Unlit candles

unlit candles makes me sad

Enya

Okay Mr Moon, by all means unleash the night. 

We are ready, our eyes are closed,

We welcome the embrace.

Enter, little star

you are most expected

onto our sky

Into our world

into our lives

into our hearts

I love the fall

it's the answer to it all...

Darth Vader Jellyfish

This is the Hydromedusa "Darth Vader" Jellyfish, or rather Bathykorus bouilloni.
It's a litte deep-sea jelly fish discovered around 2005 by Kevin Raskoff, and it wasn't just a new species, but a new genus! And for a nerd it kinda looks like Darth Vaders helmet, doesn't it?

Links:

Smithsonianmag.com
National Geographic

Films I recommend

Mr Nobody 

A fantastic fantasy, a beautiful piece of film making

Favourite quote: Promise me that when I die, you'll scatter my ashes on Mars.

Inception

Epic, this will rank among the greatest films of all time.

Do they come here to sleep? No, They come here to be woken up. Dream has become their reality! Who are you to say, otherwise?

Hot Tub Timemachine

Surprisingly amusing, and amusing in surprising ways. Not the expected jokes, felt fresh. 
Favourite quote: You're married?  No, not yet, she's nine.

Green Zone

Well made and any film with Matt Damon in it that I can watch without being irritated that Matt Damon is in it must be good.
Favourite quote:  What the fuck you talking about? Of course it fucking matters! The reasons we go to war always matter! It's all that matters! It fucking matters!

The Ghost Writer

Cosy, though not scary or very exciting. More than worth the time though. 
 Favourite quote:  He can't drown two ghost writers, for god sake. You're not kittens!

Taken

One long action sequence, and one awesome revenge-movie. Gore-fest with Liam Neeson, sounds strange? Yes but it works. 

Favourite quote:  If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

Trees

Oh how I love and fear them

Now, already a memory

Have you ever been gripped by nostalgia?
Have you ever felt that strong urge to travel back and revisit your old memories?

Youth is wasted on the young, as George Bernard Shaw said.

By janussyndicate 

I sometimes feel too caught up in building new memories and a better future to appreciate the very now, because frankly that "now" is all there is. Everything else is just a chemical pattern in your brain that is a formed memory that changes over time, or a longing for a later "now" on the horizon.
Still, as you live the "now" every second of every hour of every day of every year of your life, it is already a memory. I quantify my "nows" into such small parts that they have already passed before I've been able to savour them.

I think that is why memories from my childhood and teenage years seem so attractive now, because they are like a movie I can sit down and watch with a drink and some popcorn. I can pause, rewind and edit them into a perfect stream of a blissful life.
That is why I think Youth Is Wasted on The Young. They live through my favourite memories without even knowing it, as I did. They create what I miss.

Today is the happiest time of my life, I'm sure of that. The memories I create now will be played, paused and edited by me 20 years from now. Will I still feel that I didn't appreciate them while making them?
Is looking back on the nearest part of your life with nostalgia a sign that life is constantly getting worse, because the best part of your life was just before now? Isn't that a peculiar paradox that you know your life is getting better while your nostalgia is convinced it's getting worse!

Time is nothing you shall try to understand, like flying in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. If you stop and think about it you will crash.

More quotes from mr Shaw that I think fits the subject:

- “We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing"

- “I want to be all used up when I die.”

- “Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

Silverstone 2010

This weekend the F1 circus will come to a slightly revamped Silverstone Circuit in Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire in England (not far from Oxford)
It hosted the very first F1 race in 1950 and is an old airfield which has been transformed several times during it's long history. From the sixties almost square, dangerously fast track almost only consisting of long straights and 90 degree bends. In the early nineties it changed more towards the shape we recognize (and love) today. Well, this year premiers another alteration and the current format is this:

Pay extra attention to the Arena complex which looks promising but did catch out a couple of drivers this morning (Schumi among others). The incorporation of this complex also made the track 759 metres longer to a total of 5901 m. It now has 18 turns that will take around 1:32:3 to navigate, and the GP will stretch over 51 laps.

