Show Notes for TWS083: The World is Out To Get You (Sick)
A small personal note: this week I bid a sudden farewell to Chuck and Kreg of Technorama, on of my favourite
podcasts. They’ve decided to call it complete for the regular show, leaving me a bit in the lurch. I’ll survive, but it still hurts. I thank them both, and wish
them all the best in the future.
On the show this week:
- Life Will Go On..
- The birds and the bees do it: mysteries of sight unsound…
- Evilization?
- The other 90% of the show. (EXTRAS)
This week’s Challenge Question:
What one things are you going to do to change the future for the better?
Leave your answer in the comments, send your email to weirdshow[[at]]gmail.com, record your message via the MobaTalk client on the right hand side of Encaffeinated!, leave an answer on Facebook or call in at 206-203-2292.
Full links to all stories covered and many more after the jump!
- Theme Song: Caffeine by Grubspoon from The Podsafe Music Network
- Responses
- Thanks to: Matt, Arkle, Not Bruce, Pizza guy, 101 guy and (indirectly) Chuck and Kreg..
- Life Will Go On..
- When the will to live is strong, you put your heart into it… – Metro: Cigarette packs patch up hole in chest
- Maybe it can do that coin-roll thing, too.. – LiveScience: New Prosthetic Hand So Nimble an Amputee Can Type
- I don’t make typos so much as my fingers cringe when they get close to the keyboard.. – Ananova: Keyboards ‘dirtier than toilet seat’
- I think the use of the word “vomit” is a bit strong.. Perhaps “crap out” or “take a dump” might be more, uh.. ewww! – New Scientist: Amoebas may vomit E. coli on your greens
- Survival of the Fightest? – ScienceDaily: Humans May Lose Battle With Bacteria, Medicinal Chemist’s Research Shows
- How can this *not* be a top story somewhere?! – BBC: The man who grew a finger
- I wonder if that affects voicework for female announcers.. – New Scientist: ‘Sexy’ voice gives fertile women away
- I say: Oui! Oui! Let ‘er rip! Petez-vous immediatement! (Pardon my French.) *poot* (Also, pardon my French horn.) 🙂 – Ananova: Doctor says French must dare to fart
- Oh no! Profs might be people, too! Sheesh.. – Ananova: Cheeky dance lands prof in trouble
- Next year: women who love chocolate invited to test weight loss.. – Ananova: Women needed to test chocolate
- EXTRA: A different kind of pixie dust.. – Ananova: Mayor hands out free Viagra
- EXTRA: Another outbreak of the crazy schoolgirl disease, “over-reaction”. Also seen in environmental circles.. – cnews/AP: Over 50 girls succumb to ‘hysteria’
- EXTRA: “Help, he’s fallen and I can’t get up!” – Yahoo!/AP: Newspaper carrier finds woman pinned by husband’s dead body
- The birds and the bees do it: mysteries of sight unsound…
- Can birds see magnetic waves in the same way we see blue? – New Scientist: Birds can ‘see’ the Earth’s magnetic field
- Or are birds really little quantum detectors? … Huh? – New Scientist: Do birds see with quantum eyes?
- The lab animals get a lot of the cool toys. Microscopic lifespans demand it. – New Scientist: Virtual reality for flies puts humans in control
- “Kids, I stole the Honey” — a new movie from Pixar? – LiveScience: Bees Learn Thievery
- This sounds like some sort of scandal rag.. – LiveScience: Bug Has Sex with Orchids
- “Our God, who buzzeth in heaven..” – Ananova: Church-going bees
- On the Wildlife Channel: EXTREME DOLPHIN MIXED MARTIAL ARTS! – San Francisco Chronicle/AP: Dolphin dies after aerial collision at
- “Oh no! It’s a giant guard turtle! What shall we do?” I say, walk swiftly around it! – Practical Fishkeeping: Turtle rescued from life of drugs
- But really, it was when it updated its blog that the wildlife researchers felt their assumptions had been in error. – The UK Times: Swimming orang-utans, spearfishing exploits amaze the wildlife experts
- An early report of the coming of Cthulhu.. er.. “colossal squid”. – BBC: Colossal squid comes out of ice
- Is it surprising that something which is really big and needs to see in very dark places has a big eye? Still.. cool. – BBC: Colossal squid’s big eye revealed
- Finally, me and fish have something in common! Bummer… – BBC: No sex for all-girl fish species
- EXTRA: I’ve always been confused about how you have “de-oxygenated water”; wouldn’t that be hydrogen? – New Scientist: Growing ocean dead zones leave fish gasping
- EXTRA: Never send a generalist to do a specialist’s work.. – WIS10: WIS goes in search of the Lizard Man
- EXTRA: Not really six-legged, more four-legged with a half a cat stuck to it. Fix it or forget it, please! – Sky News: Six-Legged Kitty’s Life Is In The Balance
- EXTRA: Badgerbadgerbadgerbadgerbadger.. – NOVOSTI: Huge beaver rampages through Russian store “for vodka”
- FLYBY: It’s a snake! It’s a snake! Oh no, it’s a snake! – ScienceDaily: Legless Lizard And Tiny Woodpecker Among New Species Discovered In Brazil
