Archive for July, 2006

Melt Down Your Pennies!!

"The penny is going to disappear soon unless something changes in the economics of commodities," says Robert Hoge, an expert on North American coins at The American Numismatic Society.

A new push to do away with the penny is being considered, which will mean rounding to the nearest nickel on all purchases. Myninjaplease! You can’t screw me out of my pennies…

While this isn’t the first time officials have tried to remove the coin, this is the first time it has cost more than 1 cent to make a penny [currently it costs 1.2 cents]. So clearly the ninja thing to do would be do melt down these suckas and cash in while you can… or make shurikens.

article at CNN

Aqua

"In an increasingly dense city like Chicago, views from a new tower must be negotiated between existing buildings. Aqua tower considers criteria such as views, solar shading and function to derive a vertical system of contours that gives the structure its sculptural form. Its vertical topography is defined by its outdoor terraces that gradually change in plan over the length of the tower. These terraces offer a strong connection to the outdoors and allow inhabitants to occupy the building faA§ade and city simultaneously. The result is a highly sculptural building when viewed obliquely that transforms into a slender rectangle from further away. Its powerful form suggests the limestone outcroppings and geologic forces that shaped the great lakes region."*

Ninjaplease! Look at this thing! So I’m not going to take credit on this, I peeped it on archidose, but I felt that you all needed to see it. More info on Aqua, in Chicago, at ChicagoReader, which has a pretty interesting article on new skyscrapers in Chi city, and at the designers page, Studio Gang. I once tried to start a gang in studio class, but there just weren’t enough ninjas around…

*quote from Studio Gang’s homepage, images from Archidose

My Ninja, Please! 7/21/06: Randy Moss opens fruit-juice franchise

First 50 cent then Randy Moss.AA Ninjas are gettin into juice, son!AA How bugged out would you be if you walked into a juice store and this tall-ass ninja sold you a blueberry smoothie? (ninjas prefer blueberry)

That would never happen you say? Oh ho-ho, ho… check him out.

"CHARLESTON, W.Va. a€" Randy Moss walked behind the counter in a pinstripe suit with a red striped tie, traded his jacket for an apron, took off his sunglasses and went to work a€" as the owner of a new fruit-juice store.

Making smoothies gave Moss another chance to smooth out a rift with his home state. "

Full Article Via: Star Tribune

The Retro Future

A group of B&W HDR shots of futuristic buildings abandoned about twenty years ago before completition. They’re sick! Check them out.

Juggling Callers

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LG have partnered with DMC and have introduced a new phone aimed at DJs…AAAA

"You’ll notice the scrollwheel on the left, which acts in a similar way to that on an iPod. The menu is arranged in a circle, to optimise this. It also allows you to make silly scratching noises over any track you play on the inbuilt MP3 player, just one of the ‘proper DJ’ effects you can mess around with."

Article Via: Techdigest

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UK Officials Mull Carbon Trading System

In the wake of the raw environmental truths that are pollution and global warming UK officials have begun to look into a possible "carbon trading system."AA The system would operate by rationing out a carbon allowance that could be spent with a sort of credit card for gas, air travel, etc.AA God forbid your carbon runs out, though.AA Then you would be charged for extra carbon.AA My ninja, please!

"The overall points distributed would decrease each year as the U.K. aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The system is unlikely to happen in the short term, and Miliband admits that it’s "easy to dismiss the idea as too complex administratively, too utopian, or too much of a burden for citizens." But individuals account for 44 percent of Britain’s emissions, and Miliband believes a CO2 trading system could be fair and effective."

Source Article from Grist Magazine

Yahoo to Offer DRM-free MP3s (Holleratchaboy!)

It stands to reason that if you already done paid your $0.99 per song for your Gnarls Barkley tracks from ITMS that you might be able to, I don’t know, copy them wherever you want, agreed? Well, Yahoo agrees too and is pushing forward with their eventual plans to sell all of their music with no restrictions. Myninjaplease.com wonders what the record companies think of that idea (and doesn’t particularly care).

