every sperm is sacred
An aborted foetus could one day become the mother of a new baby by "donating" her eggs to an infertile woman. "The highly controversial idea has been suggested as one solution to a worldwide shortage of women prepared to donate their eggs to help other women become pregnant."
Because of course we don't have enough fucking people already (and all the orphanages have been empty for years), so those whom nature has selected for elimination from the gene pool have a "right" to breed anyway at any costs.
Tags: mutants, parts, perversions
Current Music: The Electric Hellfire Club -- Evil Genius ♬
Hektor the Graffitinator
Hektor is a printer that is made of a spray-can and a pair of pulleys. This is surely more of a tagger-wet-dream than the PrintBrush is...
- interesting, but insanely slow-paced, QuickTime demo;
- a gigantic PDF that contains lots of images (this isn't HTML why?)
How to Bless a Seismograph
How to Bless a Seismograph:
According to the 1964 edition of The Roman Ritual, the following prayer/ceremony, to be conducted by a priest with the assistance of one or more other people, is a valid way of blessing a seismograph machine. This prayer was approved by the Congregation of Sacred Rites on Feb. 13, 1924.
Priest: Our help is in the name of the Lord. Response: Who made heaven and earth. Priest: The Lord be with you. Response: May He also be with you. Priest: Let us pray. Priest: Almighty everlasting God, whose very gaze causes the Earth to tremble, pour out your blessing on this seismograph; and grant that the signs of the Earth's tremors may be precisely recorded by it, and then rightly interpreted by man, both for the benefit of your people and for the greater glory of your name; through Christ our Lord. Response: Amen. Priest: O Virgin Mary, in view of your own sorrows take pity on us and pray for us. St. Emidius, pray for us, and in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, protect us and also this seismograph from the terror of earthquakes. The priest then sprinkles the seismograph with holy water.
Priest: Lord, bless this creature, beer, which by your kindness and power has been produced from kernels of grain, and let it be a healthful drink for mankind. Grant that whoever drinks it with thanksgiving to your holy name may find it a help in body and in soul; through Christ our Lord. Response: Amen. The priest then sprinkles the beer with holy water.
This book is online, and there's lots more of this kind of stuff in there, like "Blessing of an Electric Dynamo" and "Blessing of LARD".
RFID
There are going to be some very strange privacy implications once everything you buy has an RFID transciever in it, enabling it to be remotely identified from several feet away. Especially once these tags make their way into currency, making cash no longer be anonymous and untrackable. This Register article has a history of the barcode and of RFID, and lots of links to more info. "PrintBrush"
Random Movement Printing Technology: "Information is downloaded to the PrintBrush via a Bluetooth wireless link. The device is hand operated by sweeping it across any type of print media, no matter what its shape, size or thickness. The printout will then start to appear right behind the sweeps. The device takes into account all the parameters of the hand movement, including rotation and sudden changes of speed and acceleration. The resulting image on the printed media is very much like its digital counterpart."
do-not-call registry: useless.
You've probably heard about the new National Do-Not-Call Registry. The idea is that you add your phone number to a list -- which will then be distributed to each and every phone spammer in the country -- and they all sincerely promise not to call you.
Well, even if you buy that story, it's still useless, because the law exempts:
- long-distance phone companies;
- airlines;
- banks and credit unions;
- insurance companies;
- all political organizations;
- all charities;
- anyone conducting a survey.
All those people are allowed to cold-call you even if you're on the list. Oh, and also anyone you've done business with in the last 18 months. (FAQ.)
I almost never get telemarketing calls, and my technique was:
- pay for anonymous call rejection;
- pay for an unlisted phone number;
- pay extra for an unpublished phone number;
- wait a year for it to propagate.
"Unlisted" just means "take me out of the paper book." "Unpublished" is what you need to get out of the databases they sell to spammers.
Tags: corporations, firstperson, phones, security, spam
Current Music: Tykwer, Kilmek, Heil -- Introduction ♬
DNA Lounge:
Photos of the Naughty Nursies event are up. This was a fundraiser for the St. James Infirmary, a free clinic for sex workers. It was a good turnout, and a lot of fun! There were, I think, thirteen separate acts on the main stage, six of which were real bands. I was impressed at how well orchestrated the whole thing was: each band only did a short set, but there was very little down-time between acts. When I saw how many folks they had booked, I thought there wasn't any way they'd make that work, but they did... Oh, there was also at least one band playing upstairs in the lounge, but I missed them.
We were having some lighting trouble, though: the dimmers kept flaking out, making the stage lighting go dark for a few seconds every few minutes. This is possibly due to the recent high temperatures, but it's possible something else is wrong too (since this didn't happen last summer.) Jeremy is still investigating...
now I'm looking zombiefied
Airport screeners may get X-ray vision "Susan Hallowell, the director of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration's security laboratory, allows her body to be X-rayed by the 'backscatter' machine that bounces X-rays off the skin, producing a black-and-white image. To the eye, she is dressed in a skirt and blazer in dark, businesslike colors. On the monitor she is a NAKED, BRAIN-EATING ZOMBIE, except for a gun and a bomb that she hid under her outfit. (AP Photo/Brian Branch-Price)""It does basically make you look fat and naked, but you see all this stuff," Ms. Hallowell said.
The agency hopes to modify the machines with an electronic fig leaf - programming that fuzzes out sensitive body parts or distorts the body so it does not appear so, well, graphic.
Some were uncomfortable with the technology - called "backscatter" because it scatters X-rays - while others proclaimed it "a whole lot nicer than having someone pat me down," he said. [...] With backscatter technology, rays deflected off dense materials such as metal or plastic produce a darker image than those deflected off skin. The radiation dosage is about the same as sunshine, Ms. Hallowell said.
Tags: boobs, computers, doomed, perversions, security, zombies
Current Music: The Future Sound of London -- Central Industrial ♬
