Share + Comments Sep 2, 2010 1:31 pm US/Eastern BEAVERTON, Ore. A homeless man who called 911 from the hot tub of a suburban Portland home and asked for towels, hot chocolate and a hug got arrested for trespassing instead.

I love the occasional story about printing on unusual surfaces, like the first time I heard about the CakeJet printer for transferring edible images on to cakes.

September 2, 2010 is a day that will come around only once. Ever. It's 90210 Day, a date that mirrors the zip code for Beverly Hills.

Divers who found what's believed to be the world's oldest drinkable champagne say they have also discovered two-centuries-old bottles of beer at a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea.

Two young goats wandered onto the thin ledge of a railroad bridge and spent nearly two days high above the ground until rescuers in a towering cherry picker plucked them from their perch, hungry but safe.

Acclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design , has not even released yet, but it has already caused a stir.

For a second time, an Ohio woman has given birth to a baby who couldn't wait and arrived on the drive to the hospital.

Two Florida men were questioned by wildlife authorities after they were seen cutting the tail off a beached whale.

The power of the Internet is still being shown in the efforts to track down the "puppy throwing girl," the one who threw a number of live puppies into a river, on camera, in a horrific video.

A retired miner has dug out his own underground home to avoid becoming a 'mortgage slave' in China.

Farmer Jia Kebing noticed a small bump on this cow's forehead when it was born two years ago but didn't expect it to grow into a 20cm horn.

The German husband of ailing 93-year-old Hollywood actress and socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor said he wants to preserve her body by plastination after she dies.

ONE of the trapped Chilean miners is dreading his rescue after his wife met his secret mistress at the entrance to the San Jose mine.

The Hungarian girl who offered to sell her virginity to the highest bidder in a live TV auction has pulled out after getting a savage beating from four men.

The family of a mentally ill man says he was tricked into handing over the deed to his home for $10. Attorney calls deal valid.

Phone poles

Buster and Boo Typewriter repairmen in photos Beautiful old typewriters in photos History of the typewriter through vocal sound effects NYC writer's space throws out last remaining typewriter user ... Prints made from typewriter parts Typewriter stays relevant in technology-saturated world Trove of classic typewriter info

Video Link (via reddit)

Xeni posted a great NASA image of the 2010 Hurricane Earl earlier this afternoon, which got me hunting around for some information on Hurricane Earls past. After all, this is not the first Earl. There've been three others, as well as some lesser Tropical Storms of the same name. The naming lists for these things are used again every seven years, and individual names are only retired after they've been attached to a particularly damaging storm. Earl, so far, has not.

When the names do get retired, replacing them isn't easy. According to Time magazine, there's a whole list of types of names that aren't allowed. Over the years, the meteorologists in charge of naming have resorted to flipping through the weirder end of baby name books and adding friends' names to the list.

Time: How are hurricanes and tropical storms named?

Above: Hurricanes Earl and Danielle in their 1998 incarnations.

Another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded today. All crew members survived. Right now, nobody knows whether or not the explosion caused a leak in any of the seven wells that the rig collects from. There have been reports of an oil slick on the water near the fire, but that could just as easily be from the finite amount of oil stored on the rig—which would still a spill, but a significantly less problematic one.

Other than that, there's not really much information out about this right now. If anybody's learned anything from Deepwater Horizon it seems to be that you're better off, PR-wise, if you don't have to correct everything you say two days later.

To give you something to chew over in the meantime, though, Deep Sea News has been doing a really interesting series on the science (such as it is) of oil dispersants. It's interesting, not just because of the basic facts, but also because it gets into the details of why we don't know more.

Dispersants must be applied successfully and have a high effectiveness once in ocean waters. This sounds easy, in principle--once you've perfected your Corexit formula in the lab, just spray it from a helicopter, and voila! Except there are a lot of factors which you also have to take into account: the composition of the oil spilled, sea energy, whether the oil has been subjected to weathering at all, exact type of dispersant used and the amount which you sprayed, and ocean temperature/salinity.

