Isegoria

I had assumed that someone was already doing this. From Second Life Figures Get a Life:

Buckbee is the first to get his service off the ground. The virtual designer creates a three-dimensional model of a client’s avatar using screenshots taken in the world of Second Life. He uses an open-source design tool known as the OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam OpenLab. After tweaking the model to make sure that there are no overly fragile parts — hair has been a big worry — Buckbee sends the design to the client for final approval. The digital file is then turned into reality using a 3-D printer made by Z Corp.

The final price? Typically less than $100, which has convinced some denizens of Second Life to give the process a go.

Stephen Browne graduated with an anthropology degree, lived in eastern Europe for a while, and did a year in “the Kingdom” — Saudi Arabia. He “went there with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances,” and came back with some Observations on Arabs:

1. They don’t think the same way we do.
2. When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.
3. Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.
4. Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can’t maintain it either.
5. They do not think of obligations as running both ways.
6. In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites.
7. In rhetoric, they don’t mean to be taken seriously and they don’t understand when we do.
8. They don’t place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.
9. They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do.
10. We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.
11. We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.
12. Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

Read the whole article.

From Creating Passionate Users:

I highly recommend this video of judo newaza (matwork) — all very dynamic. Just turn down the volume before you start it up — unless you really want the hip-hop soundtrack playing.

In Sleeping with Cannibals, Paul Raffaele describes his trek into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, to visit the Korowai, a tribe known for killing and eating khakhua, the (male) witches who cause disease:

After we eat a dinner of river fish and rice, Boas joins me in a hut and sits cross-legged on the thatched floor, his dark eyes reflecting the gleam from my flashlight, our only source of light. Using Kembaren as translator, he explains why the Korowai kill and eat their fellow tribesmen. It’s because of the khakhua, which comes disguised as a relative or friend of a person he wants to kill. “The khakhua eats the victim’s insides while he sleeps,” Boas explains, “replacing them with fireplace ash so the victim does not know he’s being eaten. The khakhua finally kills the person by shooting a magical arrow into his heart.” When a clan member dies, his or her male relatives and friends seize and kill the khakhua. “Usually, the [dying] victim whispers to his relatives the name of the man he knows is the khakhua,” Boas says. “He may be from the same or another treehouse.”

I ask Boas whether the Korowai eat people for any other reason or eat the bodies of enemies they’ve killed in battle. “Of course not,” he replies, giving me a funny look. “We don’t eat humans, we only eat khakhua.”

An example:

On our third day of trekking, after hiking from soon after sunrise to dusk, we reach Yafufla, another line of stilt huts set up by Dutch missionaries. That night, Kembaren takes me to an open hut overlooking the river, and we sit by a small campfire. Two men approach through the gloom, one in shorts, the other naked save for a necklace of prized pigs’ teeth and a leaf wrapped about the tip of his penis. “That’s Kilikili,” Kembaren whispers, “the most notorious khakhua killer.” Kilikili carries a bow and barbed arrows. His eyes are empty of expression, his lips are drawn in a grimace and he walks as soundlessly as a shadow.

The other man, who turns out to be Kilikili’s brother Bailom, pulls a human skull from a bag. A jagged hole mars the forehead. “It’s Bunop, the most recent khakhua he killed,” Kembaren says of the skull. “Bailom used a stone ax to split the skull open to get at the brains.” The guide’s eyes dim. “He was one of my best porters, a cheerful young man,” he says.

Bailom passes the skull to me. I don’t want to touch it, but neither do I want to offend him. My blood chills at the feel of naked bone. I have read stories and watched documentaries about the Korowai, but as far as I know none of the reporters and filmmakers had ever gone as far upriver as we’re about to go, and none I know of had ever seen a khakhua’s skull.

The fire’s reflection flickers on the brothers’ faces as Bailom tells me how he killed the khakhua, who lived in Yafufla, two years ago. “Just before my cousin died he told me that Bunop was a khakhua and was eating him from the inside,” he says, with Kembaren translating. “So we caught him, tied him up and took him to a stream, where we shot arrows into him.”

Bailom says that Bunop screamed for mercy all the way, protesting that he was not a khakhua. But Bailom was unswayed. “My cousin was close to death when he told me and would not lie,” Bailom says.

