Anyway.

Saturday was my birthday! I received very nearly a hundred birthday greetings and well-wishes, which I am totally floored by. Thank you all so much.

Audra got me a present! It is a toothbrush!

Let me tell you about this toothbrush!

It is the ORAL-B TRIUMPH PROFESSIONAL CARE 9900, MOTHERFUCKERS.

Do not mock this toothbrush, it is SERIOUS BUSINESS! Witness this FLOSS-ACTION HEAD!

IT MEANS BUSINESS. Does YOUR toothbrush come with this much stuff?

I DON’T THINK SO! Does YOUR toothbrush have a base station that wirelessly monitors your use of the oscillating-rotating technology-enhanced brush using the 2.4 GHz ISM band?

IT IS UNLIKELY! Does YOUR toothbrush include a separate ProWhite polishing brushhead and a massage mode for optimum gum health?

If it does, you are the proud owner of a ORAL-B TRIUMPH PROFESSIONAL CARE 9900 and I would like to meet with you regularly to discuss how much better our toothbrushes are than everyone elses! Do you remember life before the ORAL-B TRIUMPH PROFESSIONAL CARE 9900? I hardly do. Can you imagine, MANUALLY moving the bristles around on the end of a stick like some kind of barbarian?

Neither can I.

So, thank you, Audra, for this amazing birthday gift! Thank you for elevating me over all of those people I once considered ‘friends’ to the lofty position I now occupy, which I do not think is hyperbolic to describe as ‘godlike’.

“This is Chauncy Morlan, and around 100 years ago his obesity was so shocking that people would pay money to see him as he toured the country as a circus “fat man”. I find the unremarkableness of his size to be a telling sign of how we’ve pushed the limits of obesity in the past 100 years.”

(Related, via MeFi: Weighing 607 pounds, Bruce Snowdon was a sideshow fat man from 1977 to 2003, billed as “Harold Huge”. His death on Nov. 9, 2009, at the age of 63 marks the end of a long tradition dating back centuries.)

Particle physicists around the world are looking forward to a potentially rich harvest of new physics as the LHC begins its first long run at an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.

“It’s a great day to be a particle physicist,” said CERN1 Director General Rolf Heuer. “A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends.”

Shine on you crazy bastards.

As it turns out, you are!

The present study investigated voters’ testosterone responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election. 183 participants provided multiple saliva samples before and after the winner was announced on Election Night. The results show that male Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome testosterone levels, whereas testosterone levels dropped in male John McCain and Robert Barr voters (losers).

Wired has an oversimplified assessment of the study’s results, but the findings are clear:

Male voters exhibit biological responses to the realignment of a country’s dominance hierarchy as if they participated in an interpersonal dominance contest. [...] Moreover, since the dominance hierarchy shift following a presidential election is stable for 4 years, the stress of having one’s political party lose control of executive policy decisions could plausibly lead to continued testosterone suppression in males.

“Any girl can be glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Hedy was a successful actress as a young teenager, but her big breaththrough came in the controversial Bohemian (as in, from Bohemia) film, Ecstasy. It was 1933, and people were excited and outraged about a skinny dipping scene; the most outstanding thing about this movie, however, is that it was the first studio film to have a sex scene in it — and the first to depict a female orgasm.

The movie is special not just for its prurient content (and it should be said, the camera never leaves the actors’ faces when things get heavy), but for being an powerful study of a young woman’s sexual empowerment. It was released a year before the Hays Code crackdown began, and so there’s no moral play at work. No virgin/whore complex to feed, no pretense that women live identically sexless lives, who only acquiesce to their husbands after shopping trips (while thinking about their kitchen duties the entire time).

After Ecstasy’s release, Hedy married an controlling Austro-fascist arms manufacturer thirty years her senior who forbade her from making movies. He would take her with him to his business meetings (where military technology and highly technical problems were debated), and force her to entertain at his parties (which Mussolini often attended).