Thank goodness for all those lab tests over the years which figured all this stuff out, you say. Um, well actually it seems like even designing simulation experiments is difficult, and different tests can report different effectiveness scores for the same dispersant. It is difficult to accurately scale up lab tests in order to predict dispersant action on real spills. Older studies used methods and analyses which have since been discredited. Wave-tank tests can probably provide upper limits on dispersant effectiveness, but there are SEVENTEEN (!!) critical factors that require strict control for accurate results (Fingas 2002). Field tests in open ecosystems are even worse for measuring the fate of oil and controlling variables. In terms of measuring dispersant effectiveness, tank tests, field tests, and lab tests all disagree. Awesome.

Part 1: How effective are dispersants on real oil spills?

Part 2: How toxic are dispersants?

Part 3: Do dispersants really promote degradation of oil?

Image of a random oil rig: Some rights reserved by kenhodge13

Pete Emslie at Fan Expo 2010

Julie Newmar as April Conquest More of Pete Emslie's doodles on newspapers Thoughts on doodling

How astronauts see Hurricane Earl. This image acquired by NASA two days ago: The relatively placid view from the International Space Station belied the potent forces at work in Hurricane Earl as it hovered over the tropical Atlantic Ocean on August 30. With maximum sustained winds of 135 miles (215 kilometers) per hour, the storm was classified as a category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale as it passed north of the Virgin Islands.

The LowBrow Tarot Card Project preview (Hi-Fructose)

LOWBROW + TAROT + PROJECT

UPDATE: You can see the entire show at the La Luz de Jesus site here.

Yesterday, while flipping through my Minneapolis Continuing Education fall catalog, I noticed a class on the Great Mysteries of Science, which turned out to be lake monsters, Sasquatch and UFOs. The class was to be taught by a retired University of Minnesota professor who has since participated in an expedition to study said Sasquatch.

Now, this surprised me, because I had previously pegged Bigfoot as one of those coastal elites, who spent all his time in the Pacific Northwest and shunned the forests here in flyover country. But, apparently, Sasquatch is a Real American after all. In fact, sightings are common enough in northern Minnesota that the Bigfoot Field Research Organization recently organized a Sasquatch search party up there. Forty-two people went along, including my friend, travel journalist Frank Bures, who wrote about the experience of "'squatch hunting" for Minnesota Monthly magazine.

We'd been split into 15 camps, and we were carrying an armament of investigative equipment: night-vision scopes, walkie-talkies, GPS, infrared cameras, thermal-recording devices, video and audio recorders, and more. Someone handed me a thermal imager, which would show bright heat signatures of the living things in the forest. I scanned the area around us but saw nothing except a few warm rocks and something that may have been a raccoon.

"We've got some activity here," came another report across the radio. "They're walking around our site." Whenever the group laughed, apparently, there was a rustling in the woods. When they laughed really hard, there was even more rustling.

Those lucky bastards!

Just that morning I had seen the ghost of a footprint in the soft sphagnum near the other group's tent. It looked not quite human, but not quite ape. It had toes, but it was hard to tell what kind of biped might have made it. Two of the people in that camp, a young couple who had once recorded sounds thought to be a Sasquatch running through their hometown near Cass Lake, had heard many strange noises and seen odd shapes just beyond the light of their campfire the previous night.

"We can hear it walking past our tent," they now called over the radio. "It sounds like it's wearing corduroys."

"So," someone in our group replied dryly, "Sasquatch isn't very stylish."

The article contains more science than you might expect. After being told about the alleged Sasquatch's alleged ability to "zap" potential prey into submission with ultra-low frequency sounds, Frank muses on the vast gulf between the deeply silly Sasquatch and the Sasquatch which may, at least, have some tenuous connection to reality.

From Bigfoot's invisible energy beams, it's not far to the edge of the cliff that many enthusiasts have happily thrown themselves over, leaping from simple zoological fact into a morass of New Age nonsense. ... Even if I did want to believe, these things make it very hard.