At the stream, Bailom says, he used a stone ax to chop off the khakhua’s head. As he held it in the air and turned it away from the body, the others chanted and dismembered Bunop’s body. Bailom, making chopping movements with his hand, explains: “We cut out his intestines and broke open the rib cage, chopped off the right arm attached to the right rib cage, the left arm and left rib cage, and then both legs.”

The body parts, he says, were individually wrapped in banana leaves and distributed among the clan members. “But I kept the head because it belongs to the family that killed the khakhua,” he says. “We cook the flesh like we cook pig, placing palm leaves over the wrapped meat together with burning hot river rocks to make steam.”

Such noble savages, uncorrupted by civilization…

Making Water From Thin Air is now feasible, and it can save the military a lot of money and logistical hassle:

Once deployed, the machines could reduce the cost of logistical support for supplying water to the troops in Iraq by billions of dollars, said Stuart Roy, spokesman of the DCI Group, Aqua Sciences’ public affairs firm.

The cost to transport water by C-17 cargo planes, then truck it to the troops, runs $30 a gallon. The cost, including the machines from Aqua Sciences, will be reduced to 30 cents a gallon, Roy said.

Several systems on the market can create water through condensation, but the process requires a high level of humidity.

Aqua Sciences’ machines only require 14 percent humidity, Roy said. “That’s why this technology is superior and why they are getting the contracts.”

Scott Adams (Dilbert) says, Your Ancestors Disgust Me:

It has come to my attention that many of your ancestors were pedophiles. They probably didn’t know it, since marrying 15-year old girls was considered “normal” by those perverts. And I’m sure they had excuses such as the fact that the life expectancy was 17. So maybe they rationalized it by saying they had to start pinching out new farm hands before the plague got them. Blah, blah, blah. But that’s no excuse for being a pedophile.

I also have it on good authority that your ancestors from several thousand years ago rarely washed their hands with soap after pooping in the desert, or forest, or igloo, whatever. You come from a long line of unhygienic child molesters.

If you follow your repulsive blood line far enough back, you will find that your ancestors were atheists at best, but more likely worshippers of phalluses.

That’s right: You are the genetic fruit of unhygienic, penis-worshipping, child molesters.

And they couldn’t read – those illiterate, unhygienic, penis-worshipping, child molesters.

Keep going back in time and there’s a virtual guarantee that somewhere a cousin married a cousin, or a brother married a sister. Statistically speaking, you’re probably an inbred spawn of illiterate, unhygienic, penis-worshipping child molesters.

Exposing the organic myth notes how the tiny organic-food industry has grown and changed:

So it may come as a surprise that Stonyfield’s organic farm is long gone. Its main facility is a state-of-the-art industrial plant just off the airport strip in Londonderry, N.H., where it handles milk from other farms. And consider this: Sometime soon a portion of the milk used to make that organic yogurt may be taken from a chemical-free cow in New Zealand, powdered, and then shipped to the U.S. True, Stonyfield still cleaves to its organic heritage. For Chairman and CEO Gary Hirshberg, though, shipping milk powder 9,000 miles across the planet is the price you pay to conquer the supermarket dairy aisle. “It would be great to get all of our food within a 10-mile radius of our house,” he says. “But once you’re in organic, you have to source globally.”

There’s a reason farming went “inorganic” in the first place:

Since the widespread use of synthetic pesticides began, around the time of World War II, food producers have reaped remarkable gains. Apples stay red and juicy for weeks. The average harvested acre of farmland yields 200% more wheat than it did 70 years ago. Over the past two decades chickens have grown 25% bigger in less time and on less food. At the same time, the average cow produces 60% more milk, thanks to innovations in breeding, nutrition, and synthetic hormones.

It’s also worth remembering how inexpensive food is these days. Americans shell out about 10% of their disposable income on food, about half what they spent in the first part of the 20th century. Producing a budget-priced cornucopia of organic food won’t be easy.

Old but Not Frail looks at those who age well — and those who do not:

The researchers published their data in the May 3 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, finding that being unable to walk a quarter mile within five minutes portended troubles. For each minute beyond five, the risk of dying in the next four years increased by a third, the risk of having a heart attack increased by 20 percent, and the risk of having a disability increased by half.

Those who took more than six minutes for the quarter-mile walk had the same risk of dying or having a heart attack as those who could not walk the distance at all, and the effect was independent of age.