People shown erotic or gory images have trouble processing what they see immediately afterwards, according to a new study.
A great quote (and a great quote within the great quote)
From About Last Night, the blog of Terry Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal (among other things): More and more I question the ultimate value of any criticism whose immediate purpose is not to bring its readers into direct contact with beauty (or shorten the amount of time they spend in contact with …
Fly me to the moon…
…for a cool $100 million.
Remote-controlled humans
No, seriously.
A black box for people
NASA has developed a device that keeps track of biological data for people, much like the flight recorder in an airplane keeps track of flight information. The comfortably wearable device can monitor changes in heart rate, the amount of oxygen in the blood stream and more. It’s intended for astronauts, but the medical possibilities here …
Marines to get fighting robot
The Gladiator Robot, a three-ton unmanned remote-controlled vehicle that can fire machine guns, nonlethal sting balls or tear gas, has been rolled out. The U.S. Marines will begin testing six prototypes in 2007 and could deploy around 200 of them in 2009 if they work as intended. And at just $300,000 to $400,000 each, they’re …
The end of Disney hand-drawn animation
This makes me sad. Disney has closed its last studio turning out hand-drawn animation; it’s all going to be computer-generated from now on.
Row, row, row your boat
Wascana Lake in Regina, just a couple of blocks from my house, is the venue for canoeing, kayaking and rowing events at the Canada Summer Games, now underway. Which, naturally, got me thinking…about science. The first scientific principle involved in boating of any sort is the one named after Archimedes, the Greek philosopher who formulated …
Canola with a sting
Chinese scientists have inserted scorpion and moth genes into canola to make them poisonous to insects. The anti-GMO crowd is going to love that.
Another garden picture
Beverley’s Flower 1 Originally uploaded by Edward Willett. Actually, we have lots of friends with beautiful gardens. Here’s a late-afternoon shot of a lovely flower in yet another Regina garden.
A Saskatchewan garden
A Saskatchewan Garden Originally uploaded by Edward Willett. Summer may be deadly (see earlier post), but it has its rewards, too. Some friends of ours have a most beautiful garden, which we were in on Saturday morning. It’s almost enough to make me want to take up gardening myself. Almost.
It’s official: summer’ll kill ya
According to the Centers for Disease Control, over a 20-year period, from 1979 to 1999, more people in the U.S. died from extreme heat than from hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes combined.
My latest live walk and vlog
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