In 1937, after having enough of his crap (and after being forced by her husband to sleep with Hitler to get an arms contract), Hedy dressed up for a ‘party’, drugged her husband, and left Austria (with all of her magnificently expensive jewelry).

Over the next 10 years she made close to twenty films, had two children, and developed a backstage reputation as a voracious bisexual (second only to her sometimes-lover, Marlon Brando). In her time, she was reportedly involved with Frank Sinatra, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Johnny Carson, Howard Huges, Errol Flynn, JFK, and even Charlie Chaplin.

“I don’t think that anyone would call me a lesbian, it’s just that I seem to be the type that other women get queer ideas about.”

More importantly, however, she also did this.

U.S. Patent #2292387

That is the design drawing for her 1942 invention of Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum communication, upon which all WiFi, CDMA cell networks, and countless other technologies rely. It went like this: Radio controlled torpedoes are more accurate than ‘dumb’ torpedoes, but it’s easy to jam the frequency that the torpedo control channel is on. By rapidly changing the frequency that the control channel was transmitted on, you prevent the adversary from jamming your signals.

Working with experimental composer George Anthiel (who once composed a symphony that required 16 player pianos), she placed a modified piano roll in the torpedo and the controller plane, allowing them to switch frequencies in sync with each other. Unfortunately, it was nearly two decades later before her the importance and potential of her invention was realized. The Navy of the time did not take seriously a device invented by a woman that ran on musical equipment, and suggested to Hedy that she could best support the war effort elsewhere. She did, once raising $7,000,000 in a single event where she sold kisses for fifty grand each. (When honored by the EFF in 1997 for her contribution of spread spectrum technology, she was quoted as saying “It’s about time.”)

Her later years were noteworthy for her lavish parties, five husbands, two shoplifting arrests, a star on Hollywood’s walk of fame, and a Boeing recruitment ad featuring her as a woman of science, with no mention of her film career.

So, here’s to you, Hedy Lamarr. You kicked ass, you took names, you did what you wanted, who you wanted, when you wanted, and you changed the world.

“Jack Kennedy always said to me, Hedy, get involved. That’s the secret of life. Try everything. Join everything. Meet everybody. “

Yet, despite his achievement, and being one of only five people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, Borlaug was hardly a household name: a 1997 Atlantic profile described him as the “forgotten benefactor of humanity.”

(Post by NotMyselfRightNow, via MeFi.)

You know what’s even awesomer? NUCLEAR FUCKING FUSION.

Do you know what happens when you put the two of them together? MOTHERFUCKING LASER-BASED INTERNAL CONFINEMENT FUSION, that’s what!

That’s where you take 192 big fucking lasers and put them in a room like this:

…and then point them all at this:

…and you make it so they all hit that little fucking ball at the EXACT SAME FUCKING TIME and heat the thing up to 100,000,000 ˚C.

THAT is what fucking happens.

The National Ignition Facility in California broke the one-megajoule barrier a few weeks ago, and appear to be well on the way to the first energy-positive fusion lab ever.

Godspeed, you crazy bastards.

More: missiles, warheads, bombers, submarines, command centers, new warhead designs.

For bigger and/or higher-quality copies of any of the watermarked photographs, just fiddle with the URL a bit.

(Via MeFi.)

The distinctive hexagonal shell, long legs, and claws of this delicate-looking feather star crab help it blend in with its host, the crinoid or feather star.

The crab dwells in the center of the feather star, where it grabs food particles from its filter-feeding host’s arms.

Over 150 scientists from 20 countries participated in the survey of Espiritu Santo in the South Pacific, scouring caves, mountains, reefs, shallows, and forests collecting species. Out of over 10,000 species collected, the researchers are predicting that as many as 2000 may be previously unknown to the scientific community.

More photos and info:  Crabs! Not-crabs!

