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Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Time Elapse Painting

some pretty creative art. you have to watch the whole video to really get the full effect because it gets more interesting as it goes.

Aaron Spears

just wanted you guys to check this cat Aaron Spears out, he won modern drummers up and coming award in 2006, and trust me he is more than up and coming now, this guy is one of my favorite drummers right now. He plays for usher, so he has some hip hop influences, but this guy really combines it all, he has amazing grooves, rediculous fills, and more than enough style and soul. watching this guy really inspires me to stick with drumming. i dont need to say any more about, this guy just watch.

Art is Cool

you may have already caught this on high snobiety, but in case you didnt artist chuck anderson released a new set of prints, some available in t-shirt form. i chose two of my favorites but there are a few others i really liked. i wouldn't mind having of of those in my dorm room at school. you can see the rest here: chuck anderson

Mario

if mario had a drum set this is what it would sound like. gets good around half way through.

invisible

basically the article says its possible to make an acoustic invisibility cloak that when worn would keep you from being detected on radar.

But another race is underway - to make an acoustic invisibility cloak. Sounds waves behave enough like light waves to be manipulated in similar ways, if you can make the 'metamaterials' that make cloaks possible. Metamaterials can bend - refract - waves in the opposite direction to natural materials, allowing physicists to play new tricks with them.

No one has yet made an acoustic metamaterial, but simulations points to possible ways of doing it. Chinese researchers last year suggested embedding rubber-coated gold spheres and water-filled pockets containing air bubbles in an epoxy resin. And this week a team in the UK showed that carefully sculpted silica and a few carbon nanotubes could make acoustic metamaterials for perfect sound proofing or even protection against earthquakes.

Today a group at Duke University in North Carolina, US, went one better. They have worked out that it should be possible to make a 3D acoustic invisibility cloak - something that had still been in doubt.

Such cloaks could make submarine's invisible to sonar, or improve acoustics by letting sound travel through, say, pillars at a concert hall. What the Duke team has to say about the materials that could achieve that is unknown for now, as the new results will appear in the journal Physical Review Letters on January 11.

While I'm sure there is plenty more theoretical work to be done, the next step is clear. Who is going to physically build an acoustic metamaterial first?

The Mars Volta

just when you thought the mars volta couldn't be any weirder, they stoop to a new level of mind boggling inspiration for their newest album "Bedlam in Goliath". they first full length album "deloused in a commatorium" is based on their friend's dreams during a drug induced comma. Their follow up album "frances the mute" was inspired by the death of the bands sound technician, jeremy ward, after a heroin overdose. The band then wrote the album based on the characters from a diary ward had found in a car while he was a repo car salesman.

Their latest album however is based on their communications with an ancient Ouija board the band purchased in jerusalem. Lead singer Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Rodriguez-Lopez appearantly communicated with the board they named "soothsayer" and used its words directly as the basis for the lyrics to their songs. They also found poetry inside the board, which they had translated, and this too was used as insight for the albums lyrics. The band suggests their communications with the soothsayer were very spiritual, and they claim its energy almost lead to the break-up of their band collectively and individually. Omar Rodrigues-Lopez was quoted saying " it felt like i was fighting for my life, if that makes any sense, for my sanity". the band eventually destroyed the board, to end their struggle.

I find this inspiration for the album very interesting, and at first it almost made me a lil worried about listening to the album, but the band claims the album has a positive outlook on the the experience, a statement of triumph, not a statement of the evil the ouija board carried. The band even released an online game based on the soothsayer that can be played here soothsayer game
Im pretty pumped for the albums release on january 29th, hopefully its a little better than their last album amphutechture.

the song goliath can be heard below.

i knew i hated mosquitos

just read this pretty sweet article about the extinction of dinosaurs. According to the article biting and disease carrying insects may have played a large role in the extinction of dinosaurs. Recent studies have shown that an influx in flowering plants and insects that would pollinate them matches up with the time period of the extinction of dinosaurs better than the idea of asteroids hitting. This growth of flowering plants may have also depleted the amount of fern like plants that dinosaurs were thought to have thrived on. heres an exerpt that sums up the article pretty well.

"In dinosaur feces, we found nematodes, trematodes and even protozoa that could have caused dysentery and other abdominal disturbances. The infective stages of these intestinal parasites are carried by filth-visiting insects."
In the Late Cretaceous, Poinar said, the world was covered with warm-temperate to tropical areas that swarmed with blood-sucking insects carrying leishmania, malaria, intestinal parasites, arboviruses and other pathogens, and caused repeated epidemics that slowly-but-surely wore down dinosaur populations. Ticks, mites, lice and biting flies would have tormented and weakened them.
"Smaller and separated populations of dinosaurs could have been repeatedly wiped out, just like when bird malaria was introduced into Hawaii, it killed off many of the honeycreepers," Poinar said. "After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases. But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them. Massive outbreaks causing death and localized extinctions would have occurred."

dinosaur extinction article

All-Star balloting

there is only 18 days left to vote for the NBA all-star teams so get on it people. Im a little torn on the NBA all star voting process, because i feel the fans get too much say, and quite frankly most fans dont know shit and pick guys who are fun to watch play because they can dunk or shoot from deep rather than guys who are fun to watch because they play the game the way its supposed to be played. This annoys me because it means a lot of deserving players often get left off the rosters. I tried to choose guys who i would want playing on my basketball team if i was a coach. so with out further adue, here is my expertly chosen line-up for the east and west starters. Can you imagine having dwight howard kevin garnett and lebron james on the same team with jason kid running the fast break and chauncy billups running the set offense....WoW

West:
Carlos Boozer
Utah

Shawn Marion
Phoenix

Steve Nash
Phoenix

Deron Williams
Utah

Chris Kaman
LA Clippers

East:
Kevin Garnett
Boston

LeBron James
Cleveland

Jason Kidd
New Jersey

Chauncey Billups
Detroit

Dwight Howard
Orlando

new years

so this is my excuse for new years eve....

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net