The first practice saw Sebastian Vettel in the Red Bull take the fastest time followed by Lewis Hamilton and Robert Kubica. Jenson Button finished way down in eight with both him and Ham trying out the new exhaust-blown diffusers (leading the exhaust under the car to help out the diffusers, similar to Red Bull)

Results after first practice here:

ESPN F1 1st practice results

Other links

Races & Circuits 2010
Crash.net

photons are bosons

Two trapped charged bosons for different densities and temperatures;
PIMC simulation by Jens Böning

Physicists in the US have carried out an extremely precise test of the one of the cornerstones of modern physics – the idea that the two types of fundamental particle, bosons and fermions, follow two distinct kinds of statistical behaviour.

Physics tells us that fundamental particles come in two basic varieties: bosons, which have integer values of intrinsic angular momentum or "spin", and fermions, which have half-integer spin. Bosons include force-carrying particles such as the photon, W and Z and follow Bose–Einstein statistics. An important consequence of this is that many identical bosons are free to occupy the same quantum state, leading to phenomena such as Bose–Einstein condensates and lasing.

Fermions include the fundamental matter particles such as quarks and electrons and obey Fermi-Dirac Statistics. Identical fermions can never exist in the same quantum state, giving us the shell structure of atoms and, with it, chemistry.


Dmitry Budker and Damon English of the University of California at Berkeley decided they would test this principle, known as the spin-statistics theorem, as precisely as they could.

The researchers fired two green laser beams from opposite directions into a beam of barium atoms contained within an optical cavity, with the combined energy of a photon pair (made up of one photon from each of the beams) equal to the barium absorption energy. They found that when the frequencies of the two beams were very slightly different to one another this absorption took place, which they observed by measuring the photons given off by the barium's subsequent de-excitation. But they observed no such absorption when the frequencies were identical – demonstrating that photons really are bosons.

Read the whole story on:

Physicsworld

The De-icing Business's continuous mining machine

 

photo: saltunion.com

Proverb I

"Art is nothing without science"

Shutter Island

Yesterday I saw the new Scorsese/DiCaprio collaboration Shutter Island.
The film is based on the novel by the same name written by Dennis Lehane, a 44 yo American author who has written some fantastic books, incl Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone and has also worked as a writer on The Wire.

Shutter Island was written in 2003 and was turned into a film by Scorsese and was released this year.
It starts out on a ferry with the main character  U.S Marshal Edward Daniels feeling sick in his room before going up on deck to meet his new partner Chuck. The ferry goes to Shutter Island where the Ashecliffe Hospital is situated, a hospital/penitentiary for the criminally insane. And the reason we are given is that they are to investigate the disappearance of a patient out of a locked cell. Inside the cell Edward finds a note written by the escapee that points to a patient 67 (there being 66 official patients in the prison) which Edward then investigate while also (which is revealed later) seeking revenge on one of the patients that's guilty of burning his house down effectively killing his wife.

The movie is a Scorsese masterpiece in many ways. There are some fantastically beautiful scenes that pictures Edwards dreams that will take your breath away. The cinematography is always aptly done in Scorsese movies but I feel it has been lifted a notch in this film.
DiCaprio does a steady job portraying the troubled Edward Daniels, a WWII veteran that liberated Dachau and had his wife killed. Ben Kinglsey is a little bit on autopilot, but he has that persona (Like Anthony Hopkins) who can get away with it. I also like most of the music, especially Mahler is used very effectively.

All is not well though, There are also some continuity mistakes, hands that switches places between angels, papers that are ripped and the next second is whole again. The Auswitch sign over the Dachau camp. There are probably more that I didn't immediately recognize, but what I don't know doesn't bother be of course.

All in all, a good popcorn movie with a lot of talent involved.

Marina & The Diamonds

A fantastic album has crossed my path once again. Sometimes you just fall into an abyss of strange but comfortable new water and I've totally fallen into The Family Jewels by Marina and The Diamonds.
The songs are crazy, bold, intelligent and surprisingly catchy.
It resembles Florence + the Machine, Regina Spektor, Bat for Lashes and Lily Allen with its no rules, fun, unconventional and inspired songs.

