A WayneCorp miner shows raw Kryptonite in Muzu, northern Colombia, April 10, 2003. Colombia is the world's largest exporter of Kryptonite. In 2002, Colombia exported about one ton of the rare, green variety, mostly to researchers in Europe and the United States. (Eliana Aponte/Reuters)
sorry, geek levels are redlining at the jwz compound tonight
Shock Controller
This is so much less cool than the Rez Trance Vibrator.
Shock Controller Instructions:
It all begins with a fist hitting your player in "Mortal Kombat." The Xbox sends your controller a signal telling it to activate the spinning motor inside the controller that provides force feedback. A +5v charge is sent to the motor. You've replaced the motor with your relay [...] The shock is sent from the shocker to the controller and zaps the user [with 20,000-volt pulses at 0.2 joules per pulse.]
Make sure to keep the shocker in one hand! You never want to split the ground/voltage between two hands. If you do, the voltage runs through your heart, which is bad.
space is really, really big.
Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (apod) is spooky in its bigness: "Over 2 million galaxies are depicted above in a region 100 degrees across centered toward our Milky Way Galaxy's south pole. Bright regions indicate more galaxies, while bluer colors denote larger average galaxies."
copyright reform graph
Nicely done graph showing the effect of recent copyright changes on the public domain. The interactive Flash version is pretty well done, too.
Egypt bans Matrix Reloaded
Egypt bans Matrix Reloaded
The director of artistic censorship, Madkur Thabet, said: "Despite the high technology and fabulous effects of the movie, it explicitly handles the issue of existence and creation, which are related to the three divine religions, which we all respect and believe in." The movie "tackles the issue of the creator and his creations, searching the origin of creation and the issue of compulsion and free will," it said. "Such religious issues, raised in previous times, caused crises."
One Egyptian critic, Wael Abdel Fatah, said: "The press launched a campaign to stop showing the movie, saying that it reflects Zionist ideas, and promotes Jewish and Zionist beliefs."
So much for "respect and believe in", eh?
not exactly the pepsi challenge
Designer Drug Snuffs Cocaine High
A biotech company called Applied Molecular Evolution is working with a grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a drug made of a designer enzyme that blocks the effects of cocaine. The drug could also function as an antidote for overdoses. [...]
The researchers developed AME-359 by tweaking a protein to create an optimized version of an enzyme that's common and present in all humans. "It's a scavenger enzyme (that) goes around the body chewing up a bunch of stuff, but not particularly well," Bloch said. "We're engineering part of the human body to do something a lot better that it was originally meant to do." [...]
Cocaine addicts attempting to recover is not a big enough market for companies to justify pouring a huge amount of money into a drug that might help treat the problem, so the future of the AME-359 depends largely on whether the National Institutes of Health continue to fund the project. In the meantime, Applied Molecular Evolution has other drugs in its pipeline that address bigger moneymakers, such as cancer, arthritis and infection.
