Or how about “Sacculina”, the mind-control barnacle? [LINK]

“Upon finding a host crab, a female Sacculina will crawl over the crab’s surface until she finds a chink in the armor: a joint. She then ejects her protective shell, reducing herself to a gelatinous blob, and invades.

Inside the host, the parasite grows long, root-like tendrils throughout the crab’s body…… she renders the crab infertile, and creates a small opening in the crab’s back that will allow a male Sacculina to make residence there. Soon the crab is filled with millions of Sacculina eggs and larvae, and like a zombie, the crab cares for these eggs and larvae as though they were its own, losing all interest in mating. When a male crab is infected, the parasite alters its physiology and behavior to be female, to better care for the Sacculina’s young.”

Imagine such a thing happening to a human? You’d essentially be powerless within your own body!

And lastly, the parasitic worm “Leucochloridium paradoxum” which infects snails. The snails eat worm eggs, the eggs grow inside the snail and …

In the snail’s digestive gland the miracidia change into cercaries and produce sporocystes, long tubes that can contain several hundred cercaries.

One or several of these tubes stretch until into the snail’s tentacles and begin to pulsate in there. The obvious colour and the sporocystes’ movement attracts birds that hack for the snail’s tentacles. The bird rips off the snail’s tentacles which cannot be withdrawn because of the sporocystes tubes inside.

Inside the bird’s digestive tract the cercaries change into the parasite’s adult stage, which then reproduces sexually and lays eggs. Thos are distributed by the bird to infect further snails, which closes the generation cycle.

So what does this tell us? What nugget of wisdom can be extracted from these disgusting and unnerving examples of the natural world?

Nobody cares for the snail as its getting eaten alive.  No one sheds a tear when the crab is slowly infested and paralyzed by tentacles.  The karma of the universe does not go out of balance whilst the snappers’ tongue is being eaten out of its mouth.

Life is ruthless. Life does whatever works. Life does not care and it’s going to mow you down if you’re not careful.

From Steve’s site:

“Big Mess o’ Wires 1 is an original CPU design. It does not use any commercial CPU, but instead has a custom CPU constructed from dozens of simple logic chips. Around this foundation is built a full computer with support for a keyboard, sound, video, and external peripherals.

My original goals were:

• Build the CPU from scratch, primarily using basic 7400-series logic. No 6502, Z-80, etc.
• Keep the hardware complexity to a minimum. I’m not an electrical engineer.
• Be capable of running “real” programs, not a 4-bit CPU or toy machine.
• Provide a way to interface with a PC.
• Be fast enough to run interesting programs interactively”

Interestingly I also used the 74HC595 shift registers on my LED matrix project.

Steve’s project doesn’t use soldering but rather each wire connecting the chips is wound by hand around a special gold leg on the proto board. This is an “old school” technique which takes a lot longer than soldering but if you make a mistake it’s much easier to recover from.

Things like this always fascinate me when I contrast to software development in the “real world”. Here’s a guy that had a direction, knew what he wanted to achieve and set about doing it. It’s just one person so it took a long time but he got there.

If you wanted to get 2 people to build the same thing, working as a team, my guess is the likelihood of success goes drastically down. In fact on a project like this with the addition of that one extra person you’re probably going to fail the first time.

So why is that?

Contrast this with the process of industrial ship building or air-liner development. Those projects involve literally thousands of people, each doing a small job. In the case of the air force or Department of Defense you now have thousands of vendors. And it seems from the Discovery Channel that those projects generally finish on time.

Why is that?

The common thread is hard to pin down but to me it’s people who know what they’re doing.

The ship building scenario is a very long process but infinitely broken down into minute detail. Each component, each step is itself extremely well defined and well understood. So in spite of its size, the ship building process has

• a LOW number of unknowns
• very RIGID requirements
• and a LARGE number of people and moving parts.

Now in the case of how to build a CPU from scratch, starting out I’d say Steve knew very little. I would venture (and it’s no reflection on Steve) that almost the entire process was an unknown. So how was he successful?

In contrast to the ship example he had

• a HIGH degree of unknowns
• very FLUID requirements
• a LOW number of people

Of course things are never this clear cut which is why software development is so tricky. You need to constantly manage these three variables of Unknowns vs Constraints (requirements) vs Headcount and keep them in balance if you’re gonna be successful.

And so I draw my conclusion; Any time you have a HIGH degree of unknowns with RIGID requirements and a LARGE number of people you are destined for FAILURE.

The corollary is any time you have a LOW number of unknowns with FLUID requirements and a LOW number of people, you are destined for SUCCESS.

I know which team I’d like to be on.

I guess some folks really do run barefoot but if you’re not sure or don’t have the feet for it you can always grab a pair of “Vibram Five Fingers” shown here.

These are probably the strangest looking things I’ve seen, like gloves for your feet. I guess that makes traditional sneakers more like mittens for your feet.

These things seems to be fairly popular and a well developed product and I’m told they have to be broken in. Check ‘em out here: Vibram FiveFingers: Sprint-Male.

Now basically, the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motions of conductors and fluxes, it is produced by the modial interaction of magnetoreluctance and capacitive directance.

The original machine had a baseplate of prefabulated Amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzel vanes so-fitted to the ambifacient lunar wane shaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented.

The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a nonreversible trem’e pipe to the differential girdlespring on the up-end of the grammeters.