Ok Granted, the only song available right now is some Jessica Simpson track… and granted it’s two bucks… but it’s still interesting enough for us to drop the link on ya.

Full Story Via: Wired.com

RFK and Brad Blog

There is a great interview with RFK on Brad Blog.AA Also, if you ninjas are interested, take a look at the video of them appearing together on court TV.AA The following is an excerpt.

BRAD BLOG: In your book, "Crimes Against Nature," you said that Bush won the 2004 election because of an information deficit caused by a breakdown in our national media. You go on to say that "Bush was re-elected because of the negligence of-and deliberate deception by-the American press." Your recent article in "Rolling Stone" seems to suggest that your opinion has changed, focusing more on the fraud and deception in Ohio with the computerized voting machines. What was the most important thing that made you suspect fraud and decide to investigate the 2004 election?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, my opinion hasn’t changed, that the press has been negligent, and that the large amount of support for the President, and for the people that did vote for the President, that large numbers of them would not have done so, had they known the truth about his policies, and his record. You say my opinion changed, but it hasn’t changed.

You know I’ve known this for many years, because of my anecdotal experience. I give about 40 speeches a year, in red states to Republican audiences, and I get the same enthusiastic responses from those audiences as I get from Liberal college audiences. The only difference is, is that the Republicans often say to me, "How come we’ve never heard this before?" I made the conclusion many years ago that there’s not a huge values difference between Red State Republicans and Blue State Democrats. The distinction is really informational. 80% of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on. And my anecdotal conclusion was confirmed by a survey done immediately after the 2004 election called the PIPA report, which tested Bush supporters and Kerry supporters based upon their knowledge of current events. It found that among Bush supporters, they were widespread in its interpretations, or there were factual errors in the way that they viewed Bush’s major public policy initiatives.

For example, 75% of the Republican respondents believed that Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center, and 72% believed that WMD had been found in Iraq. And most of them believed that the war in Iraq had strong support among Iraq’s Muslim neighbors and our traditional allies in Europe, which of course is wrong. The Democrats as a whole had a much more accurate view of those events. And then PIPA went back twice to these same people. The first time it went back to the people that had these misinterpretations, and asked them where they were getting their news, and invariably they said talk radio and FOX news. And PIPA went back a third time, and made inquiries about their fundamental values, and it did start with a string of hypotheticals:

"What if there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? What if Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with bombing the World Trade Center? What if the U.S. Invasion of Iraq had little support among Iraq’s Muslim neighbors and was largely opposed by Iraq’s Muslim neighbors, and by our troops and allies in Europe? Should we have still gone in?" And roughly 80% of Dem and 80% of Rep said the same thing, "We should not." And so the values were the same. It was the facts, the information, it was the access to information that was different.

BB: Are you then adding a layer of suspicion about the direct manipulation and fraudulent counting through computerized voting?

Thanks to Pheez for sending this in.
Click here for more.

Rat Brain Trained to Fly Jet (Army of Ninja Assassins Soon to Follow…)

Yeah, we know that title is a total mind-fiduck, but such is life.AA And yes, we mean the brain; no body, just the brain.

Scientists from the University of Florida first grew a "brain" from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a rat embryo, and if growing brains wasn’t enough, they then proceeded to teach it how to play elaborate videogames.AA The Brain first struggled in the cockpit of a simulated F-22 jet (was The Brain aware that it was only a simulation, and if not, was this ethical treatment of The Brain?), but rapidly learned to keep the plane’s trajectory on point, even in hurricane-force wind.
Here’s a quote from Dr. Thomas DeMarsh, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at University of Florida and, more notably, the evil genius who actually had the cojones to begin training the army of rats that will soon rule the empire of the united states… ahem… well then, let’s get on with the quote, shall we:

"When we first hooked them up, the plane ‘crashed’ all the time…but over time, the neural network slowly adapts as the brain learns to control the pitch and roll of the aircraft. After a while, it produces a nice straight and level trajectory."

Scientists hope that their research will lead to the integration of organic components into machines and vice-versa. Well, I could go either way on that one, but let’s save that for another post, mmmkay?

Check out The Brain via The Register