steve barrett

This video is the making of Pontiac’s Spy Hunter Commercial for the G8.

Look at those digits go!

I bet the high heel sneakers and oversized sunglasses contributed to this weak ass attempt to throw a teeny tiny ball a few feet.

Agent Orange was a defoliating herbicide widely used during the Vietnam war. Over 20 million gallons were dropped over the jungle from aircraft. As a dioxin, it is extremely hazardous and since the war Agent Orange has been revealed to be a potent carcinogen. Its effects are still being felt by those who live in areas surrounding drop zones, even those who are now in their third generation since its use. This just goes to show how easy it is to fuck up the environment with a quick spritz of chemistry.

I’m a New Scientist subscriber and I’ve been following this line of research for quite a while now. This whole topic really stems back a good number of years - back to the times when PETA came to be because of early neurological research on primates. The research has been making leaps and bounds over just the last several years as it reaches a state mature enough to engage in experiments such as this.

I read a book called The Mind and the Brain by a brilliant neurologist by the name of Jeffrey Schwartz; the book covered a multitude of subjects but one thing he touched on quite a bit was the cortical maps within the brain - more specifically the plasticity of cortical maps. He spoke of researchers severing the neural connection in the brain to a finger for instance, and then slowly training primates to relearn how to use the affected finger. The research improved our knowledge of both how to map the cortical map for motor skills and also how the brain can change its map over time - even in adulthood.

With this research, we are now finally coming into the age of “smart” prosthetics that behave much in the same way that your real limbs do in everyday life. You simply think of reaching over to grab your cup of coffee - and your arm proceeds to play out the program to do so. As you can see in the video below, the monkey has learned to control a robotic prosthetic arm that has been directly wired into the motor cortical map. This is simply astonishing if you ask me.

I think the best part of this story is the scientist that explains it. Granted, the fact that these tiny little mammals experience a level of social interaction that really isnt all that far off from what you and I experience is interesting.

I’m all for green energy. I especially love the new wave of smart engineering behind it. Windmills have been around for years - in fact, windmills have been around for thousands of years, and that’s part of what’s so surprising about this video. According to the description of this video the braking mechanism that slows the windmill to tolerable speeds in high winds failed. This allowed the windmill to build up some incredible speed and eventually the whole thing gave out.

Quite impressive.

Sex Toy Helicopter Interrupts Speech - Watch more free videos
props to the engineer, flying penii are neither aerodynamic or balanced