Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Joel Anaya, a Hospitality Business Management student from Washington State University, studied entries from Web sites like dinnersfromhell.com, flightsfromhell.com, and notalwaysright.com to identify seven classes of annoying customers. Now, Anaya's data set was certainly limited, but his breakdown seems pretty good to me. I'm not sure though if "loud talkers/laughers" would fit under "Service rule breakers." From Washington State University:
In analyzing the different accounts, Anaya came up with the following categories of customer sabotage.
• "Badmouthers," the most common saboteurs, used profanity and raised their voices.
"It's crazy what a few bad words can do, how uncomfortable they can really make other customers nearby," says Anaya.
• "Paranoid shouters," a close second in Anaya's tabulations, are "really irate customers who don't know how to handle themselves." They are like badmouths but start yelling at the first sign of inadequate service or a perceived injustice.
• Customers with poor hygiene were a close third.
"Quite frankly, they smelled," says Anaya. Or they sweat on to other people, picked their noses, sneezed openly, or all of the above. They are most often found on airplanes.
• Some customers make outlandish requests, like the one who insisted on paying at a grocery store in pennies while others had to wait.
• "Service rule breakers" don't follow social norms, like waiting their turn instead of cutting in line.
• "Bad parents with bad kids" refuse to discipline unruly children whose behavior is bothering others.
This category made Anaya nervous, as if he might be blaming the parent on a flight whose child is crying uncontrollably. But he let the data speak for itself.
"I just made it objective," he says. "'This kind of customer affected this kind of service experience.'"
• Unknowledgeable customers will belabor service workers with endless questions or minor quibbles while others have to wait.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Remember AT&T's "You Will" campaign from the early 1990s? Here's its predecessor, from 1961. Starring:
* The wireless Bellboy Pager, which was introduced commercially in 1962
* The Data-phone, which was supposed to revolutionize business communications
* The videophone—shown as a credit-card-reading vertical two-way television
* The card-reading phone or automatic dialer, which would dial a number from small plastic punch cards, introduced in 1961
* Oh, and package delivery via rocket (which had just been tested in 1959).
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
There Are No Ghosts is a delightful and creepy children's book written by my niece Amanda Pescovitz, a high school senior, and illustrated by her classmate Ellen Wang. The book was born from an award-winning poem that inspired the fantastic (and fantastical) art. The illustrations landed a silver key in a Scholastic Art competition. While I admit I can't be entirely objective, I honestly do think it's a terrific book. My kids (6 and 3) got a real kick out of the surprise ending. (SPOILER ALERT) It's true, there may be no such thing as ghosts. But the title doesn't say anything about zombies!
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
From 1957, "Private Dreams and Public Nightmares," an incredibly weird and fantastic BBC sound experiment by writer Frederick Bradnum, pioneering electronic music composer Daphne Oram, and producer Donald McWhinnie. Oram went on to co-found the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the massively influential sound effects and music studio. From McWhinnie's narration introducing the piece:
This programme is an experiment. An exploration. It's been put together with enormous enthusiasm and equipment designed for other purposes. The basis of it is an unlimited supply of magnetic tape, recording machine, razor blade, and some thing to stick the bits together with. And a group of technicians who think that nothing is too much trouble - provided that it works.
"You take a sound. Any sound. Record it and then change its nature by a multiplicity of operations. Record it at different speeds. Play it backwards. Add it to itself over and over again. You adjust filters, echoes, acoustic qualities. You combine segments of magnetic tape. By these means and many others you can create sounds which no one has ever heard before. Sounds which have indefinable and unique qualities of their own. A vast and subtle symphony can be composed from the noise of a pin dropping. In fact one of the most vibrant and elemental sounding noises in tonight's program me started life as an extremely tinny cowbell.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Above, an ad that recently ran in The Guardian newspaper. “The government of a Middle Eastern state is recruiting a senior torturer to work in a well-equipped prison. Our ideal candidate would be prepared to inflict extreme pain and suffering… Candidates will be expected to inspire a small but enthusiastic team." The ad is part of a new awareness campaign for the Freedom From Torture medical foundation. Other positions they are advertising for include Abuser and Kidnapper. Both of those pay much more than Torturer. "Career Prospects in the Pain Business" (Design Observer)
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
We've postedbefore about researchers exploring slime molds as a kind of bio-computer capable of some amazing accomplishments in information processing. Recently, computer scientist Andrew Adamtzky of the University of the West of England in Bristol and his colleagues used a slime mold to devise optimal interstate highway systems for the United States, Britain, Mexico, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Canada (above). He will detail his latest slime systems in a forthcoming issue of the scientific journal Complex Systems, "devoted to the science, mathematics, and engineering of systems with simple components but complex overall behavior." For a teaser, check out Adamatzky's recent op-ed in the New York Times, titled "The Wisdom of Slime."
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
London's Hayward Gallery is mounting an exhibition of Invisible Art. The exhibition includes pieces such as Andy Warhol's Invisible Sculpture, essentially an empty pedestal, and, seen above, Tom Friedman's "1000 Hours of Staring," a large blank sheet of paper that he looked at repeatedly over five years. They should play John Cage's 4'33" as the exhibit soundtrack. From The Telegraph:
Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, said: ''I think visitors will find that there is plenty to see and experience in this exhibition of invisible art. From the amusing to the philosophical, you will be able to explore an invisible labyrinth that only materializes as you move around it, see an artwork that has been created by the artist staring at it for 1000 hours, walk through an installation designed to evoke the afterlife, and be in the presence of Andy Warhol's celebrity aura.
