Category Archives: Weird

Technology and Society, Weird

A Silver Lining In The Madoff Cloud

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It put an end to funding nonsense like this:

A typical apartment has three or four rooms in the shapes of either a cylinder, a cube, or a sphere. Rooms surround a kitchen-living room combination with bumpy, undulating floors and floor-to-ceiling ladders and poles. Dozens of colors, from school-bus yellow to sky blue, cover the walls, ceilings and other surfaces.

At least one tenant says he feels a little younger already. Nobutaka Yamaoka, who moved in with his wife and two children about two years ago, says he has lost more than 20 pounds and no longer suffers from hay fever, though he isn’t sure whether it was cured by the loft.

There is no closet, and Mr. Yamaoka can’t buy furniture for the living room or kitchen because the floor is too uneven, but he relishes the lifestyle. “I feel a completely different kind of comfort here,” says the 43-year-old video director. His wife, however, complains that the apartment is too cold. Also, the window to the balcony is near the floor, and she keeps bumping her head against the frame when she crawls out to hang up laundry, he says. (“That’s one of the exercises,” says Ms. Gins.)

“A different kind of comfort.” Yes, I suppose that’s one way to put it. But there’s a fly in the ointment:

Some transhumanists dismiss the couple’s architectural solution.

You don’t say.

“Human life has enough challenges in terms of our work and daily lives that we don’t need to invent new physical challenges for our bodies,” says Ray Kurzweil, a leading transhumanist figure in the U.S.

Well, the good news is that Madoff’s (and their) loss is our gain.

Political Commentary, Space, Weird

The Truth, At Last

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Why we haven’t been back to the moon:

The former head of the US lunar program, Wernher von Braun, said in one of his interviews several years later that certain extraterrestrial forces were even more powerful that humans could ever imagine. The scientist said that someone or something was watching every US-led flight to the Moon.

According to one of the versions, which seems to be rather unreal, all lunar programs were shut down 30 years ago because of the fear to encounter extraterrestrial beings and their immense power. Both the USSR and the USA realized that their presence on the Moon was not desirable at all.

The Earth’s natural satellite is a perfect platform for aliens and their spaceships. The Moon is not far from the Earth and it faces the planet with only one part, which means that aliens can rest safely on the other side of the Moon and they do not have to worry about telescopes. Ufologists say that there is quite a number of alien bases on the dark side of the Moon.

Well, if Ufologists say so, it must be true.

Actually if it were the deliberate policy to not have returned to the moon for the past thirty-seven years, but not explain why, I’m not sure what the government would have done or be doing differently.

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Science And Society, Social Commentary, Weird

The Really Big O

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I am not qualified to render an opinion on this subject:

The idea that birth can be orgasmic isn’t new. The British birth guru Sheila Kitzinger says that she has met “hundreds” of women during the course of her career who report experiencing orgasm during labour – some were hoping for it, others were taken completely by surprise. She herself has experienced it during three of her four labours (she has five daughters: one birth was twins). “It is difficult for a man to understand,” she says “hard, too, for any woman who has had an average hospital birth. But it can be one of the most profound psychosexual experiences in a woman’s life. Each contraction may bring a rush of joy so overwhelming that the pain recedes into the background.” She puts this partly down to simple biology. “The pressure of the baby’s head against the walls of the vagina and the fanning out of the tissues as the head descends bring for some women an unexpected sensation of sexual arousal, even of ecstasy.” But is this really an orgasm? Or just a very unusual sensation? “It can be orgasmic. People recognise it as an orgasm. And it can be a multiple orgasm, one with each push.”

Well, there can be a fine line between pain and pleasure, particularly when it comes to this sort of pain and pleasure.

Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Weird

A Bridge Too Far

15 Comments

You know, William Shatner had a three-word phrase for these people a few years back (the third was “life”):

Mr. Veazie, a manager at Underwriters Laboratories, built the chair himself last year, and has been gratified to find, since installing it in the living room in May, that “when someone comes in, it’s the first thing they comment on.”

You don’t say.

But I thought they didn’t like the word “Trekkie.” Isn’t it supposed to be “Trekker”?