The notion that there are small populations of unknown primates around the world got an unexpected boost when Scientific American published a cover story in 2000, titled: "We Were Not Alone." It began: "Our species had at least 15 cousins. Only we remain. Why?" The article said our last relative died out 25,000 years ago. But a 16th cousin was added in 2003, when the existence of the "hobbit," a human-like creature that scientists believe died out 12,000 years ago, was confirmed in Indonesia.

For years, locals in that country had told stories of Orang Pendek, a small hairy person that lived in the forest, yet such tales were dismissed as folklore. Now that science has begun to rewrite the evolutionary family tree, the question arises: Are we really alone?

Recently, scientists with more than a few credentials have started to take that question seriously, people like primatologist Jane Goodall (who, in 2002, told Talk of the Nation host Ira Flatow, "You'll be amazed when I tell you I'm sure they exist") and Jeff Meldrum, an anthropology professor at Idaho State University. In his book, Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, Meldrum looks at the assembled evidence and finds that some Sasquatch footprints have a midfoot joint that's common in nonhuman primates while others have toe prints running lengthwise instead of across the foot. And new examinations of the old Patterson-Gimlin footage suggest the figure's torso and limbs don't match typical human anatomy.

But what about the zapping? Seriously? Zapping?

... After all, as Meldrum pointed out, it was recently discovered that tigers stun their prey with a blast of infrasound just before they pounce.

They zap them.

Image: Some rights reserved by Wayne_Parrack

Rob say: "I spent way too much time making a solid-ice beer tray, but I still feel it was worth the effort. To be truly complete, I should have test floated it in a pool or hot tub, but the bottle opener kept short-circuiting my experiments."

The Quest for a Solid Ice Beer Tray

Here's video of the triumphant success of an elaborate kids' Rube Goldberg machine, created at an "informal Rube Goldberg summer camp for kids ages 3-8." I know nothing about this summer-camp, but it seems like one of the great Good Things of our era -- especially judging from the awesome elation of the kids after the successful run!

How to Get a Beach Ball Into a Galvanized Bucket (the Hard Way) OK Go's Rube Goldberg music video Rube Goldberg rat-run sends a neutral balloon through dozens of ... RFID Rube Goldberg device Rube Goldberg Machine animation from Sesame Street Rube Goldberg Cream Egg killer Ideal toy commercials from 1963

A white tiger cub born at the Vandalur zoo in Chennai, India is turning black. From The Telegraph: Biologists believe a large presence of melanin, the dark skin pigment, is the likely reason for its unusual colouring.

Tigers' skin colour is determined by the presence of black and yellow pigments. In most tigers, the colour yellow dominates over black to give them their characteristic colouring.

"In this cub, the reverse has happened — black is the dominant colour," senior zoo biologist Dr Manimozhi told The Times of India.

"It is the dominance of yellow pigment that enables tigers to survive in the wild," he added. "In fact, this is the reason why most white tigers are found only in zoos and not in the wild," Dr Manimozhi said. "White tiger cub in Indian zoo turns black"

CCAD Students Create Interactive Mural (Thanks, Jen G!)

(Image: Ken Aschliman) Four-storey Mario mural made from Post-Its Gamer/anime mural Painstakingly painted Megaman 2 bedroom walls Super Mario Bros theme performed by an RC car on a row of liquid ... Custom Mario levels used as rhythm section for anime theme medley ... Mario and Luigi: warrior plumbers tee Profane Super Mario ranter plays hardest level ever Violinist plays Mario soundtrack in real time Stop-motion Super Mario made out of sticky notes Super Mario cardies

Fast Food Advertising Vs. Reality: Quiznos Baja Chicken Sandwich Ridiculous gut-busting food-ads lampooned Photos of fast food in ads and in real life Study suggests fast food logos make us more hasty and impatient ... Fast-food toxicity comparison chart The Perfect Turkey Doesn't Really Exist Baconator: fantasy vs reality Obedience To Authority at fast food joints Sugar Information explains how sugar won't make you fat