awesome duuuuuuude

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Because I don’t want to go to bed with two consecutive posts pertaining to Star Wars staring me in the face (no matter how good, or how nutty)…

A strand of DNA containing the digital data of all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a half-minute sound clip of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a photo and a science paper was announced a few days ago in an article from the journal Nature. So you could pretty much take everything information-wise accumulated during the course of your entire life – photos, videos, music, writings, financial information, medical files, an entire Blu-ray collection of movies and TV shows, computer games and porno – and put it inside a test tube. The DNA used in the research took two weeks to extract data from, but the read times are supposed to get shorter as the tech develops.

And earlier this month ...

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This man is hardcore. HARD-CORE, no two ways about it. MacGuyver ain’t got nuthin’ on this dude…

Hu Songwen was diagnosed with early kidney failure in 1993. A college student at the time, Hu went to a regular hospital for the next six years on a routine basis to have dialysis scrub his blood of the waste material that a healthy metabolism has no problem with passing out of the body.

But then the money ran out. And Hu could no longer afford those hospital visits.

So left with what he deemed no choice, Hu put together a homemade dialysis machine.

And his self-crafted dialysis has kept him alive for the past thirteen years!

Mail Online has plenty on the story of Hu Songwen, including a bunch more pictures and the technical details of how his machine works.

Gotta love ingenuity and initiative like that. Whenever I find ...

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Nearly sixty years ago, James Watson and Francis Crick figured out what DNA – that mega-long molecule containing the blueprints of organic life – looked like. All they had at the time was deduction through observation and x-ray crystallography (don’t worry, it took me awhile to learn how that worked, too!) to figure out the double-helix arrangement. But they had no way of actually seeing the darned thing.

Now for the first time, scientists have been able to visually image DNA using a novel technique with electron microscopy and a teeny tiny “bed of nails”. Hit the above link for more about how Enzo di Fabrizio and his fellow boffins at Italian Institute of Technology pulled it off.

As for the first real picture of DNA, behold:

Photo credit: Enzo di Fabrizio/Italian Institute of Technology

WOW! It’s the double-helix determined by Watson and Crick… but look at how tightly packed...

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It wouldn’t be at all surprising if trillions of dollars have been spent in the name of combating computer viruses, to say nothing of the countless hours of lost productivity and technical havoc that those malevolent digital prions have wrought.

And it all started thirty years ago this year, with a high school student’s innocent practical joke.

Rich Skrenta in 1989:
Blame HIM for having to buy all that
anti-virus software.

The Register has a fascinating in-depth interview with Rich Skrenta: the creator of Elk Cloner: now recognized as the first-ever computer virus. Skrenta, then fifteen years old in 1982, got a little more interested in the Apple II than might have been healthy for anyone, but it started benignly enough: writing his own text-based adventures and learning advanced coding. Then inspired by a string of “hysterically funny” pranks with disks he would loan to friends, he came up ...

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This honestly shouldn’t have to be said again, ‘cuz I’ve made enough fuss about it already. But even so…

Folks, I really, really can not help anyone to build, buy or otherwise acquire a moonshine still.

The hit TV series Moonshiners is in the midst of its second season and as last year, this blog is getting slammed with visits from good people looking for information about moonshining in general and about Popcorn Sutton in particular. I’m very honored that The Knight Shift has become such a popular resource for this aspect of Appalachian culture and the most famous practitioner of the art.

But, ummmmm… this sincerely is all that I can do at the moment, friends and neighbors. The moment that such information does become readily available, I’ll not only post where you can buy stills but I’ll publish blueprints and plans for them too! Hey, I wanna see ...

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Because there simply is no such thing as too much Star Wars…

A dude named Chris Lee has assembled a crack team of volunteers to bring their collective hydrospanners together to build… a full-sized model of the Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars movies.

From FullScaleFalcon.com, the official site of The Full Scale Millennium Falcon Project: “This is a quest to build the ultimate Star Wars prop: a 1:1 scale ESB/ANH hybrid Millennium Falcon with complete, correctly scaled interior. Yes, I have completely lost my mind, just like most of my friends and family say. Except for my close Star Wars fan friends, who say ‘cool, can I help?’.”

Yes, the interior as well! Does that mean they’ve figured out what a “fresher” is supposed to look like?! We’ve already gotten to see the bathrooms in the Star Trek and Babylon 5 franchises: surely they have water closets ...

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Meet “Hobo Joe”!

That’s the pastor of the church I’ve been going to, in his clown/hobo getup at the beginning of yesterday’s worship service. I forget what “H.O.B.O” is an acronym for but it’s something to do with kicking off the annual general fund drive.

Joe is quite a cool fella! Incidentally, I offered him the use of my Jedi Knight costume if he ever wanted to use it. A sermon preached by “Jedi Joe”? I bet a wazoo of people would dig that 🙂...

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Behold the 8 Weirdest Real-Life Science Fiction Political Ads as assembled by popular geeky/techy website io9.

And yes, that school board commercial of mine from 2006 is on the list.

But check out this ad – also inspired by Star Wars – that West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin aired when he successfully ran for re-election two years ago…

Hey, Manchin shot a TIE Fighter out of the sky with a rifle! That’s a hella lot better shootin’ than the Imperial Stormtroopers ever did.

But John Waite of Spokane, Washington blows away everybody with what he did when he ran for city council. The comic book store owner campaigned while wearing a full set of space marine armor from the StarCraft computer game series! Nevermind Spokane City Council: we should send Waite to Washington D.C.: that whole town is overrun with worse than the Zerg ever were.

Blast on over to ...

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