(via Zooillogix)

Imagine a pipe as wide as a state and as long as half the Earth. Now imagine that this pipe is filled with hot gas moving 50,000 kilometers per hour. Further imagine that this pipe is not made of metal but a transparent magnetic field. You are envisioning just one of thousands of young spicules on the active Sun. Pictured above is perhaps the highest resolution image yet of these enigmatic solar flux tubes. Spicules dot the above frame of solar active region 10380 that crossed the Sun in 2004 June, but are particularly evident as a carpet of dark tubes on the right. Time-sequenced images have recently shown that spicules last about five minutes, starting out as tall tubes of rapidly rising gas but eventually fading as the gas peaks and falls back down to the Sun. These images also indicate that the ultimate cause of spicules is sound-like waves that flow over the Sun’s surface but leak into the Sun’s atmosphere.

Madness.

Pixels.

HUZZAH!

Virgin Atlantic Airways have since announced that they will license the SSO technology to create a new commercial suborbital airline, to be called Virgin Galactic.

These are good times to be a geek.

Like right now.

The first private flight to leave Earth is in the air as we speak. SpaceShipOne is the result of countless millions of dollars, and years of research spearheaded by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. He started his own space program. And it’s paying off.

As I type this, SpaceShipOne is travelling towards a height of 100 kilometers away from Earth — officially out of our atmosphere, which will make pilot Mike Melvill the first man to fly out of earth’s atmosphere in a private spaceship.

Take note. These men (both male and female) are about to change the way we look at space, and what we can do with it. They are opening the door for everything science fiction has been promising us for the last hundred years.

(Who would have thought we would owe it all to Microsoft?)

A report released by the Center for Biological Diversity reveals that in the first 20 years of the Endangered Species Act, 114 different species have vanished from the face of the earth forever. From the report:

While only 19% of the extinctions involved species on the endangered species list, a full 81% were not on the list. Lacking legal protection, recovery plans, critical habitat, and recovery funding, these species went extinct due a lack of commitment and attention. “Virtually all of these species could have been saved if the Endangered Species Act was properly managed, fully funded and shielded from political pressure,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity and one of three authors of the paper. “Instead they were sacrificed to bureaucratic inertia, political meddling, and lack of leadership.”

The American Department of Justice has announced a massive worldwide bust of copyright infringers:

Operation Fastlink is the culmination of four separate undercover investigations simultaneously being conducted by the FBI, coordinated by the FBI Cyber Division, and the U.S. Department of Justice, coordinated by the Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) of the Criminal Division. As a result of Fastlink, over 120 total searches have been executed in the past 24 hours in 27 states and in 10 foreign countries. Foreign searches were conducted in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden as well as Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Operation Fastlink is the largest multi-national law enforcement effort ever directed at online piracy. Nearly 100 individuals worldwide have been identified by the investigation to date, many of whom are the leaders or high-level members of various international piracy organizations. As the investigations continue, additional targets will be identified and pursued.

Since last monday, the events of Doonesbury have taken a drastic turn. B.D., who we all know and love (the guy with the helmet) has been injured while serving in Iraq. He lost his helmet, and his leg. For those of you who don’t follow Trudeau’s work, this is A Big Deal. B.D. has been around for as long as the strip has, even serving in Vietnam during the 70s. He’s always worn a helmet, signifying that he’s a team player — the team itself is mostly irrelevant, what’s mattered is that he supports it. The decision to maim a thirty-five year old character didn’t come lightly, I’m sure, and the removal of his helmet alongside the injury is in no small way communicating Trudeau’s feelings about the overseas war.

(You may dismiss it as a silly cartoon gimmick, but Trudeau has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, and President Gerald Ford once stated that “There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the print media, and Doonesbury – not necessarily in that order.”)

Oblique view of the Himalayas, looking south from over the Tibetan Plateau.

At first glance, one might think that the image looks like a picture taken from an airplane, until you remember that the summits of Makalu [left (8,462 meters; 27,765 feet)] and Everest [right (8,850 meters; 29,035 feet)] are at the heights typically flown by commercial aircraft. The full mosaic covers over 130 kilometers (80 miles) of the Himalayan front, and could never be seen this way from an airplane.

If you live anywhere near Virginia (where the rocket launch is taking place), keep your eyes open, and have a camera nearby.