Tumblr! You Black Emperor
The “Intelligence Toilet” can measure blood pressure, body temperature, weight, and urine sugar levels, all while you… well.
Where, might you ask, can you get one of these marvels? Where else but (heh heh) Japan, of course. (Via Discoblog.)
Not Exactly Rocket Science brings us the science on water strider whoopee, and exactly how repugnant the males are.
Water strider sex begins unceremoniously: the male mounts the female without any courtship rituals or foreplay. She may resist but if she does, he starts to actively strum the water surface with his legs. Each vibration risks attracting the attention of a hungry predator, like a fish or backswimmer [which swim upside-down just under the surface of the water]. And because the female is underneath, she will bear the brunt of any assault. By creating dangerous vibes, the male intimidates the female into submitting to his advances. Faint heart, it is said, never did win fair lady.
Last night, I dreamt that S-K had reunited and were playing a club in SF. Unfortunately, I missed most of it — by the time I arrived at the club, they were already performing the encore — but worse yet, I couldn’t even go inside for some reason. NIGHTMARE.
Not Exactly Rocket Science sez:
We depend on a special organ to digest the food we eat and you won’t find it in any anatomy textbook. It’s the ‘microbiome’ – a set of trillions of bacteria living inside your intestines that outnumber your own cells by ten to one. We depend on them. They wield genes that allow them to break down molecules in our food that we can’t digest ourselves. And we’re starting to realise that this secret society within our bowels has a membership roster that changes depending on what we eat.
I for one welcome our defecating robot overlords:
Director of Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Chris Melhuish, said MFCs [microbial fuel cells] had been tried before but an artificial gut was needed to solve the problem of previous models, which was that humans had to clean up the waste left by bacterial digestion. Melhuish said the robot was called Ecobot III, but admitted “diarrhea-bot would be more appropriate, as it’s not exactly knocking out rabbit pellets.”
I don’t know whether to laugh, or laugh harder. (Via BotJunkie.)
In what sounds like the most over-engineered toilet tech ever, Stanford engineers are using rocket science to clean up sewage.
Rocket fuel? More like rocket gas, amirite? Popular Science via Discoblog. Also, I’d like to point out how apropos that this stuff is coming out of Stanfurd.
My official stance on the movie is that it was diverting but judging Inception within Christopher Nolan’s oeuvre, I’d rank this around The Prestige or Insomnia. In stories that create their own worlds from scratch, if they create their physics and rules arbitrarily, then viewers will arbitrarily find rules to question as inauthentic or inorganic, as I did with the Limbo idea which seems like an inelegant exception to and cheap way of creating tension out of the “You just wake up if you die in a dream” rule.
That said, some of the film’s detractors complain about how its overly crisp depiction of dreamworlds doesn’t resemble real-life dreams, a complaint that I find fairly weak because Inception is only ostensibly and superficially about dreams — at its heart, it’s about watching film.
The line I’m drawing from dream to film spectatorship isn’t that radical of a leap in the context of psychoanalytic film theory, which is founded on Lacan’s post-structural take on Freud. Dreams are obviously within the realm of psychoanalysis, but psychoanalytic film theory puts its critical stamp by arguing that watching film is particularly akin to dreaming. This argument begins on a basic level — film and dreams typically occur in a darkened space that suppresses most of the subject’s senses as it envelopes them in audio/video stimulation — before it heads off into the esoteric stuff (see the mirror stage, suturing), which I’ll leave alone for the real critics (and because as far as Lacan goes, I’m petty bourgeois).
However, the main point I want to bring to emphasize is that in psychoanalytic theory (in both its literary (read: Freudian) and film strains), the entire text is the unconscious dream. If the text is the unconscious, then the individual characters within the text aren’t the subjects of the dream, they’re simply projections, if you will, of the text’s unconscious desire — which is echoed in the “people” that populate the dreamscapes in Inception and are called, you guessed it, projections. (Apologies if I’m mangling Lacan, my excuse is that it’s hard, I didn’t do the reading, and slept through the lectures.)
Keeping all of this in mind, “Is the whole movie a dream?” isn’t the question to ask — rather, we ought to ask, “Is the whole movie a movie?” in which case we know the answer (if we want to get cute, maybe we could say it’s a dream with a movie — within a movie). As a result, complaining about the staircases (that it’s “pointless,” or because they only work “if you’re not actually on the staircase” is beside the point. It’s not for the sake of the characters that the staircase is there; the it’s for the sake of the film viewer to laying bare the dream-like, involuted Möbius loop of film-watching and indeed all of narrative itself.
To leave theory aside for the moment, another reason why I find the “it’s not like real dreams” complaint to be trifling criticism is because real dreams are boring and incoherent. They might seem engrossing while or immediately after dreaming, but when you scrutinize them dramaturgically, they lose their engrossing qualities because they probably were never there. It’s the Stoner’s Paradox — what someone finds captivating when they’re not sober or conscious often turns out be unremarkable when they’re sober or conscious.
(Also, the blogger’s complaint that Inception is almost entirely composed of montages? That seemed to serve the Soviet montagists fine.)
But that particular blog is based in the UK, and I recall that Lacan isn’t terribly en vogue there (or anywhere besides America — USA! USA!).
As to the question we shouldn’t ask — “Is the whole thing a dream?” — I would say yes, since all the shots we see of Cobb’s kids are all shown with in the same “memory effect” style, and that includes when Cobb is reunited with them.
Enough with the solar planes! Now, a boat made almost entirely out of recycled plastic.
The boat of 12,500 bottles was the brainchild of David de Rothschild, who sought a way to bring more of the world’s attention to the problem of discarded plastic bottles and their tendency to wind up in the ocean.
