Zombie Transformation

Japanese sewer system makes an excellent place to stage a Quake match

That's a normal-sized person on the floor of the place. The storm sewer system underground in Saitama, Japan, is one of the largest in the world and a steady tourist attraction.

Saitama has a population of about 1.2 million, making it the most populous cities in the prefecture. And situated where it is on the coast and Japan being prone to the sea-related disasters as it is, the storm control system is no joke.

Norwegian town engineers mirrors reflecting sunlight to shine into town during dark winter months

I know this isn't the first time this has been done, but the town of Rjukan, Norway, is installing mirrors on top of local mountains to reflect light into the town square during the sunless winter months of the far north.

I always love stories like this, because they show off the clever audacity of the crafty ape we call man.

A related concept is that of daylighting, where architectural measures are taken to treat buildings with natural sunlight where possible.

And I mentioned this has been done before; specifically, in Viganella, Italy, mirrors were constructed on local mountaintops to reflect sunlight into the city's valley, which, due to the depth of the valley, was resigned to shadows for so long in the year. Here's the trailer for the documentary about Viganella's mirror:

Oh, and the town of Rattenberg, Austria, also did the same thing, for the same reason as Rjukan.

Astounding engineering for a marble-moving toy

From the website woodgears.ca, creation of Paul Grundbacher of Switzerland.

Heaven's Gate cult initiation tape

Heaven's Gate was a UFO cult famous for their 1997 mass suicide, in which 39 members quietly laid down in bunk beds with plastic bags taped over their heads and died. They believed that they would launch themselves onto a flying saucer trailing the then-visible Hale-Bopp comet. At the time, I was working at the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada, on the night shift. We had an excellent view of the comet from the top floor of the plant, where we'd pause on break and stare at the blurry speck in the sky, wondering what madness possessed these people.

Well, I've recently discovered the entire tape series of cult leader Marshall Applewhite's video speeches to the sect members on YouTube. So spend some time listening to this guy ramble and see if maybe he couldn't hypnotise you into cutting your junk off and killing yourself (with $5.75 in your pocket, gotta remember the fare!):

That's just part one. There's the whole series here.

Oh, and let us not forget that the original website, maintained by the cult members who financed themselves through web development, is still up for anyone to view. The creepiest touch is the expanding 'red alert' GIF at the top. Did the cult members check the page every day for this signal? And when it appeared, that was their "boarding call"?

What it's like to crash on a monocycle.

This is a monocycle, which looks cool as blazes and fun to drive. But not so fun to wipe out in at the 2:56 mark. It bounces a few times, maybe not as bad as the equivalent crash on a motorcycle.

Monowheel vehicles have been an area of enthusiastic exploration by inventors. They go back to the 1800s even.

Stumbled on Star Wars in animated GIF form. The entire movie.

It appears to have been done entirely in MSPaint, to boot. What an artifact! Wonder how old this is? The domain shown at the end, www.barbelith.co.uk, is dead.

A Riotous Robot Roundup

Every now and then I like to touch base with the robotics field just to see if their inventions are getting either any more useful or any less creepy.

Einstein robot:

A female walking robot, because otaku boys need some dates:

That's a vast improvement over the Honda ASIMO from a few years back, which had a gait that suggested that it had just crapped its pants.

Finally, this other-worldly specimen in development:

Yeah, if you could stay out of my nightmares, that'd be great.

How long can life forms stay active in a sealed glass sphere?

The answer turns out to not only be fascinating, but a nice little cottage industry. Ecosphere is a company that sells just such an item: a glass globe with simple plant and animal life forms, which you just set in the window and let sunlight do the rest. It's basically a sealed, maintenance-free aquarium.

Here's a video of one in action:

From the site:

"Because the living organisms within the EcoSphere utilize their resources without overpopulating or contaminating their environment, the EcoSphere requires virtually no maintenance.
EcoSpheres have an average life expectancy of two years. However, it is not uncommon for shrimp populations to be thriving in systems as old as 7 years."

One wonders what the long-term implications of this would be. What if generations reproduced within the ecosphere - would they mutate? Could they evolve? Certainly, sealed systems in nature do tend to produce life forms with exaggerated characteristics. Could the system survive a global apocalypse? It needs sunlight energy, so we know it couldn't survive in space, but what if we included an artificial life source and launched it at habitable planets? Would the seed be planted for Earth-like, but adapted, life forms when we eventually go there?

The airplane junkyard

What, did you think old airplanes just get patched up and sent back in the sky? Silly you.

That's an aerial the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, just near Tucson, Arizona. Messy Nessy calls it a "boneyard" but unless you're deliberately invoking imagery from The Who's Tommy, I don't see the connection. It's a junkyard, for planes instead of cars.

If we fret every time a CRT monitor goes into a landfill, what happens when we run out of places to put all these planes?

Obligatory pendulum waves post

Even if you're seen it before, you can't get tired of watching it.

Need a shredded document restored? Hire a carpet weaver!

From the new York Times article 'Back Together Again':

"In its crudest form, the art of reconstructing shredded documents has been around for as long as shredders have. After the takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran in 1979, Iranian captors laid pieces of documents on the floor, numbered each one and enlisted local carpet weavers to reconstruct them by hand, said Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. 'For a culture that's been tying 400 knots per inch for centuries, it wasn't that much of a challenge,' he said. The reassembled documents were sold on the streets of Tehran for years."

The article details that shredding documents, just like encrypting electronic data, has arms races on either side to both conceal and reveal.