Marina is a Welsh girl with a Greek father who moved to London and used her quirky personality and brilliant mind to start the band that really is just her. The diamonds are the fans, and not the band. And she's cute as a button to...I'm obsessed with this mess that is Marina & the Diamonds.

Watch these videos


Mowgli's Road - Official Video
Hollywood - Official Video
Marina backstage at Glastonbury
Marina at the NME

The Door to Hell

Derweze (or Darvaza) is a small village in Turkmenistan in the middle of a desert pretty void of anything interesting. Except that is where the Door to Hell is located.
Wait, what?

No, the other hell. This is only hell to people suffering from harp-phobia or vertigo.

The story is this; the area where Derweze is situated is rich in natural gas which to Energy Company Executives is like honey is to bees or face-painting tents are to hippies. What the geologists (or possibly satanists with a degree) chose to do was the same old thing they always do. They set up a drilling rig, maybe something like this:

After it was set up, they probably pushed the start button and poured a cup of coffee and started planning what they'd do with their enormous bonuses. What could possibly go wrong with building a massive structure over a swiss-cheese, gas infested rock and then put a big drill through it.


Right in the middle of the eternal Aston Martin vs Jaguar discussion the whole rig disappeared into an enormous hole leaving nothing but...well, actually just "nothing" on the surface.
The geologists stared at each-other in disbelief and ransacked themselves if it was their area of responsibility to make sure the drilling rig didn't fall right down a big fucking hole! After a silent nod of mutual agreement that it was probably somewhere in the fine-prints of all of their contracts, and possibly some rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock that all ended in a tie (somebody must stop choosing Spock) they all rolled up their sleeves and went to work.
As the ginourmous hole spewed out incredible amounts of Methane gas into the atmosphere they all agreed that if they tossed in a lit match the methane would start to burn off and Bob's your uncle.

 This gas-find will selfcombust in five seconds, good luck Jim.

A cunning plan, with one little drawback; a slight underestimation of the amount of gas.
You see, it was back in 1971 they set it on fire and it has been burning ever since.

Yes, that is people. Possibly deciding to have some cognitive behavioural therapy to combat their harp-phobia

So what do you do with a big burning whole right in the middle of your normally hell-gate free little town? Make it a tourist attraction of course!

Links
Article & Pics from EnglishRussia
Tourism info
Abandonthecube

Off to Israel.

My new sneakers first trip!

Death or Cake

Laki - The Haze from Hell

On the 8th of June 1783 Iceland opened up and started spewing out its guts all over Europe creating some horrifying months where they sky was red and the air was toxic to breath.

Ahhh, beautiful! Wait, what? *cough cough* Somebody invent gas-masks fast...

What became known as the Laki Haze in northern Europe was actually a combination of hydrofluoric acid & sulfur-dioxide that moved eerily through the streets of the highly religious parts of England and France, turning day into a perpetual reddish twilight, killing people and generally made life miserable for the hard working English, and wine drinking French. Remember that his was before industrial robots and tractors so there was a lot of hard manual labour, usually an exercise where you appreciate the fresh Enlightenment air.

Not invented, thankfully not industries either

 The reason for this excitement was that rising magma collided with groundwater, creating phreatomagmatic explosions and simultaneously opened 130 craters that spent the next 8 months spreading death and terror over the neighbourhood. That sort of thing was frowned upon even back then, fortunately nobody had invented satellites either so they had no idea death came from Iceland, most people probably didn't know that there was an Iceland at all.

Not invented. Which was bad because no GPS:es meant people got lost all the time. But good because nobody had to spend a Saturday watching reruns of The Hills with their girlfriend.

In the beginning the Icelanders stood in awe watching 1400m high lava fountains, while the Brits brushed ash of their Frocks. Then started The Mist Hardships where 25% of the Icelandish population died in the famine that followed after their animals began dying of dental and skeletal fluorosis (tell your dentist that next time he tries to force fluorine-tables down your throat). Things got so bad they where forced to invent new dishes, like the scrumptious Book-soup where they actually boiled the pages that was made of animal skins. It's strangely absent from modern cooking books. Nigella, I have a top tip! Gimme a call.

