Raytheon has created a “ray gun” type weapon called Silent Guardian for the US military. It emits an invisible beam of high-energy radio frequency. The non-lethal beam heats up the moisture on the skin inflicting pain.
I was unable to find any video of the weapon being demonstrated on anyone, but here’s a radio story of the demo for reporters and a video from Raytheon’s web site of the equipment.
In a little known battle just outside Washington DC during the American Civil War, President Lincoln came out to see the battle and became the only sitting US President to come under enemy fire during a war. In fact a surgeon standing next to him was wounded by a confederate sharp shooter.
The story is chronicled in Marc Leepson’s book Desperate Engagment.
Marc Leepson appears on CSPANs BookTV and tours the battlefields describing events. (WARNING may only be enjoyable by die hard History and Civil War Fans)
I always find it incredibly interesting what verbiage in my post trigger the relevant Google ads on the right. Of course they are trying to sell you something, but it’s always interesting how it picks up on the words or phrases it thinks it can monetize. For instance, overnight ALL my ads turned into “diet” ads the moment I posted the word “diet” in a previous post. It will be interesting if a STRONGER word or phrase will break that hold that the word diet now has on the ad producer.
Company produces GPS triggered audio tours. Finally, a innovative use for all those GPS receivers out there.
Not being into video games much these days, it doesn’t take much to impress me. But I think most would agree this site offers a veritable feast of eye candy. I can only imagine the amount of design work that went into this project.
It’s since been moved here:
Michael Pollan writes in his book, In Defense of Food that “we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be intimidated by studies of new reports or especially food labeling. Humans can thrive on all sorts of diets. Some live healthy lives on nothing but cattle or seafood. In fact, he says, there’s only one diet that has consistently proved hazardous to our health.”
It’s actually, you know, people who have done the sort of ethnographic research around food have found this astonishing array of different traditional diets on which people have been extremely healthy. But there is one diet that it appears that we are poorly adapted to, and that is what we call the western diet.
And this diet makes people fat. It makes them diabetic. It gives them heart disease. It gives them an assortment of cancers. It’s just very toxic to our bodies.
Some of his rules for eating healthy are:
…don’t eat anything that doesn’t rot, don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize, don’t eat anything that has an unfamiliar, unpronounceable name, don’t eat anything with high fructose corn syrup, don’t eat food that features health claims on their labels.
The following interview on the radio show with a Nutrition Expert helps reinforce Pollan’s claims.
The term “skid row” takes its name from the run-down saloons and boarding houses near the skid roads of western logging camps.
Source – Modern Marvels Episode: Logging Tech
A skid road was a corduroy road made of logs, used to skid or drag felled trees through the woods or bog to the saw mill.
The longest log flume ever built extended over 62 miles running in the high elevations of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range of California. Built by the Kings River Lumber Company in 1890 to harvest the giant redwoods. Regrettably,
…the operation felled over 8,000 giant redwood trees, all over 2,000 years old. Of those trees felled, only 23% made it to the mill. The sheer weight of the giant trees caused them to shatter into millions of unusable pieces while the portions that were too large were blasted with black powder, but this method also proved unsatisfactory.
In New York City a billboard emits highly focused sound that resonates within the skulls of passersby.
According to Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media ecology at New York University, the original revelation of subliminal advertising effects was a hoax.
In 1957, an enterprising marketing researcher named James Vicary announced to a breathless world that he had conducted an experiment in a movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey during screenings of the William Holden picture, Picnic. Vicary claimed that what he had done was to flash subliminal inducements during the screening of the film telling people to drink Coca Cola or to eat popcorn. His claim was that those subliminal flashes had actually increased sales of those items at the concession stand in the theater by some 38 percent.
This announcement took the country by [LAUGHING] storm. People basically freaked out over it. The networks swore they would never engage in practices like this. The New York State Senate passed a law against this kind of thing. Aldous Huxley appeared on The Mike Wallace Show [LAUGHS] and referred to it as something far worse than anything he’d imagined in Brave New World. It was quite a to do.
And the irony is that it turned out that Vicary had made the whole thing up.