Isn't this how Khan Noonien Singh came about?
"Superior ability breeds superior ambition."...
Showing posts with label what could possibly go wrong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label what could possibly go wrong. Show all posts
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Large Hadron Collider could open up other universes this week (this may not end well)
In the process of investigating a good idea (said process being one that even Stephen Hawking said could destroy the Earth), those wacky boffins in Switzerland are preparing to generate in excess of 5 trillion volts of juice with their Large Hadron Collider in the next few days. The result could be the creation of miniatures black holes. But more than that: it...
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
For the children: "trashcan cameras" and location-tracking chips
In the wake of American schoolkids rebelling against the federal government's new school lunch rules, a school district in Florida is considering installing video cameras on its school cafeteria trashcans so it can monitor and determine if students are throwing away their vegetables.Meanwhile the students of Northside Independent School District in Texas are being told to wear ID badges containing location-tracking radio chips on penalty of "suspension,...
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Ma Chalmers lives, and she's destroying school lunch
Please tell me that isn't a soybean that Michelle Obama is extolling the virtues of in that photo.The current First Lady has somehow become the nation's Food Czar, with a capacity of recommending, implementing and apparently enforcing her own policies on the country. No other First Lady has enjoyed such power. Not even the much-beloved Nancy Reagan, who channeled the massive...
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Swedish dude gets arrested for attempting nuclear reactions... in his apartment kitchen!
There's a chap named Richard Handl in southern Sweden who is right curious about things like physics and nuclear chemistry. So he, ummmm... attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his flat's kitchen.But it can't honestly be said that he had any nefarious motives, because Richard has a blog set up chronicling all the steps that he's taken on his lil' adventure into...
Friday, July 15, 2011
Scientists punch hole in time to cloak stuff in
Wasn't this the kind of thing that the DHARMA Initiative was playing with on that mysterious Island? We all know how great that turned out, huh?Some thinkin' dudes at Cornell University have torn a hole in time itself. The result is a "time cloak" that hides events from being observed by the rest of the universe.From the article at Gizmodo...The process relies on similar...
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Germination of the Bhut jolokia has begun!
Awright, I've been putting this off for too long now. I knew that this day would come. Not gonna run and hide anymore. Here, live or die, I will make my stand.This afternoon I began the process of growing my can of Bhut jolokia.And as I said when I first wrote about coming into possession of this stuff back in February, "This is either one of the bravest things that I will...
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Chris set to tempt fate with... REAL BHUT JOLOKIA!
This is either one of the bravest things that I will have ever attempted... or it is the stoopidest of my entire life (which could be snuffed out by this stuff).Back in December I posted about my filmmaking partner "Weird" Ed Woody passing along the link where you can purchase Bhut jolokia for your very own! Why did Ed tell me about ThinkGeek's Grow Your Own World's Hottest...
Monday, December 20, 2010
Grow your own Bhut jolokia!
"Weird Ed" Woody, my filmmaking partner, is quietly attempting to murder me.That's the only reason why I can conceive of his sending me this link to ThinkGeek's product page for the Grow Your Own World's Hottest DIY Pepper kit... because Weird Ed is well aware of my fascination with spicy hot food and he knows that I'm not going to pass up on the chance to grow my own Bhut...
Monday, April 26, 2010
New Coke: 25 years since big biz's biggest bomb
I'm still not entirely persuaded that this wasn't a planned stunt. Like last week's to-do about the 4G-equipped iPhone that some Apple engineer, ahem, "drunkenly" left in a bar. Sure got the Intertubes abuzz about it, aye? So yeah, mark me down as being in the "planned marketing conspiracy" column on that one.Nearly a full quarter-century earlier, something similar happened...
Friday, August 07, 2009
Playing HALF-LIFE... with REAL guns!
The techies at Waterloo Labs in Austin, Texas are putting "shooter" into the first-person shooter game... literally! Using accelerometers, a big sheet of drywall and computer triangulation, they've made it possible to play a FPS like Half-Life with actual firearms and other physical weapons!Behold the carnage...I'd love to play Doom like this, but knowing me I'd just wind up chainsawing the drywall to pieces not long into Episode 1 Mission 2 ...
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
1 in 4 Americans are texting while driving
According to a new poll, 1 in 4 Americans are apparently text messaging while driving.I don't agree with laws prohibiting talking into a cellphone while driving, although I do believe that's something that individual drivers should make a determination about on their own. But texting is completely different. It demands an attention that talking doesn't require.Plainly put folks: it should be just common sense not to text while operating a vehicle....
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Swedish robot attempts homicide
A Swedish company won't be prosecuted but must pay $3000 in fines after one of its factory robots nearly killed a man. From the story...A worker was about to fix a broken rock-lifting robot. He'd shut the power off, but the machine suddenly woke up and grabbed the man by the head."The man was very lucky. He broke four ribs and came close to losing his life," prosecutor Leif Johansson told the TT news agency.Perhaps a review of Asimov's Three Laws...
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Artificial life possible "within five years"
Many scientists are predicting that synthetic life is going to be a reality within the next five to ten years. Geneticists have already created an artificial ribosome (a cell structure responsible for protein manufacturing) and the consensus is that a full-blown cell is just around the corner.Color me "meh". I'd love to read the journals on what's going into this effort. It's one thing to replicate structure and function. But real life is much...
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Garage-based amateurs now playing with genetic engineering
It's not likely that anyone will clone-up a velociraptor, but the Associated Press reports about the growing trend of "do it yourself genetic engineering" that a lot of people are experimenting with in the spare rooms and garages of their homes. Using equipment found on Craigslist and eBay, these burgeoning biotechnologists are involved with everything from working on melamine-sensitive...
Monday, December 01, 2008
Pentagon wants 20,000 soldiers violating Posse Comitatus (and some of them will be robots!)
Couple of items that I found in the news today, that juxtaposed together make for a rather disturbing scenario...First, the Pentagon wants 20,000 soldiers deployed inside the United States by 2011 to complement local law enforcement agencies. A move that from what I'm reading comes perilously close to blatantly violating the Posse Comitatus Act.And as if that isn't bad enough, the Pentagon is also working with a British scientist to create robot...
Saturday, April 12, 2008
U.S. robots with machine guns threaten human American soldiers
From The Register comes more evidence that giving a gun to a robot is a very, very bad idea...US war robots in Iraq 'turned guns' on fleshy comrades-Kill-droid rebellion thwarted... this timeBy Lewis PagePublished Friday 11th April 2008 10:10 GMTGround-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters...
