bandwidth than we could possibly use.

If you are into computer tech, you will know that it is largely taken as a given, that no matter how much power and storage we have in our computers, it will never be enough. Every time a point is reached where we have more power in our computers than we need, a new application to consume that power is developed. The same goes for storage space. Just a few years ago, I would have been hard pressed to fill a 20 gig hard drive, but today, I easily max out the 100 gig hard drive in my computer at home. Simply having more space caused me to find more uses for it.
Most of the time, people assume that when it comes to bandwidth, the same rules apply. no matter how much bandwidth there is, people will find a way to consume it. In Felten’s post, he asks if this is really the case? He argues that there is a physical sensory limit to how much bandwidth a single person can consume. So in his estimation, we will eventually reach a point where adding more bandwidth to our connections, will not be useful or necessary. To be clear, he says we are no where near that point right now, and won’t be for years to come.
I would argue that while he is correct on the physical sensory limit, he is incorrect on the usefulness of increasing our bandwidth beyond that point. In the near future, I see every device in our house being connected to the Internet in some way. Whether it is for remote monitoring, or automatic updating. All of those devices will use bandwidth. On the entertainment or sensory side I see lots of new devices whose goal will be to gather, filter, organize, and update any information you might be interested in automatically. most of that info might be wasted, but gathered anyway on the off chance you might want to look at it in the future. this is already happening with our TVs. DVRs record shows for us that we may never watch, but we want to have just in case. As more of our media and news moves to the Internet, I think that will become more common.

Read this blog post by a photographer who is currently touring Eastern Europe. He was able to get a special pass to visit the closed off ruins of Chernobyl. A pretty interesting read about his experience. The photos he took are also pretty creepy.

Check it out here.

Found this very cool site on another blog I read. Seriously cool looking lamps and art sculptures. I could even see a few of these in my house. Sadly, the entire site is in German(I think) and I can’t read any of it. So I have no idea if these are for sale anywhere, or just art in some museum. Either way, they are pretty cool looking. Check it out here

As many of my friends from college know, gummy bears have a special place in my college history. During the many long hours I spent in the computer lab doing projects, gummy bears were a major form of sustenance. Since we weren’t allowed to have any food (including candy) or drink in the labs on campus, the gummy bears were always a sort of open secret. Many people including some of the professors, knew that candy, cookies and even sodas were being consumed in the lab, but as long as you weren’t blatant about it they would look the other way. There was an exception made to the no candy rule, for breath mints. So jokingly the gummy bears were renamed “bear mints.”
Now, you are probably asking, what prompted this little nostalgic walk down memory lane? Well, I found a rather interesting flickr pool devoted to gummy bears. So check it out. Gummy Bear Pool

I read an interesting article about a village in China that is said to be descended from mercenary soldiers settled there by a Chinese emperor. people born in the village show a lot of European characteristics and racial features. Back in 1950s an Oxford professor, Homer Dubs, theorized that they were descended from a Roman legion know to have been captured by the Parthians(an empire located roughly where Iran is now). The Parthians forced the captured legion into mercenary service on their eastern frontier, far away from the western Roman frontier.
That was the last confirmed whereabouts of the legion. 17 years after the battle with the Parthians, history records the capture of a mercenary company by the Chinese that fought in a “fish scale formation.” Dubs theorized that this “fish scale formation” referred to the tortoise formation of interlocking and overlapping shields that Roman legions commonly used. This mercenary company was settled in the Liqian. Now for the first time, scientists are doing DNA testing to try to find the origin of the inhabitants of the village.

dna-tests-for-chinas-legionary-lore
Widipedia link to story

Well, the Superbowl is over. The Colts won and Bears fans are sad. I know, I had a bunch of them in my house last night. But for me, the fun of the Superbowl is the commercials. This year there weren’t that many good ones, but a few gems stood out. Check out this spot for blockbuster.

To see a list of some of the best spots, follow the link to Gizmodo and their list of favorite commercials.

Read an article about a woman who lost her arm in Iraq. Doctors have created a mechanical arm that is wired into her own nerve endings. So she can control and move the arm using her brain just like you and I would. Pretty cool. Follow the link for more info. Bionic Arm