A freakishly hot summer combined with a high pressure zone over Iceland meant that the poisonous, sulphuric air moved like a freight-train down over Norway, Czechoslovakia, Germany, France and ending up in Great Britain in only 6 days (which is much faster than a train actually, all trains being delayed by insurmountable obstacles like leaves and a small breeze).
And while English captains stood on shore cursing at the blood red sun, unable to take to the sea due to the thick mist, some 23 000 Brits died around them. That's around 100.000 in todays currency.

Besides being unhealthy to breathe the haze also caused weather worthy of a Roland Emmerich film. 

Epic thunderstorms with lightnings that killed horses and men, hails that killed livestock and torrential rains.
What followed was a bitterly cold and cruel winter killing at least 8000 more than usual winters.
 

Not invented, which meant that  the Greeks had to pay their own bills. 

The British had excellent records over their dead which makes it quite easy to calculate how many more died during these months than normally. The French (being very French) didn't  bother writing down such information though, they kept busy shouting at the haze, getting priest to exorcise it and probably tried to get it into a guillotine (killing things in guillotines being their national sport at the day)

Invented, which made some people shorter, and a lot of crazy French revolutionaries ecstatic

The extreme weather actually screwed up the French crops so much that the ensuing famine and poverty (as this was before the EU was invented the Germans wouldn't bail out the frogs) may have kick-started the French Revolution. Although, knowing the French, it would probably have happened anyway sooner or later.

This is not just meant to educate and amuse, but also to put the current ash-cloud into perspective. What small problems we are experiencing so far and what may come at any time. Today's society is much better equipped to deal with such disasters and that is thanks to the magic of economic growth leading to product development.

OLED Chandelier

German designer Ingo Maurer have created a very futuristic and minimalistic Chandelier that wouldn't be out of place in a Sci.-Fi movie. It's also one of the new ultra-energy effective light-sources scientists are working on in the wake of the Climate-Change hoax.

Engineers at GE are working on panels of OLED which takes us one closer step to my childhood dreams; luminous wallpaper!

Soon we will indeed live inside a television. Bliss!

Gigi Radiators

i-Radium have made some cool radiators for all you interior-design freaks out there.

Designed by Enzo Berti, famous furniture designer. Apparently.

Using infra-red heating these hot dudes are made from wood and makes you a lot happier than your old cast iron off-white Victorian ones did. And also kinder to your heating bill but will probably piss-off your cat as these are not easy to claim as a relax-area

They have also these Ikea-lamp analogues designed to blend into your other circular shapes (I'm guessing)

I like it! People who think out of the box, or rather those who say "what box?" makes this world evolve into what will become the space trekking, food replicating, alien interracial breeding future that the Sci-Fi channel has shown be will inevitably be.

My thoughts are with you Rzeczpospolita Polska

Two hearts eats as one

Food for Dinner

Cooking with colour today!

Aerogel - Frozen Smoke

Aerogel is the lightest solid material in the world, it's actually so light it's pratically air (0.003 g/cm³, only three times that of air) and it's basically a gel but the liquid is replaced with gas through something called supercritical drying.

So what can we use it for, beside holding a block of it on a couple of pretty creepy fingernails?
Aerogel has some particular characteristics among which is a very good heat insulator so we use it in windows and spacesuits. As it weighs so little it doesn't bulk you down like a couple of tartan blankies would. They are also notoriously bad in windows due to their lack of transparency.





Can you believe this little piece of heaven (more literal than usually) was invented after a bet?

That's right, back in 1931 Steven Kistler made a bet with his fellow nerd scientist Charles Learned over who could replace the liquid in jelly with gas without causing shrinkage. I know it sounds dirty but it's really not.

