Link roundup

1. Funny headline: "Homeopathy's Ineffectiveness Saves Lives." (As a demonstration, people ingested what should have been massive overdoses of "medication." But since the "medications" were homeopathic, they contained no active ingredients and had no ill effects.)

2. Even funnier, Zach Galifianakis's latest Between Two Ferns.

3. Conan O'Brien aired hilariously offensive mock Groupon commercials.

Bat Bombs

Here's a ten minute video about America's experiment with bat bombs in World War II. Wikipedia explains:

Bat bombs were bomb-shaped casings with numerous compartments, each containing a Mexican Free-tailed Bat with a small timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats which would then roost in eaves and attics. The incendiaries would start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper construction of the Japanese cities that were the weapon's intended target.

Developed by the United States during World War II, four biological factors gave promise to this plan. First, bats occur in large numbers (four caves in Texas are each occupied by several million bats). Second, bats can carry more than their own weight in flight (females carry their young—sometimes twins). Third, bats hibernate, and while dormant they do not require food or maintenance. Fourth, bats fly in darkness, then find secluded places (often in buildings) to hide during daylight.

The plan was to release bat bombs over Japanese cities having widely-dispersed industrial targets. The bats would spread far from the point of release due to the relatively high altitude of their release, then at dawn they would hide in buildings across the city. Shortly thereafter built-in timers would ignite the bombs, causing widespread fires and chaos. The bat bomb idea was conceived by dental surgeon Lytle S. Adams, who submitted it to the White House in January, 1942, where it was subsequently approved by President Roosevelt. Adams was recruited to research and obtain a suitable supply of bats.

Much more here.

UPDATE: Coincidentally, I just saw this:



Roger Dean's album art for "Nitro Function" by Billy Cox. Via these sites.

*Buy propaganda posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Absolutely bizarre story about parasitic albino redwood trees (they can't make chlorophyll, so they instead suck all their energy from another tree like a vampire). Via.

2. Tuition at Stanford Law, plus room and board, is over $70,000 per year.

3. How to remove personal information (such as location) from a photograph.

*Buy digital cameras at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Tura Satana tribute (safe for work).

2. One more thing you learned in school that is not true - - South American Army Ants don't devour large mammals, let alone people. Via.

3. My wonderful coupon ninja wife is quite diligent in entering contests. And it just paid off courtesy of My Coke Rewards:

You have won a PlayStation Move Prize Pack which will include: 1 PlayStation 3 system, 1 DualShock controller, 2 PlayStation Move motion controllers, 1 PlayStation Eye camera, 1 SingStar Dance game and 2 SingStar Microphones!

It never even occurred to me that I would one day own the system. Anyone have suggestions for games? I'm thinking Red Dead Redemption for me, and Marvel vs. Capcom to play with my boys.

Link roundup

1. Team Fortress 2 paper toy.

2. Techcrunch on AOL buying Huffington Post: "we bought the Huffington Post because it’s full of important women who buy things."

3. An argument for why alien life will probably be fairly similar throughout the universe.

Link roundup

1. Watch this uplifting video about Kevin Connolly - - he was born without legs, but has a great attitude, and is a fiend on three skis.

2. Pages 1, 2, and 3 of rejected (NSFW) Conan pitch by Paul Maybury for Dark Horse.

3. "Adult kidney stem cells found in fish." Sounds like something ominous from a Michael Crichton novel, but it's apparently very good news.

*Buy Conan Vol. 3: The Tower of the Elephant and Other Stories at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. NASA:

On November 26, 2010, Pakistani fishermen returned from a day at sea to report that a new island had emerged. The tiny dot of land was a mud volcano, and it was still visible on January 11, 2011, when the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite acquired the top image. The mud volcano was absent in a previous overpass on February 11, 2010, shown in the lower image.

There’s no need to change any maps, however; mud volcanoes have risen off the coast of Pakistan in the past and disappeared again within a few months, washed away by the waves and currents in the Arabian Sea. It is quite likely that this new volcano will meet the same fate. Indeed, a stream of pale brown sediment was snaking away from the volcano to the west on January 11, suggesting that erosion was already underway.

2. Whales have threesomes. Via.

3. Halo 3: ODST design progression. Via.

*Buy Halo toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Step by step tutorial for making a plush creature.

2. It's just "sink or float," but this Sesame Street science project interactive Youtube video is really well done. I hope they do a lot more. (I can't help but think that if Apple had its way, content like this would only be available as a $5 app.) Via.

