Apocalypse. Tomorrow.

I'm summing up here, but check out Wiki for more...

Jehovah's Witnesses expected a visible and dramatic return of Christ in 1873. And then in 1874. Soon after the 1874 disappointment, they decided Christ had returned to the earth in 1874, but invisibly.

Then armageddon was going to occur in 1914. Then 1915. Then 1925. Right now it's imminent.

So. Not great on dates. There's also a cap on the number that can get into heaven. 144,000 apparently.

JWs disagree with blood transfusions. When parents refuse blood for their children, hospitals can ask the courts to intervene but there are cases where the child has died before the court order can be obtained. It seems statistics are hard to come by. From the JW memorial...

I refused to allow myself, or my son, to recieve blood. The hospital was to petition the court in the morning to allow treatment against my wishes, but my son died before it could be accomplished...
- Buck Parker was one day old when he died

At least the parents will still have a chance of being in the lucky 144,000. Apart from that culpable homicide bit.

Magic or Physics

Physics.

Santa Monica, Washington Pier at 5am

Some really nice stuff tucked away in the forums of LuminousLandscape.

Mmmm.

Check over at EvilMadScientist for a genius sugar doughnut maker home-built 3D printer.

Arseole

Here's a molecule of Arseole.

Anyway, research suggests Gardasil, a vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV) - the cause of most cervical cancer - could prevent more than 700 deaths a year in the UK. A committee of experts has recommended that all girls of 12 should have jabs. While senior doctors warn that hundreds of women will die of cervical cancer because government advisers have delayed a decision to introduce the vaccination programme, some ethical and religious groups oppose the scheme altogether.

Here's Stephen Green, National Director of Christian Voice :

Anyone giving this drug to a girl is telling her: "I think you are a slag".

Young women will be thinking they have more protection than they actually have. No-one will bother to warn them that they are not protected against Chlamydia and that even condoms offer barely any protection against sexually-transmitted diseases either.

And here's Colin Hart, the director of the Christian Institute charity:

It's basically a sex jab, encouraging the view that girls can be sexually available. It is a disease that you can only get through being sexually promiscuous.

Arseole is rarely found in its pure form. The molecule.

EasyJet EcoJet

EasyJet plans for more environmentally friendly flying - their design for short-haul routes features rear-mounted open rotor engines. In easyJet’s current configuration and operation, the projection for the eco-liner would generate less than 47g of CO2 per passenger km. For comparison, easyJet’s current operations generate 97.5g of CO2 per passenger km and the Toyota Prius emits 104g of CO2 per kilometre.

Dollar Koi

More dollar origami. I don't know the artist but you can probably chase it up over on DeviantArt.

Amazing Tabletop Football

Not much more to say.

MAV

Nice video here showing the latest Honeywell Micro Air Vehicle having a fly around. It's a tiny ducted fan design and I wish I got to play around with these things under the pretence of work.

Hubless Concepts

Quattroflex by Russian art student Alexey Bykov. Reminds me of the hubless Nulla bike...

Nice. Watch.

Elio Linea is a prototype watch by designers Pierre Haulot and William Boullier, which shows you time on a linear scale (like a computer downloading gauge).

Make An Origami Shirt Out Of A Dollar

...and get your food spat in next you go to the restaurant after leaving your smart ass tip.

Alley Cat Races

Check out a New York race on YouTube here. You can get a better quality version here, plus one in London! I've ridden Oxford Street a bit and it makes the London video seem even more insane.

Watch out though - it will make you want to grab that passing car/truck/bus for a free ride.

Rocket Science

Here's the small X43 Scramjet attached to the nose of a Pegasus rocket, hung under a B-52. I think. You can see the plan - drop it high up, get really fast, then fire scramjet. The first one went a bit wrong and they blew it up, but by the third flight it had achieved just under Mach 10 (I think that's 1.8 miles per second). It faced the massive friction-generated temperature of 1900 degrees Celsius - they used carbon-carbon (space shuttle panel material) and water was circulated behind the leading edges to keep it from melting.

It's not just NASA - the Australians are really big on developing Scramjet engines. The University of Queensland Hyshot program (with international help) has reached Mach 7. I guess they want the potential London-Sydney flight times of 2 hours.

Black Hole Gonna Eat You. Possibly.

Here's the ATLAS detector from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - there's a man standing at the bottom of the picture - which is the particle accelerator thing at CERN in France/Switzerland that smashes protons together.

This ATLAS detector bit is the worlds largest superconducting magnet. To test it, they cooled it down over a six-week period last year to reach –269°C . It was then powered up reaching 21 thousand amps. Afterwards, the current was switched off and the stored magnetic energy of 1.1 GigaJoules, the equivalent of about 10,000 cars travelling at 70km/h, was safely dissipated. I think it measures particle mass by seeing how much their path is deflected.

Anyway, the LHC is really powerful and I think it gets switched on in November if they get their finger out. People inside and outside of the physics community have voiced concern that the LHC might trigger one of several theoretical disasters capable of destroying the Earth or even our entire Universe, including the creating of stable black holes. The CERN people were nice enough to commision a report you can read and they think it's unlikely.

They conclude "no basis for any conceivable threat".

Running the Numbers

An interesting series of work by Chris Jordan coming to the Von Lintel Gallery in New York. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something - here's part of an image depicting 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.

Thanks to Mikul for that.

Royksopp - Remind Me

Here's the nice video for Remind Me by Royksopp. It won the 2002 MTV Europe Music Award for best music video.

OK Go - Lego Style

OK Go's video for "Here it goes again" has been viewed 18 million times on YouTube. The video won the Grammy for "Best Short-Form Music Video" in 2007 and the YouTube 2006 Video Award for "Most Creative Video". Well, here you can see it in Lego.