Aerogel did however play quite an anonymous role due to the difficulty and expense of manufacturing it. But in the seventies the French (believe it or not) needed a way to store rocketfuel in porous materials and a univerity in Lyon discovered the application of sol-gel chemistry to silica aerogel preparation. This process replaced the sodium silicate used by Kistler with an alkoxysilane, (tetramethyorthosilicate, TMOS)

After that it has, among other things, been used to detect Cherenkov Radiaton in Cern (with Aerogel prepared in Sweden, yay!) and NASA used it to absorb space dust (which is cooler than normal dust cause it has the word "space" in it)
Future uses may include absorbing kinetic energy, as in computers, cars or even bulletproof vests.

Is there anything jam can't do? Save a peanut butter sandwich, pimp a porridge, feature in erotic fantasies, inspire scientists to create frozen smoke. Jam is awesome!
And also Aerogel....

A 2,5kg brick supported by 2 grams of Aerogel

Links
EETD
Aerogel FAQ

Dream

Last night I dreamt that water was pointless to drink, 

because it's transparent. That it was like air!

And that the darker the drink, the healthier it is, 

so I ended up just drinking Guinness.

News that doesn't make the news

Large Hadron Collider - First Collision

Remember this day, ladies and gentlemen. You will bore your children and grand-children with invented memories of it.

Earth Hour - Why I will not turn off my lights

The so-called "Earth Hour" is upon us again. The WWF teams up with the UN to make everybody feel guilty that we've been able to make a pretty decent living for ourselves.
I know there are people that hates having fun, a lot of these (if not all) are religious in different ways and use some made-up religious rules to guide them safely away from everything that set off the dopamine. Whether it's catholic priest swearing off the most basic urge of all, that of procreation. Or if it's the Muslims that doesn't eat, drink or have sex (again with the sex?) while the sun is up for a month.

The Ramadan of the AGW church is the Earth Hour, where everyone in the developed world (we who have access to electricity because we invented it and made it affordable) shuts off our electrical appliances for an hour. It's supposed to be a symbol, unclear what it should be a symbol for. Maybe a return to the dark-ages where religion was law for many more people. 

Black is the new black

Whether you believe in Man-Made global warming, that it will be a disaster and that it can be stopped doesn't really matter. Earth Hour is still just a farce, it doesn't save any electricity. It doesn't lower carbon dioxide emissions, possibly increasing it. It isn't any kind of symbol that makes you understand how it is to survive without electricity, as you can heat your pizza and make your coffee just before it starts and then download the tv-shows you missed afterwards. It's very easy to live without modern society when it's only for a short amount of time and you know exactly when it turns off and on.

But why am I against it? Am I only obstinate?

Well, yes I am but not only. I am also sick and tired of people trying to push their version of what's best for everybody down my throat. I am also incredibly sick of the stars of these opinions that fails to make any little sacrifice themselves. That does not compute.
For example, Al Gore took a private plane to Gardemoen to collect his Peace-prize, from Gardemoen airport he took the train in to Oslo to show his undying, real commitment to cutting carbon emissions. He couldn't be expected to bring his luggage on the train though, so it travelled in a separate Mercedes van. But it was a powerful symbol that he took the train, wasn't it?
The Scientologist and occasional "actor" John Travolta tell us not to fly, while owning his own 707 jumbo-jet (and 4 other planes) which he as a fully trained pilot fly himself from his own private landing zone in his backyard. And he does it because he loves it, like when we take our motorbike or convertible for a ride a nice spring Sunday.

John Travoltas house. I would if I could. 

The supermodel Gisele Bündchen is all about Climate Change and is a spokesperson for Earth Hour, as well as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme. She encourages me to turn off the 9 lamps I have in my apartment, and she will hopefully do the same. In her houses. She has houses, with a plural "s". And apartments. And flies everywhere. But she is a symbol.

The sleepy popgroup Coldplay travels around the world on their big tours, sleeping on stages everywhere on earth but still manages to speak out against travelling. At least they planted a lot of mango-trees to suck up all the carbon-dioxide they released. Sadly they all died. Well, at least they tried. And it's a symbol.

And I don't mind any of these people doing any of these things, as long as it makes them happy. Just SHUT-THE-FUCK-UP about my life when you are much worse in every single aspect.