- EXTRA: More Badgerbadgerbadgerbadgerbadger.. – AFP: New shrew discovered in Ireland
- EXTRA: Apparently, birds tune like an orchestra. Pop tunes like a keyboard. (groan) – New Scientist: Random babbling leads chicks to the perfect tune
- EXTRA: It’s like a cargo cult of the mouth… – Ananova: Pacific islanders’ West Country accent
- EXTRA: What goes boom in the night (in Baltimore)? – WJZ: Police Make Headway In Baltimore Co. Mystery
- EXTRA: Mankind, the natural sleep disorder (in Baltimore)? – MSNBC/AP: Arrest in town may settle light, noise mystery
- EXTRA: Disgruntled tenant, insane renter or do I see a coverup by the flast in the night (in Baltimore)? – WJZ: Baltimore Co. Light & Boom Mystery Solved
- EXTRA: Meanwhile, more disgruntled renters make boom elsewhere.. or not? – The Indy Channel: (O) Mysterious Lights, Boom Baffle Residents, Authorities
- EXTRA: Well, he put Mars on the map, at least… Or the Map on Mars, maybe.. – The Boston Globe: The Man Who Invented Mars
- EXTRA: Let’s all hope Mars stinks, ok? – New Scientist: Rover instrument to sniff out life on Mars
- EXTRA: Off to explore even *higher* realms of consciousness, perhaps? – BBC: LSD inventor Albert Hofmann dies
- EXTRA: We all see the world just as we wish. – Miller-McCune: See It … and Believe It or Not
- Evilization?
- FLYBY: Kinda misleading: they are actually self-assembling robots with the capability of the parts finding each other when separated. But who’ll form the head? – New Scientist: Shape-shifting robots take form
- FLYBY: This was just done so that the next generation of electronics professionals can hold it over their forebearers and say “betcha didn’t know about this, old man!” and the old men (and women!) can say “Oh yeah!? Well, in *my* day you didn’t need such things, whippersnapper!” – New Scientist: Engineers find ‘missing link’ of electronics
- FLYBY: Wait.. there might be some reality behind the notion of an armoured flying suit? … COOOL! WANT! – New Scientist: Iron Man: The science behind the fiction
- FLYBY: “And yeah, mankind will be shackled to their daemons, and unable to do commerce without these keepers of secrets.” (Ok, so I just made that up.) – New Scientist: Electronic ‘pet’ could replace passwords and PINS
- FLYBY: I have a hard enough time getting my camera to see the same things *I* do! – New Scientist: Quantum camera snaps objects it cannot ‘see’
- FLYBY: Let’s just hope it doesn’t crash or hang.. – New Scientist: Emergency 2.0 is coming to a website near you
- EXTRA: Be AMAZED! Be ASTOUNDED! Someone used Twitter as a COMMUNICATIONS MEDIUM! Sheesh.. Did they go through this when phones first came about? “Man uses ‘telephone’ device to call doctor”. – CNN: Student ‘Twitters’ his way out of Egyptian jail
- FLYBY: And yet, I can’t keep a birthday gift secret if I tried without UN inspectors knowing all about it! – The Telegraph: Chinese build secret nuclear submarine base
- FLYBY: I suspected it was “drafted”.. ROBOT RIGHTS! – MSNBC/AP: Israeli military enlists robotic soldier
- FLYBY: So, it really might have been “if you were the last women on Earth”. Or more accurately: “Ug!” – CNN/AP: Humans nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago, study says
- FLYBY: Wait.. so you’re saying that the corporations might have LYING or just plain WRONG? – The Independent: Exposed: the great GM crops myth
- FLYBY: It doesn’t make it the wrong decision, just not enough on its own.. – New Scientist: London congestion charge did not improve air quality
- FLYBY: Just because I can’t say when, precisely, the giant is going to step on you doesn’t mean that it’s not coming this way.. – New Scientist: Poor forecasting undermines climate debate
- I would love to try one, just to be decadent. Then again, they aren’t going to keep lots on hand, meaning that likely prepare it from frozen or only on reservation.. Still: drool… – Ananova: (O) Burger King launches £85 burger
- A not-so-deadly game of Chicken with PETA. Or: MEAT TREE! – CNN: Scientists offered $1 million to grow laboratory chicken
- EXTRA: And I thought the flooding around here was bad *now*.. – New Scientist: (O) North Pole could be ice free in 2008
- EXTRA: A unicycle meets a SegWay — on steroids! – Ananova: Balancing act
- EXTRA: “A nice drive with a view, he says.. Over a river, he says.. Well, where’s the bridge?” – Ananova: Tightrope trial
- EXTRA: Oprah was likely unable to hold her breath nearly that long. And woudln’t that be a boring show? “And he’s.. still holding his breath..” – Ananova: Blaine holds breath for 17 mins, 4 secs
- EXTRA: Moochers international? – Ananova: £10,000 mile trek for free
- EXTRA: Pink Floyd, flying high as ever.. – Ananova: Star offers reward for lost pig
- EXTRA: It’s a bar! It’s a barber! It’s both! “Shave and a haircut, two pints!?” – Ananova: Half cut?
