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Honey I Left It On The Toast

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:58:33 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: I know it is a bit stupid,
but isn't it cool?

Nothing gets your morning going like a cup of joe and a piece of toast slathered in your favorite spread. Of course, it can also be the time of day when things are hectic to start. Kids running around, people in and out, everyone trying to remind everyone else about the super important soccer meet after school. Next time, put it on toast.

This toaster by Sasha Tseng incorporates a little message board where one can read quick notes. The message also gets “toasted” into the toast itself so it gives new meaning to “read while you eat”.

Of course if I had it my way, I’d use it as a scathing reminder to friends suffering from hangovers. Yes, this piece of toast will help settle your stomach buy not without first reading my warnings about binge drinking.

Tags: technology, gadgets, kitchen

From edible to incredible

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:32:38 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Incredibly, everything you see in this image can be found in the kitchen. Photographer Carl Warner has painstakingly captured all kinds of food in a series of still lifes.

He says his 'Foodscapes' were partly inspired by healthy eating campaigns. But they have not persuaded his own children to take up the five-a-day pledge.

The Forest of Dean or the Forest of Greens? The road is paved with cumin, peas hang from broccoli trees and cauliflower clouds adorn the sky with bread for mountains.

Edible ingredients in this Italian-inspired rural scene include a lasagne cart, fields of pasta, a pine nut wall, mozzarella clouds, trees of peppers and chillies and a parmesan village.

To give a realistic three-dimensional feel to the photographs, each still life is composed on a table measuring 8ft by 4ft. The foreground is only about 2ft across.

A winter landscape for carnivores

The red sky at night in this landscape is actually made from salmon

Tags: food, art, images

Visions of Science

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:48:57 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

peppercorn and a grain of salt

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

A tiny shrimp fearlessly enters the mouth of a fish to clean its teeth

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

A clinical skills tutor holds a pile of prosthetic arms

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Representation of panspermia

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

The surface tension of water supports a metal paperclip

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

This cancer cell is moving down a pore in a filter

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

This is a representation of a barn seen during an attack, painted by an artist and migraine sufferer

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

The fine cellular structure of the stem of a sunflower is revealed here, including red vascular areas and blue supportive tissue. This systematic regularity contrasts with the sweeping outline of the butterfly. (©Rachel Shillcock)

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

An eye studies a self-contained ecosystem in which every organism feeds on another, or its waste products. All this sealed globe needs to sustain it is light, so that the plant can produce oxygen. It is like a mini-Earth

Tags: science, images

Self-illumination

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:08:55 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth

Clip Source: fantasyartdesign.com

Tags: andre kutscheraer, artist, art, modern art, surreal art

Why Can't You Unscamble An Egg?

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:37:30 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

The Boltzmann brain problem arises from a string of logical conclusions that all spring from another deep and old question, namely why time seems to go in only one direction. Why can’t you unscramble an egg? The fundamental laws governing the atoms bouncing off one another in the egg look the same whether time goes forward or backward. In this universe, at least, the future and the past are different and you can’t remember who is going to win the Super Bowl next week.

Tags: my, comprehension, of, this, subject, is scaring, me

Dozens Report Mile-Wide UFO Over Texas

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 06:16:45 GMT

clipped by: thisnamecantbetaken
clipper's remarks: Just imagine if aliens exist!! Abductions, secret flights, missing time, men in black, being probed and tortured and terrorised by alien foreign invaders!! Hmm.... I don't think we should fear UFO's. If aliens exist, I'm pretty sure they're just trying to liberate us and bring us some freedom and democracy.

Optical Illusion?

Clip Source: ap.google.com

Dozens in Texas Town Report Seeing UFO

STEPHENVILLE, Texas (AP)

Several dozen people — including a pilot, county constable and business owners — insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.

"People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it's the end of times," said Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot who said the object he saw last week was a mile long and half a mile wide. "It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts."

it was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the ground than an airplane.

the object's lights changed configuration

very large and without seams, nuts or bolts.

federal officials insist there's a logical explanation

The Air Force no longer investigates UFOs.

Tags: ufo, mystery, friend, or, foe

Sound Clips: The Human Instrument

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:49:50 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: AMAZINGLY FLEXIBLE the human voice creates sounds as rich and complex as those of conventional musical instruments--but with much smaller equipment.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Although the human vocal system is small, it manages to create sounds as varied and beautiful as those produced by a variety of musical instruments. The question is: How can singers produce all those remarkable sounds?

