Security

The Enzo

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Where's the eject button?The recent news of a car crash on Highway One in California, which disemboweled an Enzo Ferrari, should prove two things:

  1. A million dollar car has some incredible safety features, including the ability to go airborne at 160mph and break apart upon impact with a telephone pole without injuring the occupants. Volvo’s got nothing on Ferrari.
  2. Even video game designers do not believe that life is better online. They long for extreme real world experiences where they can feel the buzz of a powerful engine, hear the squeal of their tires, and cut their lip on an exploding airbag. Apparently, however, there is some value in keeping imaginary friends.
Security

Air Quality Indicator

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Amy Franceschini and some colleagues started a site based on the belief that “art can be a catalyst for social awareness and positive change”. Hmmm. Or is social awareness and positive change a catalyst for art?

Chicken before egg.

Anyway, I like (some of) their commentary and found this post might be a sign (ha ha) of things to come:

The project intersects with recent public debate in Copenhagen about air pollution in the city. In collaboration with Senior Scientist Jørgen Brandt from The National Environmental Research Institute in Denmark a first prototype is developed for making an indicator that can be placed in the city and display local levels of pollution as well as pollution forecasts on individual streets. The project holds an open source script for displaying data from the Internet in a variety of forms.

I like the information awareness and creative use of technology for health/security, but there also seems to be a whine or similar noise that cuts into the effectiveness of the free-soil signal. I mean how ironic is it that so many of these “back to basics” advocates require you to use Macromedia Flash to get their message? Roll up your pants and stick your toes in the ASCII, as my mother used to say…

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Food, Security

The Deadly Blue Ring Octopus

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I just found out from The Cephalopod Page that some octopuses have a venom that can quickly kill humans:

Typically, the victim is unaware of the danger and either picks up the innocuous looking octopus or inadvertently contacts it. The bite is slight and produces at most only a small laceration with no more than a tiny drop of blood and little or no discoloration. Bites are usually reported as being painless. Often the victim doesn’t even know that he had been bitten. This can make it difficult for emergency and medical personnel to determine the cause of a patient’s distress. In fact, there is some question as to whether the octopus even needs to bite to envenomate a human. In cases with prolonged contact, the venom might pass directly through the skin. While most severe envenomations appear to involve bites, I can report developing mild local neurological symptoms after immersing my hand in sea water in which a large blue-ring had been shipped.

Seems like powerful stuff. Probably most dangerous if you try to eat or drink the toxin. The damage potential of even a small octopus is impressive:

The toxin was characterized as a low molecular weight, non-protein molecule and was named maculotoxin. It was recognized to be similar to tetrodotoxin (TTX), the extremely deadly toxin found in pufferfishes Experiments with rabbits showed that a single adult blue-ringed octopus weighing just 25 g possessed enough venom to fatally paralyze 10 large humans.

Why so much? And how many rabbits had to die to figure that out? Interesting to note how these octopuses happen to produce and carry the toxin:
Blue Ring

Their salivary glands harbor dense colonies of TTX-producing bacteria. The blue-rings have evolved a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria, providing them ideal living conditions while using the toxin they produce to subdue prey and as part of their highly advertised defense.

There’s a beautiful picture of one available HERE, probably taken just before it killed the photographer, William Tan.