The problem isn't the solution

In Bangladesh there are villages with electricity, there are also villages without. The villages with electricity have a 35% lower mortality rate amongst children. In the villages without electricity there are children dying because they have Earth Hour 24/7/365. The problem is that they don't have access to electricity to cook and keep their food. The solution is more electricity, everywhere.
Earth Hour is about making the problem (no electricity) the solution. And the solution (more electricity) the problem.

That's why I will have a normal electricity consumption tonight, I will have a couple of lamps lit, I will have the telly on, the computer and the amplifier. I will still use less electricity than the average man, and far far far less than the average AGW Hollywood Saint.

The Codex Gigas

Called The Devils Bible the Codex Gigas is a remarkable manuscript.
It was written in the early 13th century in a monastery in what is now the Czech Republic and is called The Devils Bible because of two things, one is that it contains an illustration of a Devil

 a devil

And the other reason is the myth of it's creation.

The Myth

The Codex Gigas is rumoured to have been written by a doomed monk in the Podlažice Monastery that was sentenced to death for a crime too heinous to even be written down. Pleading for his life he promised the other monks that he would write one book celebrating the monastery and containing the answer to life, the universe and everything (which we all know now is 42 but they didn't back then). The other monks naturally scoffed and told him - "Okay, you have one night to finish it but if it's finished in the morning, we will wall your ass"
Knowing that walling actually meant being built into a wall with bricks and mortar, the monk got work writing at a speed that would make Ryoki Inoues jealous. When it became midnight, it was pretty obvious to the doomed monk that it would take a miracle for him to finish the book, he did what everybody in Hollywood does when the deadline is creeping up. He asked the Satan for help.
Satan being a pretty decent chap, showed up and finished the book wanting nothing more than 10% of all future revenues and the monks soul. A deal still regarded in showbiz today, as the best ever struck by any artist. So after Satan finished the book, our monk rose from his bath (probably, historians disagree) and  added a picture of Satan in a sudden outburst of bromance.
The next morning the other monks came a-knocking, spatulas ready for some old fashion wall-in, but was met a by a beaming (and probably rose-scented, again historians disagree) monk with a finished Giant Book (Codex Gigas).

The History

It is still a great debate around how this enormous manuscript ever got written but we are fairly certain that it was written by one single monk called Herman the Recluse (cool but not as cool as Stephen the King, you do understand the "recluse" part) and that it was written in a Benedictine Monastery called Podlažice and that it was finished 1229AD. After changing owners frequently, once being owned by Rudolf II, it was taken by the glorious Swedish Army in 1648 (during the 30 year war) and since then it has resided in the National Library of Sweden.

 Yes, that is a matchbox

Why it's awesome

It's absolutely massive, almost a metre high and half a meter wide. It's 22 cm thick and weighs in at around 75 Kg. The book weighs as much as me! (after I shed this holiday weight I'm carrying since x-mas).
Back then when you wrote a book, you wrote it by hand, dipping your quill in ink (which consisted of crushed insect nests) and continued to write. They haven't found a single mistake in the entire book and the ink and style is the same through it all.
New tests has shown that it would take about an hour to write one page, the decorated initials would take a couple of days each. And this is in a monastery life where you had lot's of other duties so you maybe had two-three hours a day at best, to write. Careful guesses approximate that it would take 20 years to finish it, but prefer to believe it to have taken between 25-30 years.

A big decorated initial

The Codex Gigas is the largest medieval manuscript. It's written flawlessly by one man over close to 3 decades. It combines parts of different scriptures not ever combined anywhere else. It has survived fires, wars, plunders and whatnots. It is mad and fantastic and awesome.


Links
Scanned Copy
NG documentary on Youtube
Hubpages

Scary Wednesday - Irukandji

If you are small and live in the ocean you're pretty much fucked. There will be sharks, turtles, nosy divers, black smokers, moray eels and outboard motors everywhere just waiting to eat, poke and slice you into a million pieces. So you need something special to be successful, a gimmick if you will. Like Britney Spears who is s a pretty sucky singer, but compensate by not wearing knickers.

