The eternal quest to figure out who’s a deviant and who’s not, and who things they are, continues. One research team adds to its impressive body of body work work: “Body Art, Deviance, and American College Students,” Jerome R. Koch, Alden E. Roberts, Myrna L. Armstrong and Donna C. Owen, Social Science Journal, (article in […]
Month: January 2010
Recycing: office-to-loo converter
Investigator Ura Daniels recommends this DigInfo News report: At Eco-Products 2009, Oriental Co., Ltd. exhibited a revolutionary recycling machine called White Goat, which makes toilet paper from shredded paper. White Goat also has a shredding machine in it…. The dry paper is wound into finished toilet rolls, which emerge from the outlet one at a […]
History of homeopathic overdose
The vast archives of homeopathic literature do describe — once, in an 1864 book (see below for detail) — the danger of homeopathic medicine overdose. We mention this as background to today’s worldwide demonstrations — volunteers take massive amounts of homeopathic medicines (medicines from which all the medicine has been removed) to demonstrate that those […]
Cepalopod beak guidebook
The British Antarctic Survey has put the entire Cephalopod Beak Guide for the Southern Ocean online, downloadable free (one entry, more mysterious than most, is reproduced below). The official description: This is an up-to-date guide to identify the squid and octopods beaks, including 3-D computer images, making this book a extremely useful tool to marine […]
Pres praises pork
A 1983 medical report about Mexico [see details below] conceivably helps explain this January 28, 2010 AFP report (in the Windsor Star) from Argentina: Eating pork is at least as effective as popping a Viagra pill to spice up your sex life, according to Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, who claims to have tested the theory. […]
Coroners & Body Part Sales: Perspective
Some historical perspective for the case of the New Orleans coroner whose election opponent is accusing him of selling body parts: “Whose body is it anyway?: trading the dead poor, coroner’s disputes, and the business of anatomy at Oxford University, 1885-1929,” Elizabeth T. Hurren, Bull Hist Med, Winter 2008;82(4):775-818. The author, at Wellcome Trust Centre […]
Coroner as Frankenstein in NO
Forensic science, in a manner of speaking, is all the rage in In New Orleans. One candidate for coroner — Dwight McKenna — is running this TV ad. It accuses the other candidate, Frank Minyard, the incumbent, of being a Dr. Frankenstein who sells body parts. (Thanks to Rose Fox and TPM for bringing this […]
Don’t mess with Bond
What are the survival prospects for female characters in the James Bond movies? A new research project from Cleveland State University and Kent State University performed a quantitative content analysis for 195 female characters in 20 out of the 22 Bond films – uncovering in the process some clearcut predictors of their survivability. “End-of-film mortality […]
Overhanded Imaging
“Perhaps one of your readers can solve this mystery. This drawing is in two of three copies I own (yes, I am a book collector) of the 1895 book 400 Versuche aus dem Gebiete der Mechanik, Akustik, Wärme, Optik, Elektricität. Uebungsbuch für den Experimentirkasten, Meiser and Mertig, editors, (4th edition, Dresden, Selbstverlag). My third copy […]
Surveillance: Tracking multiple fruit flies
The science and engineering of tracking multiple missiles (which tend to move in fairly predictable paths) pales compared to this advance in surveillance: “Multi-camera Realtime 3D Tracking of Multiple Flying Animals“, Andrew D. Straw, Kristin Branson, Titus R. Neumann, Michael H. Dickinson, 2010, arXiv:1001.4297v1. (Thanks to Ben Stromquist.)