November 4, 2010
The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer was one of the first programmable drum machines. Introduced by the Roland Corporation in early 1980, it was originally manufactured for use as a tool for studio musicians to create demos. Like earlier Roland drum machines, it does not sound very much like a real drum kit.
One of the machine’s earliest mainstream hits in the United States was on Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing.’ A TR-808 was also David Byrne’s sole accompaniment (apart from his acoustic guitar) at the beginning of ‘Stop Making Sense.’
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November 4, 2010
Reason is a music software program developed by Swedish software developers Propellerhead Software. It emulates a rack of hardware synthesizers, samplers, signal processors, sequencers and mixers, all of which can be freely interconnected in an arbitrary manner. Reason can be used either as a complete virtual music studio, or as a collection of virtual instruments to be played live or used with other sequencing software. As of August 2010 Reason was at version 5.0, version 1.0 was released in November 2000.
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November 4, 2010
Cindy Jackson (b. 1959) is listed in the Guinness World record book for having had more cosmetic surgery procedures than anyone else in the world. She set the record in 2000 and is still the official record holder to date.
Since 1988 she has had 52 cosmetic procedures, including several facelifts, two nose operations, two eye lifts, knee, waist, abdomen and thigh liposuction, jaw surgery, lip and cheek implants, chemical peels, chin bone reduction. Others were non-surgical, including Radiesse injections, hand rejuvenation, Voluma treatments and permanent make-up.
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November 4, 2010
Stelarc (Stelios Arkadiou) is a Greek-Australian performance artist whose works focuses heavily on extending the capabilities of the human body. As such, most of his pieces are centred around his concept that the human body is obsolete. He is currently a visiting Professor in the School of Arts at Brunel University, West London.
In 2007, Stelarc had a cell-cultivated ear surgically attached to his left arm. In 2005, MIT Press published ‘Stelarc: The Monograph’ which is the first extensive study of his prolific work.
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November 4, 2010
The Vacanti mouse was a laboratory mouse that had what looked like a human ear grown on its back. The ‘ear’ was actually an ear-shaped cartilage structure grown by seeding cow cartilage cells into a biodegradable ear-shaped mold. The earmouse, as it became known as, was created by Dr. Charles Vacanti, an anesthesiologist at the University of Massachusetts and Dr. Linda Griffith-Cima, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at M.I.T. in 1995.
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November 4, 2010
PayPal Mafia is an informal term for the community of American businesspeople and investors centered in Silicon Valley, who were early employees of e-commerce service PayPal before founding a series of other technology companies. Paypal was founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel in 1998 and was aquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. The PayPal Mafia are often credited with inspiring Web 2.0, and for the re-emergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot com bust of 2001.
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November 3, 2010
A bucket bong, also called a gravity bong, is a method of consuming cannabis. The smoke in a gravity bong never actually passes through the water as it would in an ordinary bong. The water is used to draw the smoke into the container by pulling up, creating a change in air pressure. The smoke is then pushed into the mouth of the user by pushing down causing air compression.
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November 3, 2010
The DARPA PowerSwim program is developing a human-powered swimming device for use by combat and reconnaissance swimmers. The device uses the same oscillating foil approach to swimming that is exhibited by many fish and aquatic birds. This propulsion approach is more than 80-percent efficient in conversion of human motions to forward propulsion. Typical recreational swim fins are no more than 15-percent efficient in their conversion of human exertion to propulsive power, and freestyle swimming converts only 3-percent.
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November 3, 2010
Barefoot running was widespread for the majority of human history and is still relatively common in undeveloped populations. In competitive running virtually all modern athletes use running shoes, but a small minority of runners have achieved success running barefoot, including Olympic champions and world record holders Abebe Bikila and Tegla Loroupe, as well as Zola Budd. The biomechanics of running are changed quite significantly when shoes are used – in barefoot running, the balls of the feet strike the ground with the most force. With padded shoes more emphasis is placed on the heel and the back of the foot. Running in thin-soled, flexible shoes such as moccasins, VivoBarefoot and Vibram FiveFingers is biomechanically similar to barefoot running.
Barefoot running is experiencing a small resurgence of popularity. Its proponents believe it is healthier for feet and reduces the risk of chronic injuries, notably repetitive stress injuries due to the impact of heel striking in padded running shoes. These health claims are supported by some research and advocated by some authorities, but the research is not conclusive or widely accepted in the medical community. Barefoot running is not generally advocated by medical or sports organizations, who recommend that padded running shoes be worn, with particular consideration to foot type (type of pronation in heel strike gait).
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November 3, 2010
The Areni-1 shoe is a 5,500-year-old leather shoe that was found in 2008 in excellent condition in the ‘Areni-1’ cave in Armenia. It is a one-piece leather-hide shoe and the oldest piece of leather footwear in the world known to contemporary researchers (the oldest footwear of any kind yet discovered are a 10,000 year old pair of sandals made of sagebrush fiber, from Fort Rock Cave in Oregon). The use of shoes is believed to have begun between 40,000 and 26,000 years ago. The Areni-1 shoe was found in near-perfect condition due to the cool and dry conditions in the cave and a thick layer of sheep dung which acted as a solid seal.
Large storage containers were found in the same cave, many of which held well-preserved wheat, barley, and apricots, as well as other edible plants. The shoe contained grass and the archaeologists were uncertain as to whether this was because the grass was used as insulation to keep the foot warm, or used to preserve the shape of the shoe while not being worn. Radiocarbon analysis dates the shoes to 3,500 BCE (a few hundred years older than a leather shoe found on Ötzi the Iceman, 400 years older than shoes found at Stonehenge, and 1,000 years older than shoes found at the Great Pyramid of Giza).
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November 2, 2010
In software development, a software project’s bus factor is an irreverent measurement of concentration of information in a single person, or very few people. The bus factor is the total number of key developers who would need to be incapacitated, (as by getting hit by a bus) to send the project into such disarray that it would not be able to proceed. Commentators have noted that the vanilla Linux kernel tree’s bus factor may be as low as one: the project’s founder and chief architect, Linus Torvalds.
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October 28, 2010
Dub FX (real name Benjamin Stanford) is a worldwide street performer and studio recording artist from Australia. His trademark is creating live music using only his own voice, Live looping, and effects pedals.
His music is based on hip hop, reggae and drum and bass rhythms. Stanford travels and performs with his fiancée, Flower Fairy (real name Shoshana Sadia).
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