The Irukandji (Carukia Barnesi) is a jellyfish that's very small, very fragile and almost invisible as it swims in the ocean.

 most venomous creature in the world

So it need something better than an absence of underwear to make it. And it has, and that is, as always; poison. Extremely potent poison, designed to catch fast moving fish and kill then in a heartbeat.
When you get stung by and Irukandji you initially just feel a mild pain that you will have no idea where it came from because the Irukandji is a little transparent devil far from the big hairy spider we featured last week.  After an hour or so you start vomiting. Am I seasick? You ask yourself. Well, maybe you are but it wouldn't help if you where Captain Haddock himself, you would still empty yourself all over the Fraser Island coastline, making local birds pretty happy and local divers pretty miserable.
If you have the good luck to be close to the boat and be driven to hospital you will probably survive, although you will spend a week wishing you didn't. As the doctors pumps as much weapons-grade morphine straight into you veins as possible, you will still experience the worst pain you have ever felt. People are known to have asked their doctors to kill them to get over it.  Yes, really
In the television show Super Animal a women says this:
""It's like when you're in labor, having a baby, and you've reached the peak of a contraction—that absolute peak—and you feel like you just can't do it anymore. That's the minimum that [Irukandji] pain is at, and it just builds from there."

It's called; the Irukandji Syndrome.
It's a lovely little state where you vomit, sweat profusely, cramp, kidney pain, burning skin, massive headaches, feel very agitated, you have a very high blood pressure and you heart pumps like it's trying to escape your body. Basically like Shane Macgowan feels every morning. But this lasts for days and days.

most hungover creature in the world

Very little is known about the Irukandji, partly because is nearly invisible, partly because it's very hard to handle. You can't even keep it in an aquarium cause it will break apart if it even touches the wall. It's not the rhinoceros of the seas, exactly.
What we do know is that it lives around Fraser Island north of Australia, they are related to other box jellyfish and they kill everything that touches it so they are probably lonelier than Mike Tyson.

When it stings the stingers that cover both it's tentacles and bell uncoils and millions of minute poisonous stingers (nematocysts) that travels in through you skin and releasing poison all the way through, even from the tips deeply imbedded in your flesh. Like you're gulliver but instead of ending up on the beach you find youself in a container of the Lilliputs discarded hypodermic needles. They also break off the Irukandji and continue to pump poison even after the initial contact is over. Bastard...

Oh, and there is no antidote.

Links
timsaxon
Youtube
Official Site
Discovery Channel - Killer Jellyfish

Smoke

Like folded up dreams

Malin

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that 's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;

Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,  
A heart whose love is innocent

 - Lord Byron                                      

Aston Martin Carbon Black Edition

Some of my favourite words are "Aston Martin", "Black", "Carbon" & "Special Edition".
So if Aston Martin decided to make a Carbon Black edition of their beautiful DBS that would be pretty awesome. It would be like a peanut butter & jelly sandwich but with doughnut as bread and whipped cream on top. And you had it in a bathtub of custard. With Miranda Richardson and Kirsten Dunst. While Enya was singing in the background.

Then feast your eyes on this:

This is what the devil drives while on earth harvesting souls

This is the Aston Martin Carbon Black Edition.
It has the same wonderful 510 bhp engine as the normal DBS, with a touchtronic gearbox and is available in both Coupe and Volante (convertible) versions. There is also a V12 Vantage.
It has Obsidian black leather seats (of Kevlar) with silver stitching (hand stitched) and the car itself is handpainted (sort of) in a black colour that takes 50 hours per car to paint and quality check.
While you're cruising down the Stelvio Pass and you're getting tired of only listening to the glorious roar of the engine you must be insane, but if you are insane there is a brilliant 700w Bang&Olufsen stereo to drown out the V12 with Colony 5 (it's possible to listen to other bands but C5 is recommended)

This is pure art

So what's the price of this mid-life crisis? Well, nothing official yet but the rumour is 5% more than the standard versions which seem like a bargain with all that extra blackness.

