steve barrett

If you had purchased $1,000.00 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago you would have $49.00 left.

With Enron, you would have had $16.50 left of the original $1,000.00.

With WorldCom, you would have had less than $5.00 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer one year ago, drank all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have $214.00 cash.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. It’s called the 401-Keg:

A recent study found that the average American walks about 900 miles a year. Another study found Americans drink, on the average, 22 gallons of alcohol a year. That means, on average, Americans get about 41 miles to the gallon.

If this happens to you, you deserve it. Was he alone? It says he was naked so I don’t know if they’re implying there was some sort of sex act involved. Do you think the partner just bailed on him after realizing the fool had suffocated on a GOD DAMN CONDOM!?

Frost on Mars was first detected on the Viking 2 in 1980. This year the Pheonix Lander finally confirmed that water exists on mars by chemical composition and boil point tests. This seems like a major discovery, wouldn’t it be easy to collect morning frost. If liquid is in the atmosphere it could be continually harvested. As you know water is hydrogen and oxygen. Air for breathing and Hydrogen for jet fuel. So why aren’t we on mars yet?

Sachiko Kodama, a Japanese artist, has created something truly unusual. What you’re seeing is a liquid infused with metallic particles that have magnetic properties. When a magnet is introduced, you see the shape of the magnetic field as the liquid aligns itself.

Through a coordinated choreography of magnets and liquid Kodoma has produced a number of videos and art exhibits displaying a unique look at something we take for granted on a daily basis. Magnetism is everywhere and it seems as though we need something striking to remind us of how beautiful physics can be.

spotted on io9

You’re looking at Julio, a robot singing to a recording of David Byrne of the Talking Heads. Julio was built by David Hanson and chronicled on Hanson’s blog. Hanson has a great collection of other videos at his website. David says he designed Julio to study the “uncanny valley.” Instead of giving you a wonky description I’ll just include the wikipedia low-down

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness….

…The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is “almost human”, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of “strangeness” in the human viewer. In other words, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a good job at pretending to be human, but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person.

I find this to be a pretty interesting concept. Something so close to real it’s harder to personify than a cartoon? It’s as though people have an easier time humanizing an object if its obviously not real than they do personifying a 99% accurate recreation.

An article published by Washington University in St. Louis claims that the American Military will be roughly 30% robotic by 2020. This includes everything from crawling scouts, unmanned automatic UAVs, self-driving convoys, and job specific bots like the robo dog.

Sounds like a pretty accurate estimate to me.

This little gif is pretty impressive. It speaks volumes to the intelligence of birds. It also reminds me of a speech given by Joshua Klein at TED 2008 about the intelligence of crows. Joshua created a machine that passively teaches crows through a series of steps to use a vending machine, in theory with widespread implementation the vending machine could be a way to use crows to help pick up litter or some other task that is mutually beneficial.

Joshua talks about a trick learned by crows in Japan where they drop nuts into traffic to be crushed by cars, then wait for a red light to safely retrieve the soft and nutritious insides. His speech is most definitely worth a watch if you find this topic interesting.

Adelir Antonio de Carli was a Brazilian priest who took on the noble task of fund raising for a spiritual rest stop for truckers, but that’s just the beginning. His method of fund raising is what really made this guy famous - he decided to perform a publicity stunt where he took flight by means of a bushel of helium-filled balloons.

He flew away with a wide variety of safety gear including, water proof overalls, a helmet, parachute, food for 5 days, a satellite phone, a mobile phone, a gps tracker, a floating chair, and a thermal suit. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough forethought to learn to use his GPS device.

Despite staying in contact with authorities for some time, Adelir was never able to relay his position for a rescue. For that reason, his body wasn’t found until 3 months later by an offshore oilrig support vessel.

Way to go Adelir.

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.

Two major supermarkets were cordoned off by police today after a man shocked shoppers by allegedly spraying urine on the food.

The raider entered Morrisons in Glevum Way, Gloucester at around 11.20am and fired a “foul-smelling substance” - thought to be urine - on meat, salad and fruit.

He fled the store and went to Tesco four miles away in Quedgeley, where he again terrified customers and staff by spraying the fluid on produce.

Remember, always wash your produce when you get home from the grocery store. Go figure this sort of thing would have to be your reminder. While disgusting, this story’s pretty funny.

As lame as that title is, I’m sure Chad Kroeger really would be singing the blues if he was capable of writing, performing, or singing. The lead man for the group some call a band, Nickelback, was busted in British Columbia back in 2006 for driving under influence. Allegedly at twice the legal limit for blood-alcohol content Kroeger was rolling at 160km/h in his Lamborghini and sped past the wrong officer.

This month his case finally came to an end, and the fool has lost his license for good. Although I’m sure he’ll be limo bound until he burns through his dough. At some point he’ll regret it.

Just to reiterate how much I dislike this guy, I thought I’d bring up an older video that shows just how much his fans in Portugal really like him. After asking if the crowd wants to hear some rock and roll or go home - Kroeger gets NAILED in the head with a rock. For most I’d feel bad, but this guy’s such a twat I can really thoroughly enjoy seeing him take a wad of granite to the face.