- EXTRA: In most places, dropping your baby is tantamount to child abuse, not entirely for the health of the child.. BTW: the video accompanying this story is very odd, and will disturb parents. To me, it looked like it might be fun.. (to be the baby, not the dropper). – Reuters: Indian baby dropping ritual
- EXTRA: Suddenly I really feel the need to express my devotion to keeping the Net a non-tiered, flat-rate system.. – MSNBC: Your virginity for Net neutrality
- EXTRA: It’s an honest mistake: they were trying to rob a living guy, I’m assuming. – cnews/AP: 2 men cleared of trying to cash corpse’s check
- EXTRA: The problem was: it wasn’t from a dead guy.. – Ananova: Man tried to cash £180bn cheque
- EXTRA: Wasn’t that a movie? – Indy Star/AP: Blind homeowner captures intruder
- EXTRA: Now *this* I *know* was a film.. – The Lancashire Evening Post: Police confront ‘masked man with chainsaw’
- EXTRA: “Smell like crap. Crap.. and drugs!” – New Scientist: Urban drug habits sniffed out in sewage
- EXTRA: Fashion Nazis have invaded the postal system! Beware! – Ananova: Postman wore wrong shorts
- EXTRA: There is, apparently, no such thing as an “honest mistake” anymore. Also outdated: “no harm, no foul”, “common sense”, “understanding”, “compassion” and “thinking”. – Ananova: Boy, 7, taken into care over alcopop
- EXTRA: The plastic princess is on the front lines of cultural collapse once more! – Ananova: Barbie invades Iran
- EXTRA: Wow.. I only *wish* to be confused with a porn star. – Ananova: Porn mix-up lands woman in jail
- EXTRA: They should make a monitor t-shirt as well.. No, wait.. – Vous Pensez: The geekiest pants… ever?
- EXTRA: And the aren’t talking about munchkins here.. – The Telegraph: Cameras for school crossing wardens to fight ‘lollipop rage’
- EXTRA: Because everyone knows that short-haired people are perfectly moral.. Huh? – Lancashire Evening Post: Flirting men to get haircut punishment
- EXTRA: There is only one way to settle this.. mud wrestling! – The Register: Lesbians turn on lesbians in battle of Lesbos
- The other 90% of the show. (EXTRAS)
- EXTRA: Covering weird stuff takes dedication; Charles Fort spent much of his adult life doing it. – The UK Telegraph: The man who created the Fortean Times
- EXTRA: A heavy criticism based on speculation made on photograph evidence alone. Be careful how harsh your criticism is when that’s also the most common evidence of cryptids.. – Cryptomundo: Hobbit Hoax Claim: “Complete Lunacy”
- EXTRA: Somehow, this is meant to be a deterrent *against* cutting the heads off witches. Something feels *wrong* here.. – MSNBC/Reuters: Accused witch’s severed head set for museum?
- EXTRA: A whole new variation on the “got your nose!” gag, gone horribly wrong.. Send Viagra, stat! – Register: Congo lynch mobs attack penis-snatching sorcerers
- EXTRA: Repeat after me: coincidence does not prove causality! – The New York Times: Does Climate Change Mean More Witch Hunts?
- EXTRA: Is that a light draft, or a ghost whisper? – The Slough and Windsor Observer: Exorcist calls time on pub poltergeist
- EXTRA: A first-person account of a third-person occurence. – NewsMonster: ‘I died in Jerusalem in 1276’, says researcher who underwent hypnosis to reveal a former life
- EXTRA: I guess the rapture only took one person.. – cnews: Navy suspends search for missing ballooning priest
- EXTRA: A super-coconut tree that is split three ways and produces three times the fruit. – BBC: (O) Rare coconut tree on sale for $1m
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