Bespoke wheels

Beside the cosmetics and a few gadgets it's pretty much the same car as the normal DBS. 

There is a 5,9l 48-valve V12 delivering a 510hp through the back wheels and will reach 100 km/h in about 4,2 sec.

It was launched 2007 to replace the Vanquish S and is designed by Henrik Fisker and sort of premièred in the James Bond movie Casino Royale. 

Links

Wiki

Official

Scary Wednesday - Brazilian Wandering Spider

So why is this scary? Because it’s an effing spider, of course. All spiders are the spawn of Satan and should have the common decency to stay out of everyones view.

This is my war face

This also extra scary because of several reasons,
First of all, it’s a wandering spider. That means it will fool you to think it’s less scary due to the fact that these spiders doesn’t make webs. And we all hate spiderwebs (except in photos with the morning dew covering it as the sun ascends),

 Not so scary

but that also means that you have no idea where it is. It’s not confound to a large web inside a remote forest. Spiders in webs are also pretty particular on what they attack. If something too big (i.e. you) rips the web, it stays hidden and wait for you to curse, wipe the web of your face and continue with your day, only slightly more aware of your surroundings.  When you are gone they set out to repair the damage and wait for insects to feast on. That’s a sweet deal between spiders and humans.

Deal breaker

The wandering spiders haven’t signed that deal though, they walk around and just wait for a fleshy human foot to sink their teeth in. Just for the hell of it…Oh, and they are nocturnal so you don’t even have a chance to see them. And during the day they hide, in your shoe or under your breakfast banana. And they have a leg span of 15 cm. And they attack everything that wakes them up with the ferocity of a demon with parent-issues.
But God can’t be so mean so that he made this angry, big spider that likes to inhabit the same places as humans poisonous, can he? That would be pretty sick of him, wouldn’t it?

 Phoneutria Nigriventer

It would, and it is.
The Phoneutria Nigriventer is arguably the most poisonous on earth (and by that, probably on any planet).
6 micrograms of Nigriventer posion kills a labrat where it takes 110 micrograms of Black Widow poision to kill it's mate. They actually blend strong neurotoxins with serotonin. This shock and awe cocktail shuts down your nervous systems and cause intense spasm, tremors and incredible pain. And it inflicts you with priapism (It's what you get when you ask for Viagra in hell).






Next time you see a spider, I suggests RUN!



Links
Video
The Spider Catalouge
Pics of Wandering Spiders

Formula One - Bahrain

Fernando Alonso Ferrari - © Getty Images

So here we are, the 2010 season under way and four world champions in competitive cars.  All was set for a fantastic race, and all we got was a procession. The refuelling ban meant that there was no strategies at all. 

It also meant that the drivers looked after their tires to the point of not daring to push. The first lap looked like a warm-up lap of GP2 cars, and it didn't get any better from there. 

Sebastian Vettel started from pole in his RedBull Racing and should have easily won if one of his spark plugs hadn't broken which meant he lost a lot of power and was subsequently passed by Alonso, Massa and Hamilton and cruised home to a bitter fourth place.Worth noting is that his fastest lap was half a second faster than Alonsos.

The F1 poster-boy Michael Schumacher looked to be pretty well adjusted to F1 speeds in his Mercedes but was outpaced by his team-mate, it will be interesting if he will be able to get on top after 3-4 races.

To be fair, Sakhir is a funny track so the real test for these new rules will come on the 28th in Australia. 

 2009 Sakhir track

2010 Sakhir track

 

Australias Melbourne circuit is a more conventional track and the drivers have one race-distance (well, not Chandok, he managed just 5 laps over the entire weekend) in their backs so maybe they dare to push a little harder next time. Button said that he had been over-cautious with his tires so he at least, will be a lot braver next race. 

Congrats Alonso (for the win) and SaintMagnus (for the win on the bet I put down). Sorry to all the F1 fans that should have seen an awesome race, but watched paint dry in 350 kph.

Fernando Alonso, Felipe Massa, Lewis Hamilton - © Getty Images