Everything is Interesting
A Munny doll is a designer toy from the American company Kidrobot. It is a blank figure the owner can decorate using pens, pencils, markers, paint, and other supplies. A Munny doll is made out of vinyl and has movable joints. The first doll was white, and has since been available in other colors such as black, pink, blue, and phosphorescent green. The figure is housed in a box which includes 4 random accessories such as a carrot or a hat.
Carbon nanotubes are a molecular configuartion (or allotrope) of carbon with a cylindrical structure. Nanotubes have been constructed with length-to-diameter ratio of up to 132,000,000:1, which is significantly larger than any other material. These cylindrical carbon molecules have novel properties which make them potentially useful in many applications in nanotechnology, electronics, optics, and other fields of materials science, as well as potential uses in architectural fields. They exhibit extraordinary strength and unique electrical properties, and are efficient thermal conductors.
Nanotubes are members of the fullerene structural family, which also include spherical buckyballs. The ends of a nanotube may be capped with a hemisphere of the buckyball structure. Their name is derived from their size, since the diameter of a nanotube is on the order of a few nanometers (approximately 1/50,000th of the width of a human hair), while they can be up to 18 centimeters in length.
Fabric is a nightclub in London by Keith Reilly and Cameron Leslie that opened on 29 October 1999. Fabric has three separate rooms (two of which feature stages for live acts) with independent sound systems. A feature of the club is its vibrating floor in Room One: known as a ‘bodysonic’ dancefloor, sections of the floors are attached to 400 bass transducers emitting bass frequencies of the music being played.
The musical genres played there vary. FabricLive is a Friday-night ‘soundclash,’ (music competition) including tempos from hip hop to breakbeat to drum and bass to electro. Fabric’s Saturday nights showcase house and techno. The club has been releasing monthly compilation albums mixed by popular DJs since November 2001. There are two series that alternate months, entitled fabric and FabricLive.
Onychogryphosis (also known as ‘Ram’s horn nails‘) is a disorder that may produce nails resembling claws or a ram’s horn, possibly caused by trauma or peripheral vascular disorders, but most often secondary to neglect and failure to cut the nails for extended periods of time.
Nacirema [nak-uh-ree-ma] (American backwards) is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the people of the United States. Anthropologists and sociologists use the term to examine (with a degree of anthropological self-distancing) aspects of the behavior and society of American people.
The original use of the term was in ‘Body Ritual Among the Nacirema’, which satirizes anthropological papers on ‘other’ cultures, and the Northern American Culture. Horace Miner wrote the paper and originally published it in the June 1956 edition of American Anthropologist.
The Kayan are an ethnic minority of Burma. Women of the various Kayan tribes identify themselves by their different form of dress. The Kayan Lahwi tribe are the most renowned as they wear ornaments known as neck rings, brass coils that are placed around the neck. The government of Burma has discouraged this practice in its efforts to modernize and ease some of the cultural restrictions placed upon women. Consequently, many women in Burma began breaking the tradition, though a few older women still wear them and in remote villages some of the younger girls as well. In Thailand, however, the practice has gained popularity in recent years because it draws tourists who bring business to the tribe.
Coils are first applied to young girls when they are around six years old. Each coil is replaced with longer coil, as the weight of the brass pushes the collar bone down and compresses the rib cage. Contrary to popular belief, the neck is not actually lengthened; the illusion of a stretched neck is created by the deformation of the clavicle.
Rat Fink is one of the several hot-rod characters created by artist Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth. Roth’s hatred for Mickey Mouse led him to draw the original Rat Fink, who came to symbolize the hot-rod and ‘Kustom Kulture’ scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Although Detroit native Stanley Mouse is credited with creating the so-called ‘Monster Hot Rod’ art form, Roth is accepted as the individual who popularized it. The Rat Fink is a green, depraved-looking mouse with bulging, bloodshot eyes, an oversized mouth with yellowed, narrow teeth, and a red T-shirt with yellow ‘R.F.’ on it. Other artists associated with Roth also drew the character, including Steve Fiorilla, who illustrated Roth’s catalogs.
A Rat Fink revival in the late 1980s and the 1990s centered around the West Coast grunge/punk rock movements. The term ‘fink’ was originally underworld slang for an informer, comparable to ‘stool pigeon.’ It is also thought to have been a toned-down form of ‘ratfucking,’ a slang term for playing dirty tricks.
L’esprit de l’escalier (staircase wit) is thinking of a clever remark when it is too late. The German word Treppenwitz and the Yiddish word trepverter are used to express the same idea. This name for the phenomenon comes from French encyclopedist and philosopher Denis Diderot. A remark was made to him at a dinner party which left him speechless at the time because, he explains, ‘a sensitive man like me, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and can only think clearly again [when he reaches] the bottom of the stairs.’ The reception room was located on the étage noble, the noble storey, upstairs, so that to have reached the bottom of the stairs means to have definitively left the gathering in question.
Diderot’s fellow-philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau also recognised his own affliction with l’esprit de l’escalier, staircase wit. In his autobiographical book Confessions he blamed such social blunders and missed opportunities for turning him into a misanthrope, and reassured himself that he was better at ‘conversations by mail’.
AOHell was a program that modified early versions of America Online. It included a fake account generator, social engineering (or phishing) tools, and email, IM, and chatroom automation. Released in 1994 by a hacker known as ‘Da Chronic,’ AOHell provided a number of utilities which ran on top of the America Online client software. Upon loading, the program played a short clip from Dr. Dre’s 1993 song ‘Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.’ It was the first program of its kind, and spawned a large number of copycats. Over a period of 10 years, more than 1000 programs would be released for various versions of AOL.
In the manual, the creator of AOHell claims that he created the program because the AOL administrators would frequently shut down hacker and pirate chatrooms for violation of AOL’s terms of service while refusing to shut down the pedophilia chat rooms which regularly traded child pornography. Da Chronic claimed when he confronted AOL about it, he was met with an account deletion. His goal was,'[To have] 20,000+ idiots using AOHell to knock people offline, steal passwords and credit card information, and to basically annoy the hell out of everyone.’
The Daily Omnivore 