Ghost Pepper
Take the world’s hottest peppers, rub them in your eyes and then eat 51 of them in world record attempt. Mere mortals blanch at it.
The Naga Jolokia is the hottest pepper in the world, at 1,000,000 Scoville Units. One seed from a Naga Jolokia can sustain intense pain sensations in the mouth for up to 30 minutes before subsiding. Imagine what eating an entire pepper will do? One intrepid ESPN reporter finds out.
Hot Sauce Blog = Teh Awesome.
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It Ain’t Easy
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Make It, Fly It
It has lately been popular to make stuff. But few have made an airplane. A great variety of homebuilt/amateur experimental aircraft can be made, some speedy, some aerobatic, some quite popular. Some folks have even made a blimp.
Before building, it would be wise to consult a professional. Powerplant options include an air cooled Volkswagen engine, diesel, and conventional small aircraft engines.
As an alternative to starting from scratch, there is restoration.
Plus, airplanes can be a fun way to fly somewhere (though some routes require advance preparation).
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Wait… No Pirate Vs. Ninja?!
Haven’t you always secretly wondered what would happen if a ninja accidentally stumbled into,
say, Bill and Ted’s time
traveling Phone Booth and ended up somewhere around 7th century BC, only to
come face-to-face with a feisty Spartan?
Have you not pondered what would happen if you locked up an Apache with a Gladiator
inside some sort of 21st century battle
dome? Are you frustrated because you feel like there’s nobody doing proper
scientific studies to see what would happen when you pit two historically violent warriors that
could have never actually met in real life? Worry no more people – I present to
you Spike TV‘s newest offering
– Deadliest Warrior!
The
show basically goes like this; you take two crazy fighters who, previous to the
show, have only been pitted against one another in heated debates between young
men in line for the midnight showing of the newest X-Men movie (or really
awesome drunk people). The show’s ‘Host, Simulation Consultant, and Blogger’, Max Geiger brings in experts
representing each warrior. The experts bring in weapons that are historically
accurate which are then tested on a variety of dummies that are stuffed with
SCIENCE! The data from said SCIENCE! all goes into a computer simulation based
on an unreleased commercial game engine by these guys. Not just the SCIENCE!, which
is actually pretty cool (ballistics gel, pig carcasses, high speed photography),
but also, as Max aptly put it:
“The simulation’s inputs include real world
scientific data gathered by one of my co-hosts, Geoff Desmoulin, who is getting
his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering. Our number crunching is balanced out by Dr.
Armand Dorian, an ER doctor who keeps our work firmly grounded in the actual
trauma our tests cause.”
The reviews are in! Variety
seems to feel it might be possibly the stupidest show ever, appealing only to
the lowest common denominator! Newsarama
was a little nicer, pointing out that there are some people on the show trying
to make it as scientific as it can possibly be, while also having a great time.
Either way, do you care? Don’t you want to watch a Viking fight a Samurai? Or a
Pirate against a Knight? You can apparently only watch the latest episode on the
website, here. Also,
looking forward on the Wikipedia, it does look like the show might slip-slide
from whatever tenuous grasp they have on ideas for fights as they start doing
shows about William
Wallace versus Shaka Zulu or finally, the IRA versus the Taliban.
I have only one
thought. How could they have NOT had a Pirate
versus Ninja episode? FAIL!
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The Biology Textbook That Wished It Was A Progressive Rock Album
This
is your biology textbook. This is your
biology textbook on drugs.
Any questions?
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Secrets of the Phallus
Why
is the penis shaped like that? [T]he human penis is actually an
impressive “tool” in the truest sense of the word, one manufactured by nature
over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. You may be surprised to
discover just how highly specialized a tool it is. Furthermore, you’d be amazed
at what its appearance can tell us about the nature of our sexuality.
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Act Now! Supplies are Limited!
Raptiva, an
immunosuppressant used to treat severe plaque psoriasis, caught
the attention of the FDA as triggering the activation of the John Cunningham virus. Present in 70%
to 90% of human beings, the virus, once activated, inflames the white matter of
the brain – a condition known as progressive multifocal
leukoencephalitis (PML) – which has no cure and is almost always fatal.
Although the FDA recognized the link between Raptiva and PML last autumn, it
wasn’t until last month that Genentech, the manufacturers of
the drug, issued a voluntary
withdrawal, and even then, are still allowing people who use Raptiva to continue
to get refills until June 8.
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Naked Swedish Men and the “Dance of the Crispbread”
“Dance of the Crispbread” to ancient Swedish folk songs such as “What
What In The Butt” and “Kung Fu Fighting.” They use the bread to cover
what we can only imagine are their already impressive manhoods.
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The most inappropriate logo of all-time
In the 70s, this picture stood for God’s children. Now it just stands
for boys giving priests a good ol’ beej. Yes, this is an actual logo
designed in 1973 for the Catholic Church’s Archdiocesan Youth
Commission. It even won an award from the Art Directors Club of Los
Angeles.
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Woman sends Stripper to 10 year school reunion.
