Similar Posts
Anti Monkey Butt
Sometimes words fail me…
With Calamine Powder
Sweat Absorber and Friction Fighter
Anti Monkey Butt® Powder is specially formulated to absorb sweat and minimize frictional skin discomfort. Helps to keep you dry and comfortable. Ideal for butt busting activities such as motorcycling, bicycling, horseback riding, truck driving, hiking, hockey, football, and baseball.
Indoors or outdoors, work or play, or on occasions when you sit on your butt all day. Don’t let your buns get red. Use Anti Monkey Butt ® Powder instead!
Iron Man, Military Insect Spies
Iron Man was wonderful, every bit of what the trailers promised–adventure, humor, and a huge dose of gosh-wow. Of course, the idea of military exoskeletons are not new. It’s been in science fiction for a long time. More recently, Dan Brown used the idea in his thriller Act of War. In fact, if you think about it, it becomes clear that airplanes, ships, and tanks are all exoskeletons. So this is all old hat. But when did we ever need a brand-spanking new idea to have a wonderful and new story? What’s important is what the do with the idea–the characters, problem, plot, and setting. And Iron Man does a wonderful job of imagining new twists on all these parts of story.
*
In other news, it appears the future is not so far away. The military is going to be using robot bugs for recon.
British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives.
Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby.
Soldiers will carry the robots into combat and use a small tracked vehicle to transport them closer to their targets.
Then they would swarm into the building and relay images back to the soldiers’ hand-held or wrist-mounted computers, warning them of any threats inside.
I’m all for saving lives and projecting power while we’re doing it. And robo spies are just cool. Except, of course, when they’re used against you…
Humm, zing!
The Little Man Rocks!
2’9″ and 9kg–this dude is as small as a Hobbit and weighs in like a Scottish Terrier.
Capture the zing!
Australian Uses Oil Background to Harness the Seas
This is a fantastic article summarizing some key issues with wave energy and the solution Alan Burns, an oil bloke from Australia, has come up with. It appears he’s taking lessons from his expertise in off-shore drilling (it’s safer to work on the bottom of the sea) and applying it to wave energy. It’s a must read.
http://www.popsci.com/kalee-thompson/article/2008-09/burning-tide
No ideas yet on how to use this in a story. If you have any, post in the comments section.
Wait, what if our hero is an inventor like Mr. Burns? Naw, what if we actually do go to the seas? It seems like a no-brainer. So we go to the seas. And our hero is the guy who is replacing parts. Humm, maybe. Of course, if our power generation is out there in the sea, then a perfect target for a terrorist is the pipe pumping the water in. Or what if they find a sea wreck while installing a huge one of these? And would the ocean floor suddenly become real estate? What kind of agent would sell it? Hummm
Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin + Interview
I have read few books more interesting than Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.
In it she describes her world of autism and how it helped her a perspective into animals unlike any other expert in the field. She can literally see what we block out. It’s part of what helped her make a huge impact on the meat packing industry.
And it’s had an impact on her. When she was visiting her grandparents once in Arizona, she saw a squeeze chute in operation on a ranch. She saw the cattle calm, for the most part, in the chute. “Watching those cattle calm down,” she says, “I knew I needed a squeeze chute of my own.” So when she got back home she built a human-sized one with the help of her teacher. “I got through my teenage years thanks to my squeeze machine and my horses.”
Grandin is not a vegetarian activitst (she eats meat herself) or a brutal slayer. She has taken the middle ground between the fantatics that want to prevent the consumption of all meat, on one hand, or totally disregard the life of animals on the other. She writes, she says, “because I wish animals could have more than just a low-stress life and a quick, painless death. I wish animals could have a good life, too, with something useful to do. I think we owe them that.”
Temple has dozens and dozens of insights into animals, which she shares here. You’ll learn about rapist roosters and the problem of one-trait breeding, whether prediators find it “fun to kill a groundhog” (yes, she says, they do), whether animals have true cognition, and so many other things it’s impossible to list them here. I was fascinated on every page. If you have anything to do with animals, you’re going to LOVE this book.
Get the book. Read it. In the meantime, watch a 27 minute interview of Temple by Doug Fabrizio on Utah NOW. I caught this on TV flipping through the channels and couldn’t look away. This is a fascinating interview of a fascinating woman.
Source:Temple Grandin on Utah NOW