The Turbo Encabulator has now reached a high level of develement, and is being successfully used in the operation of nofer trunnions. Moreover, whenever a barescent skor motion is required, it may be employed in conjunction with a drawn reciprocating dingle arm to reduce sinusodial depleneration.

You can watch the full video here:

Speedcabling is performed with short, medium, and long cables. In the United States, where the sport originated, these cables are of length 7, 14, and 21 feet. International speedcabling competitions utilize 2, 3, and 7 meter cables.

“There are two events that are typically conducted. In 2-2-2 competition, the contestant’s set consists of two of each cable. In 4-4-4 competition there are four of each type of cable.”

“CAT-5 Ethernet cables are to be used. Contestants may use any cable they wish, as long as it is capable of carrying 100Mb/s prior to competition. During competition, the colors red, blue, and yellow are used for the short, medium, and long cables respectively. ”

“The process of bundling the cables must be applied uniformly and methodically, to ensure the integrity of our sport. During official competition bundling may only be performed by certified bundlers. ”

You can find out more at http://www.speedcabling.org/

I am not hugely into comics but there are a couple I’ve happened across in my time that I think would’ve made FAR more interesting movies than Watchmen. Most are from 2000AD.

Strontium Dog, Portrait of a Mutant: Johnny Alpha is a mutant bounty hunter, a result of strontium-90 radiation poisoning. He has no pupils (always cool) and he can see through walls. His father’s a prominent politician who shuns Johnny and ends up passing laws which outlaw mutants. Johnny leaves home and ends up leading an army of Strontium Mutants in an uprising. Johnny becomes a bounty hunter and subsequently hunts down his own father and brings him to justice. Other characters include his partner Wulf Sternhammer (a viking), Gronk (a weird alien with multiple hearts) and Middenface McNulty, a Scottish mutant who likes saying “help ma boab”.

OR

Judge Death: Judge Death was the coolest character. A spirit from another dimension where life is a crime and the punishment is…death. He could reach into a man’s body and squeeze his heart until he died. There are a few story lines with Death that’d make good movies, most notably the attack of the Dark Judges (Fear, Fire, Death and Mortis) where Judge Anderson captures Death in her mind and I think Dredd freezes her in a plastic block, capturing him. Or “Judgement on Gotham” in which Death crosses over into the Batman universe. Dredd comes too, along with Mean Machine and the Scarecrow. Great artwork from Bisely as always.

Last one:

Slaine: The Horned God. Slaine is a mythical warrior – similar to Conan but with much more depth. He’s Celtic in origins and has a great story arc around his relationship with the Earth Goddess Danu. When in battle he can channel power from the Earth and go into these “warp spasms”. Hacking and slashing with his axe “Brain Biter”. Anyway, some amazing art again in The Horned God. In this story Slaine unites the tribes of Ireland to fight off the Formorians and Balor of the Evil Eye.

Slaine I think would make an EXCELLENT movie, sort of a darker Lord of the Rings type story with pan-dimensional dragons and much more gore.

I don’t know why, with all the amazing storylines out there they had to pick “Watchmen” to make into a movie. What a crock.

I kid you not. Yes chess boxing is real. The video below is not a spoof.

“A match between two opponents consists of up to eleven alternating rounds of boxing and chess sessions, starting with a four-minute chess round followed by two minutes of boxing and so on. Between rounds there is a one minute pause, during which competitors change their gear. The form of chess played is speed chess in which each competitor has a total of twelve minutes for the whole game. Competitors may win by knockout, checkmate, a judge’s decision or if their opponent’s twelve minutes of chess time elapses. If a contestant does not make a move in the chessround, he will be issued a warning by the referee and he must then make a move within the next 10 seconds.”

This leads to a very sweaty chess board with the occasional drop of blood on the white squares and a rook to the eye.

“The NeoCube is an entertainment device like no other in the world.
Composed of 216 individual high-energy rare-earth magnets, the NeoCube allows you to create and recreate an outrageous number of shapes and patterns. The NeoCube Is literally a puzzle with billions of solutions. Your NeoCube will provide you with hours and hours of unequaled entertainment!”

Order it here [LINK]

Sit flat on the floor with your legs in front of you. Using only one leg and without putting your hands on the floor, put your foot on the floor and stand up. The only part of your leg that can touch the floor is your foot. You can’t go onto a knee or anything like that and you can’t pull yourself up using your hands.

Give it a try right this minute!

There’s no trick to it, just put your foot down and stand up. I have not met anyone (yet) that can do it. Try each leg. It’s a tremendous exercise if you can do it more than once.

Turns out John is a mathematician, professor and gymnast also! Interesting guy. What’s even more interesting are the strength exercises he was capable of. From Wikipedia:

“As an amateur gymnast in the 1950s, 6’2″ and 180 pounds, Gill specialized in the competitive rope climb and the still rings, achieving a time of 3.4 seconds for the 20′ rope climb (from seated position on the floor, arms only) and accomplishing a number of difficult stunts on the rings, including inverted and olympic crosses, giant swings, and slow pulls from hang to handstand. He also engaged in what are now called bodyweight exercises similar to gymnastics, achieving seven one-arm pullups with the right arm and five with the left, several one-finger one-arm pullups, one-arm pullups carrying twenty pounds, one-arm pullups on a one-half inch ledge, and one-arm front levers.”

At this point I cannot do seven two arm pullups. One arm seems impossible.