3. Matt Hawkins created a Scooby-Doo paper toys for Arby's kid's meals.

*Buy Scooby Doo toys at eBay.

Video game where you control living organisms

"Stanford physicist Ingmar Riedel-Kruse has begun developing 'biotic games' involving paramecia and other living organisms. He hopes the games lead to advances in education and crowd-sourcing of laboratory research while helping to raise the level of public discourse on bio-related issues." Basically, the organisms are under magnification, and some sort of video game like screen is superimposed over the magnification. You control the game with a control pad that initiates releases electrical fields, which in turn make the organisms move. (If I understood it right.)

Creepy.

Via.

Link roundup

1. I don't know why anyone in the year 2010 would still choose to play Monopoly, but here's tips for how to win.

2. William Gibson on recent archaeological discoveries:

It's looking like our ancestors would jump anything vaguely hominid. Kind of great, really.

3. Gordon Ramsay reaps some karmic rewards.

*Buy board games at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Comment and win a Black Crowes poster.

2. The Larry Sanders Show: The Complete Series is $60 (instead of $150) Amazon. Via.

3. Stay away from those cell phone towers:

In the United Kingdom, the more mobile phone towers a county has, the more babies are born there every year. In fact, for every extra cell phone tower beyond the average number, a county will see 17.6 more babies. Is this evidence that cell phone signals have some nefarious baby-making effect on the human body?

Nope. Instead, it's a simple example of why correlation and causation should never be mistaken for the same thing.

*Buy concert posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. 60% off posters at Zazzle today with the code JINGLESALE42. I recommend Steve Thomas's store.

2. Congratulations to Noah Z. Jones on Fish Hooks' renewal:

Since its September premiere, Fish Hooks, which features 2D animation characters set against photo-real backgrounds, has unseated Disney TV Animation's other hit, Phineas and Ferb, as TV's No.1 animated series among kids 6-14.

3. "Over the past 13,500 years, humans in what is now America were subjected to dramatic climate changes: an ice age ended, rain increased, and vegetation changed completely. Now archaeologists say these peoples evolved new technologies to deal with it."

Link roundup

1. Kotaku says NBA 2K11's latest roster update dramatically reduced Tony Parker's "loyalty" ranking, and increased his "steal" ranking.

2. "Most Disney Drawings on eBay are forgeries."

3. "The radiation you get from body scanners is the same as what you get in two minutes in an airplane at 30,000 feet."

*Buy Tony Parker toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Adding gold nanoparticles could transform trees into street lights. Via.

2. Art contest with Last Exit to Nowhere t-shirts as the prize.

3. New specimen box by Alex CF.

Link roundup

1. A good argument for why there could be a zombie invasion.

2. Illustration of an astronaut being consumed by a tentacle monster.

3. The BBTS put a bunch more toys on sale for $5 and $10.

Link roundup

1. Lincoln Logs were invented in 1916 by John L. Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright. They were named for Frank (his middle name was actually Lincoln), and based on the basement of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which Frank designed. Via these sites.

2. Cool, simple surface tension experiment.

3. Drop a Raymond Chandler plot in William Gibson's Neuromancer world, and you get Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon. I enjoyed it enough to add the next two novels in the series to my wishlist. 526 pages of hard-boiled, vatgrown ninjas for $8 Amazon.

*Buy home science kits at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. NASA & Etsy Space Craft Contest. Via.

2. Tiny privacy curtain automatically chases people as they walk past a storefront window. Via.

3. "Fertility experts at the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine assisted in the very real birth of a healthy baby in May from an embryo that had been 'cryopreserved' for 19 years and 7 months." Via.

*Buy NASA patches at eBay.

Cyborg seal

Scientists are mapping the ocean floor in Antarctica by gluing sensors onto seals' heads.

*Buy mad scientist costumes at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. New Trading Places t-shirt on sale at Last Exit to Nowhere.

2. A professor in New York has been quoted as an expert in 150 articles in the NY Times by 78 separate authors over the past 20 years.

3. "Postdoc Vipul Bhrigu destroyed the experiments of a colleague in order to get ahead. It took a hidden camera to expose a surreptitious and malicious side of science."

*Buy science kits at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. Comment and win a craft book.

2. Cute spaceman paper toy.

3. "Scientists have coaxed miles of spider-like silk from a colony of transgenic silkworms, opening the door for large-scale production of super-strong, tough and flexible fibers." Via.