All instruments, including our singing voices, have a sound source, a resonator that reinforces (amplifies) the basic sound and a radiator that transmits the sound to listeners. In people, the source is vibrating vocal folds (vocal cords) of the larynx or voice box; the resonator is the sound-boosting airway above the larynx; and the radiator is the opening of the mouth.

The human voice can create an impressive array of sounds because it relies on non-linear feedback by which a small input can result in a disproportionately large output. One of the voice’s more effective nonlinear mechanisms is inertive reactance, whereby singers create special conditions in their vocal tract to amplify sounds generated by the vocal folds.

Tags: human voice

Life from Scratch

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:37:34 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.sciencenews.org

Learning to make synthetic cells

Maggots don't arise spontaneously out of dead, rotting meat. Aphids never materialize within drops of morning dew. Aristotle and others who believed in the spontaneous generation of life were dead wrong.

The only time life arose from nonlife, biologists believe, was almost 4 billion years ago, when simple living cells first appeared on Earth. But now, with the help of a microscopic parasite that infects people's genitals, researchers may rehabilitate the core of Aristotle's idea.

Scientists are on the verge of creating living cells by piecing together small molecules that are themselves not alive. The result would be the world's first human-made life forms, synthetic cells made more or less from scratch.

The goal is to make cells that are as simple as possible, yet still able to grow, reproduce, and evolve—some of the defining traits of life.

"Simplicity has always been where we try to gain understanding,"

Tags: life

Ancient Egyptian Medicine

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:57:00 GMT

clipped by: thisnamecantbetaken
clipper's remarks: If I were standing over hot coals, I think I would "displace" my uterus to somewhere cooler in a jiffy!

Clip Source: showcase.netins.net

Ancient Egyptian Medicine

The Healing Arts of the Ancient World

A partial listing of various techniques used by physicians and healers throughout the ancient world.

Cure for Headache:

The skull of a cat-fish (nar) that has been fried in oil. Anoint the head therewith.

Cure for Diarrhea:

1/8th cup figs and grapes, bread dough, pit corn, fresh Earth, onion, and elderberry

To Cure a Displaced Uterus in a Woman:

Place a wax ibis on coals and allow the smoke to penetrate the sex organs.

Cure for Lesions of the Skin:

After the scab has fallen off put on it: Scribe's excrement. Mix in fresh milk and apply as a poultice.

Cure for Cataracts:

Mix brain-of-tortoise with honey. Place on the eye

Cure for Aging:

Let there be bought a large quantity of heayet fruit.

Mix with water and cook over the fire

Place in a costly stone vase and anoint a man therewith

All information is presented for historical interest only.

Tags: egypt, ancient, myths, medicine, odd

Maps of the Imaginary

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:08:21 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: The worlds of many literary works have been subject to similar changes in perception. There is a whole genre of literary maps dedicated to tracing the real-world settings of fictional events, or the location of events once thought to have been real but now recognized as fiction.
Do these maps count?

Clip Source: www.press.uchicago.edu

Maps of the Imaginary

What makes a world “imaginary”? And what makes a representation of such a world a “map”?

As the literary scholar Thomas Pavel reminds us, the fictionality of fictional worlds often lies in the eye of the beholder.

Sacred geographies

the most obvious example

To the believer, maps of the afterlife or of the worlds of the gods are anything but imaginary, while to the nonbeliever, they are anything but real.

What about maps of lost continents like Lemuria or Atlantis, which are mere myths for most of us, but have at different times by different people been believed to be real?

The Voyage of the Pequod

from the Book, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

1956

An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland

In Bernard Sleigh’s “Anciente Mappe of Fairyland” everything is depicted pictorially: nothing is reduced to cartographic abstraction.

It provides commanding heights that the viewer can occupy imaginatively, creating a sense of mastery over the landscape.

Bernard Sleigh

An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland

1920

Google's Space-Exploration Vision

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:52:50 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: From Virtual 3-D Travel to the "People's Telescope"

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

One of the early trends of the 21st Century is the sense that science and space exploration and its expression in film, video, news and events will dominate popular culture as the Internet has during the past decade.

Leading this cultural shift is Google. The search-giant has announced several major initiatives with NASA that have positioned the company as the Space Age leader in information-delivery.

One of Google's first projects was to partner with NASA's Ames Research Center to produce high-resolution 3D maps of Mars and the Moon in the same detail as Google Earth. Users will experience a virtual flight over the surface of the Moon or through the canyons of Mars.

The collaboration will also seek to make NASA data available on the internet, including live weather maps and forecasts, plus real-time tracking of the International Space Station and shuttle.

Tags: google, space vision