Andrea Wachner sent an erotic dancer, named Cricket, to impersonate her
at her ten year high school reunion. The dancer wore a hidden ear piece
to stay in communication with Wachner. A film crew was on the scene
pretending to film a documentary about artists, including Wachner. Of
course, they were really documenting Wachner’s brilliant prank. When
she posted clips to YouTube, some of her classmates weren’t too happy
they’d been duped. Now Wachner has a manager shopping her story as a
reality show or feature film. From ABC News:
Cricket told the reunion attendees that she’d had
reconstructive surgery and also suffered from amnesia. It wasn’t
completely unbelievable, because some had already heard that the
real-life Wachner was in an accident after high school — her car was
totaled and she had been injured, but she had never suffered from
amnesia.Most of them had not seen or talked to Wachner since high
school, but many found her new profession suspect: Cricket as Andrea
said she was working as a stripper to help pay her graduate school
tuition.Daniel Wolowicz, 32, who had been an acquaintance of Wachner’s in high school, said he was immediately suspicious.
“She was just so different. You have to understand the
community we had come from,” he said. “Everyone was questioning who
this person was.“I had asked her a very specific question about seeing her at
a bat mitzvah when I was 15 years old,” he said. When Cricket answered
his question correctly, Wolowicz said he assumed it was Andrea or
“someone else who had been given a lot of information.”It would be awhile, however, before he learned the full truth.
As the night progressed the drinks flowed, and Cricket, always
outgoing, was getting ready for the climax of the evening: a striptease
performed to what Cricket described as “one of the worst songs of the
’90s,” Lisa Loeb’s “Stay.”
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Make Your Home Glow Like a Virgin-Atlantic Flight
Designer Mark Pohlkamp’s LIT Urban Underglow
is a long LED tube that changes color via remote. 16 colors and four
preset “light shows” can be yours for $200… Or you could save $44 and
book a seat on Virgin from NY to London. Tough call in this economy.
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am hatchink fiendish plan to catch moose and squirrel
Interested in Soviet era spying by the KGB in the United States? Bummed
that you cant get into the KGB archives? Well it turns out that someone copied all the good stuff already, and you can take a peek.
Alexander Vassiliev was a KGB officer who turned to journalism in 1990.
From 1993-96 he had access to the KGB archives for the 1930s to early
1950s to write notes for a book project on Soviet spying in the Stalin
era. His original notebooks – including extensive verbatim
transcriptions – were left behind in Moscow when he moved to London but
smuggled out via an elaborate plan.
There are eight notebooks, on the Cold War International History site
there are scans, transliterations and translations of each notebook,
free for nothing. Vassilev assisted in the transcriptions and
transliterations.
The whole story is in Alexander Vassiliev’s Notebooks: Provenance and Documentation of Soviet Intelligence Activities in the United States
(pdf). “Since the KGB’s archives remain closed, Vassiliev’s notebooks
are as close as we are likely to get to the actual documents for many
years, likely decades”
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Google looks like Garble
Similar Images is a Google feature that allows you to search for images using pictures rather than words. So you can get images of vaguely similar pigs or somewhat similar houses or egglike shapes or hands or snowflakes.
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A touch of Springer
War of the Roses
These are trashy, but fun, 3-8 minute radio segments in which suspected
cheaters are tricked into revealing their dirty sinful business over
the phone. Typically, the DJ posing as a local flower shop tells a
suspect boyfriend he has won a free bouquet of roses; will he send the
roses to his girlfriend or to the dreaded Other Woman? The girlfriend
waits in silence to ambush him if he gives the wrong answer. Some are sad. Some are infuriating. Most, I’m ashamed to say, are pretty funny.
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, big business and their own content.
Build a DIY non destructive book scanner for under $300. An open source OCR package. A gratis ebook creation tool. An open source ebook library management tool and reader. An open-source Linux distribution for eink-based devices. And many, many ebook readers.
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Depression: What Is It?
Depression is not a sign of weakness or a negative personality. It is a major public health problem and a treatable medical condition. It’s natural to feel down sometimes, but if that low mood lingers day after day, it could signal depression.
Seasonal Depression
If your mood matches the weather – sunny in the summer, gloomy in the winter
– you may have a form of depression called seasonal affective disorder (SAD).
The onset of SAD usually occurs in the late fall and early winter, as the
daylight hours grow shorter. Experts say SAD affects up to 3% of the U.S.
population, or about 9 million people, mainly in the northern part of the
country.
Depression: What Is It?
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A boy named Sue and a girl named Marijuana Pepsi
By high school, her name was cool to many. “They were like, ‘Oh
yeah. Man, I wish I had your name. I love that. I’m going to name my
kid after you.’ I hear that so much and I go, Lord, please don’t do
that to that child.” —Marijuana Pepsi Jackson
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Boston Bruins – Date
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Canadian Members of Parliament voting records (finally) online
After a push from the NDP, the Canadian government’s put voting records of every Canadian MP online.
It’s about time, but what a lame execution: To view an MP’s record,
head to the website and click on the Members of Parliament link to find
your member of the House of Commons. Your MP’s site will will have a
tab for votes that takes you to a list showing whether they voted yea,
nea, or didn’t vote at all on any given bill.