Perpetual motion museum - bent your mind watching people try to bend the laws of physics

"Hey, guys! I've invented a design for a 125% efficiency motor, and if you all fund my Kickstarter in return for a share of the profits in my new motor company, I can eventually build 500 of these things on a 3-ton scale and produce the world's first kinetic power generator! Who's in?"

"Hello? Anybody?"

Welcome to the world of The Museum of Unworkable Devices, a huge, engaging site documenting one of the most futile fields of study in engineering, the history-long quest for perpetual motion. Within, Donald E. Simanek serves as a James Randi of the engineering world, showing us endless attempts at overbalanced wheels, spinning magnets, wild stunts with hydraulic pressure, and machines which baffle the limits of the imagination as surely as they thumb their nose at Newton, Archimedes, and Einstein.

The site also works as an education in physics principles. For instance, did you know that the ball along the bottom ramp of this device reaches the goal first?

Be sure not to miss the FAQ, "Why won't my perpetual motion machine work?", where Simanek explains it all like you're 5. Ought to be required reading in high school science at least.

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Perpetual motion ties into a related fallacy emerging in computing.

I've recently investigated thoroughly the latest cult, sure to usurp Scientology as the most tenacious, known to some of you already as the "Singularity". The "Singularity" is the point at which computers are supposed to surpass human brains in intellect, at which point they will continue on their own to build even smarter computers, and so on ad infinitum until we're all living in the Matrix.

I'll stop for a paragraph so you can fight the urge to puke. Deep breathing helps.

The idea of  the Singularity (which has been "just a few years from now" since about the 1700s) and the bogus search for a perpetual motion machine is evident when you consider that computers do nothing until a human writes a program for them. And it's quite daunting for a human to write a program that causes a computer to be smarter than a human, since by definition the human is not smart enough to write it. And computers really are not smarter than humans at anything, they just appear to be in certain fields by virtue of brute force and speed - for instance, they beat you at chess by calculating six moves ahead from every possible move, including the ones we would eliminate through common sense. Like the would-be perpetual motion inventors, Singularitarians seek to boost the IQ of machines by making them smarter than they are so they can write themselves, just like overbalanced wheels seek to gain infinite momentum by making objects be heavier than they are so they can push themselves.

Every time, I pin down some Singularity zealot and ask them "How could you write a computer program that was smarter than yourself?" The answer is always "We'll have a computer program write the program!" I bounce back "OK, how do you write THAT program?" "We have the computer write that program, too!" Oh, I see. We'll write a program to write a program to write a program to overwhelm common sense, just like we'll trick those nasty old laws of physics by spinning a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel...

Gene Youngblood on Media (1977)

Just listening to Ubuweb Sound and caught the Gene Youngblood interview from 1977 (listen to it here). Was this guy a prophet, or what? Towards the end when he talks about the effects of the digital revolution on modern media, he sounds like he nailed everything we know now in 2013.

Blow your mind by listening to a media theorist who called quite a few shots.

Gene Youngblood on Wikipedia.

Youngblood's book, Expanded Cinema, in PDF.

Making an Easter Island statue walk

To test a theory as to how the natives of Easter Island could have transported the massive statues that are their claim to fame, scientists used a technique involving only technology available to the islanders at the time to move the statue along a road. Read more here at anthropolgy.net, which also tells of how the island was successfully settled and farmed thanks to islander's resourcefulness.

Trolling paranoid-schizophrenics for fun and profit

Hey kids! You, too, can protect yourself from dangerous mind-control wavey-ray-thingies with your AFDB (Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie).

And for identifying dangerous pockets of mind-control rays around town, there's the practice of psychalking. Learn and share this code, and the paranoid-schizophrenic community will be able to cooperate together to defeat mind--blowing psychotronic frequencies. Psychalking takes its methods from the similar practice of warchalking, the chalk marks around town identifying wifi hot spots.

While you're at it, you might want to download and install Mindguard - the software designed for remote mind-control detection and eradication. Available for Amiga and Linux (run Linux because THEY don't want you to!)

You'll find the Mindguard link to be especially, uh, enlightening.

Your word for the day...

Pop quiz: What is this man doing?

• Trying out for a part in David Lynch's Pinocchio.
• Using the latest model of inconspicuous weed vape.
• Playing a synthesized nose trumpet.
• Using an olfactometer.

Well, big surprise, it's the last one. From this site. It's kind of law enforcement equipment, like binoculars for your nose.

M.C. Escher's models made possible

The iconic artwork of M.C. Escher features impossible structures that defy geometry. But they're all too possible if you "think stretchy" and view them from only one angle...

Ever wondered what a solar eclipse looks like from space?

Well, that's just the kind of curiosity we strive to satisfy here at Mind--Blown. And here is your answer:

The crew of the ISS (International Space Station) gets to snap these whenever there's a good eclipse opportunity.

Chastity belts with teeth

From Sherman Sculpture...

"A powerful 500 volt electrical shock is delivered to anyone foolish enough to come into contact with the two carefully insulated electrodes.  The electrodes run the full length of this device giving protection from different angles of attack."

The idea here is to make an artistic anti-rape statement... however, in the more troubled areas of the world where a woman is simply not safe to walk the streets, period, the idea of an anti-rape device is taken more seriously and with a whole lot more practicality. Such is the case with the "Rape-Axe" device invented in (where else?) South Africa and unveiled in 2005.

What kind of animal is man?