''This exhibition highlights that art isn't about material objects, it's about setting our imaginations alight, and that's what the artists in this show do in many varied ways.''
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Here is Terry Gilliam in 1970 explaining how he made the classic "fig leaf" stop-motion animation for Monty Python's Flying Circus, in a spare bedroom at his apartment. (via Dangerous Minds)
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Rob Flickenger made a handheld Tesla coil gun. It's amazing and amazingly dangerous. Don't do this. Live vicariously through Flickenger instead. "The Tesla Gun" (dɸ/dt)
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
A dead bird found in a southeastern Turkey village caused a stir when it was noticed that the bird was wearing a metal ring labeled "Israel" around its leg. Apparently, some were suspicious that the European Bee-eater may have been carrying a spy chip in its beak. From the BBC:
The BBC's Jonathan Head, in Istanbul, says the regional office of the Turkish agriculture ministry examined the colorfully plumed corpse and assured residents of the village, near the city of Gaziantep, that it was common practice to fit a ring to migratory birds in order to track their movements.
An official at the ministry told the BBC that it took some effort to persuade local police that the little bee-eater posed no threat to national security.
At one point a counterterrorism unit became involved in the case.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
In this video, a woman known as Cathy, who is unable to speak or move any of her limbs or torso, controls a robot arm with her mind to take a sip of coffee. This fantastic breakthrough is reported in the current issue of the science journal Nature. Cathy has been implanted with a BrainGate neural interface (below left), the same technology that previously enabled two individuals to control computer cursors with thought alone. One of the lead researchers is Brown University neuroengineer Leigh Hochberg. I visited Leigh more than 13 years ago when he was a grad student at Emory University. He introduced me to monkeys who had received neuroimplants in his lab. At the time, Leigh was just trying to record the signals from the monkeys' brains while also dealing with the implants' proclivity to move around, reducing the quality of the signal over time. Leigh was humble, cautiously optimistic, and deeply dedicated. Amazing how far this research has come. From Nature:
The (latest) study participants — known as Cathy and Bob — had had strokes that damaged their brain stems and left them with tetraplegia and unable to speak. Neurosurgeons implanted tiny recording devices containing almost 100 hair-thin electrodes in the motor cortex of their brains, to record the neuronal signals associated with intention to move.
In a trial filmed in April last year and presented with the paper, Cathy, who had her stroke 15 years ago and received the implants in 2005, used her thoughts to steer a robot arm to grasp a bottle of coffee and lift it to her lips. She drank and smiled.
‘We’ll never forget that smile,” says Hochberg...
In the longer term, the scientists want to dispense with the wires that must be attached to a patient’s skull; wireless systems are in development… Even further in the future, researchers hope to dispense with the robot arms and direct the decoded brain signals straight to the patient’s own muscles.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
For three decades, camera company Kodak had a secret deep inside an underground lab in its Rochester, New York research facility: weapons-grade uranium and a californium neutron flux multiplier. (No, not a flux capacitor.) They stored 3.5 pounds of the uranium, apparently not enough to make a nuclear weapon but still not something you'd expect to find in most corporate research labs. The Union of Concerned Scientists are, well, concerned. From CNN:
Kodak turned the material over to the government in 2007, under heavy security. But for more than 30 years, the company had a device called a californium neutron flux multiplier, or CFX, in a specially built labyrinth beneath Building 82 at its labs near Rochester, New York. The device was about the size of a refrigerator.
It was not a reactor, but rather a hunk of metal emitting radiation. Its purpose was to create a beam of neutrons to use for scanning and testing other materials. The device's primary source of neutron radiation was the radioactive element californium, but the stream of neutrons produced by the californium was multiplied by passing it through a lattice of highly enriched uranium U-235, whose nuclear fission released additional neutrons.
According to a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Kodak's uranium was highly enriched -- to a level approaching 93.4%. That is the type of weapons-grade material that U.S. government agencies are trying to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on…
Kodak says it never intended to hide the CFX, and it was licensed by both state and federal officials. But the fact that the company was handling highly enriched uranium was never widely publicized.
OK, they're not brass, they're aluminum. 
The BBC's Jonathan Head, in Istanbul, says the regional office of the Turkish agriculture ministry examined the colorfully plumed corpse and assured residents of the village, near the city of Gaziantep, that it was common practice to fit a ring to migratory birds in order to track their movements.
Kodak turned the material over to the government in 2007, under heavy security. But for more than 30 years, the company had a device called a californium neutron flux multiplier, or CFX, in a specially built labyrinth beneath Building 82 at its labs near Rochester, New York. The device was about the size of a refrigerator.
It was not a reactor, but rather a hunk of metal emitting radiation. Its purpose was to create a beam of neutrons to use for scanning and testing other materials. The device's primary source of neutron radiation was the radioactive element californium, but the stream of neutrons produced by the californium was multiplied by passing it through a lattice of highly enriched uranium U-235, whose nuclear fission released additional neutrons.