It’s time for some civic-minded Canadian hackers to slurp out
all that data and reformat in a way that gives you real insight into
what your elected representative is up to and how she compares to all
the other politicos on the Hill.
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Giving WordPress Its Own Directory
Many people want WordPress to power their site’s root (e.g.http://example.com) but they don’t want all of the WordPress files cluttering up their root directory. WordPress allows you to install it into a subdirectory, but have your blog exist in the site root.
This process is not applicable to and does not work if you have enabled MultiSite.
Moving a Root install to its own directory
The process to move WordPress into its own directory is as follows:
- Create the new location for the core WordPress files to be stored (we will use /wordpress in our examples). (On linux, use mkdir wordpress from your www directory. You’ll probably want to use “chown apache:apache” on the wordpress directory you created.)
- Go to the General panel.
- In the box for WordPress address (URL): change the address to the new location of your main WordPress core files. Example:http://example.com/wordpress
- In the box for Site address (URL): change the address to the root directory’s URL. Example: http://example.com
- Click Save Changes. (Do not worry about the error message and do not try to see your blog at this point! You will probably get a message about file not found.)
- Move your WordPress core files to the new location (WordPress address).
- Copy (NOT MOVE!) the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory into the root directory of your site (Blog address). The .htaccess file is invisible, so you may have to set your FTP client to show hidden files. If you are not using pretty permalinks, then you may not have a .htaccess file. If you are running WordPress on a Windows (IIS) server and are using pretty permalinks, you’ll have a web.config rather than a .htaccess file in your WordPress directory. As stated above, copy (don’t move) the index.php file to your root directory, but MOVE (DON’T COPY) the web.config file to your root directory.
- Open your root directory’s index.php file in a text editor
- Change the following and save the file. Change the line that says:
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
to the following, using your directory name for the WordPress core files:
require('./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php'); - Login to the new location. It might now be http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/
- If you have set up Permalinks, go to the Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the appropriate file permissions. If WordPress can’t write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)
Using a pre-existing subdirectory install
If you already have WordPress installed in its own folder (i.e. http://example.com/wordpress) then the steps are as follows:
- Go to the General panel.
- In the box for Site address (URL): change the address to the root directory’s URL. Example: http://example.com
- Click Save Changes. (Do not worry about the error message and do not try to see your blog at this point! You will probably get a message about file not found.)
- Copy (NOT MOVE!) the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory into the root directory of your site (Blog address). The .htaccess file is invisible, so you may have to set your FTP client to show hidden files. If you are not using pretty permalinks, then you may not have a .htaccess file. If you are running WordPress on a Windows (IIS) server and are using pretty permalinks, you’ll have a web.config rather than a .htaccess file in your WordPress directory. As stated above, copy (don’t move) the index.php file to your root directory, but MOVE (DON’T COPY) the web.config file to your root directory.
- Open your root directory’s index.php file in a text editor
- Change the following and save the file. Change the line that says:
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
to the following, using your directory name for the WordPress core files:
require('./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php'); - Login to your site. It should still be http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/
- If you have set up Permalinks, go to the Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the appropriate file permissions. If WordPress can’t write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)
Pointing your home site’s URL to a subdirectory
In some cases, you may have a WordPress site that changes significantly every year, such as with a conference website. If you want to install each year’s version of the site in a subdirectory, such as /2010, /2011, and /2012, but have the root domain (yoursite.com) automatically redirect to a particular subdirectory (usually the latest), follow this technique:
- Install WordPress in a subdirectory, such as /2012.
- In your root folder (not the subdirectory folder), download and open your .htaccess file.
- Add the following to your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?YourDomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ blog [L]
- In the above code, change the “YourDomain.com” value to your root domain.
- In the above code, change the “blog” value to the subdirectory.
- Save and upload the .htacess file back to your root directory.
Now when users to go your root domain (yoursite.com), it will automatically redirect to the subdirectory you specified. When you want to redirect to a new subdirectory, such as the conference site for next year, just update the .htaccess redirect code.
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It’s the most important meal of the day!
Oh, but breakfast truly is the most important meal of the day. For a bit of background, Chris Kimball of Cook’s Illustrated can teach you the history of pioneer and Victorian breakfasts, which were centered around foods we still enjoy today. Donuts are a staple, as are breakfast cereals, themselves the subject of a fine and storied history. Bacon is a universe unto itself, as you surely already know.
And what about the waffle? Not just a taste senstation but namesake to one of America’s great culinary joys. And it’s versatile, too. Fried joy is yours with the equally versatile beignet, fried apples and, of course, the simple and elegant fried egg.
All this wonderful food, surely we must have equally wonderful drink! Coffee is a staple, as is breakfast tea. But you deny yourself some of life’s great pleasures if you stop short of alcoholic breakfast drinks: mimosas, Bloody Marys, Irish coffee, or this eponymous joy built upon vodka, peach schnapps and raspberry liqueur.
RobDurdle.com 
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