"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx
The Sports Guy reminded me of this classic moment from my youth. Battle of The Network Stars was cheesy, but it was fun. And as a big fan of Mr. Kotter and the Sweathogs I only have one thing to say, “Up your nose with a rubber hose.”
Ok, it was really funny when I was in elementary school.
My friend Robert tagged me with the 20 favorite actresses meme. I had to think about this one for a while.Â
Talk about playing Eye Spy. Wired has the story of a man who intends to place a miniature camera in his eyesocket. Don’t worry, he isn’t going to remove a live eye to do this. Apparently he had one removed a number of years ago. You can even see a short video of the surgery he had to extract it.
Click here for the full story or just settle for the excerpt I am going to post.
“When you completely lose an eye it is a difficult thing to let go of,” he says. “The eye has an emotional attachment. It is a window to your soul.”
Spence wore an eye patch for a while, which he says looked cool. But once he started thinking about having a camera in his eye, Spence got in touch with Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto. Mann is one of the experts in the world of wearable computing and cyborgs — organisms that blend natural and artificial systems.
“There are a lot of challenges in this,” says Mann, “from actually building a camera system that works, to sending and receiving images, to getting the correct shape of the camera.”
Even in the age of miniaturization, getting a wireless video camera into a prosthetic eye isn’t easy. The shape of the prosthetic is the biggest limitation: In Spence’s case, it’s 9-mm thick, 30-mm long and 28-mm high.While that might seem like plenty of room in an age when digital cameras are squeezed into unimaginably slim and compact phones, it actually isn’t. The average area available inside a prosthetic eye for an imaging sensor is only about 8 square mm, explains Phil Bowen, an ocularist who is working with Spence. Also, a digital camera has many more components than the visible lens and the sensor behind it, including the power supply and image-processing circuitry. Getting a completely self-contained camera module to fit into the tiny hollow of a prosthetic eye is a significant engineering challenge.
That’s where Professors Huang and Rogers’ research could come in handy. Three months ago, the duo published a paper that showed how a new sensor built out of a flexible mesh of wire-connected pixels could replace the traditional flat imaging chip as the light sensor for a camera. The mesh is made from many of the same materials as a standard digital-camera sensor, but it has the ability to conform to convoluted, irregular surfaces — like the back of a synthetic eyeball.
“Our cameras might more naturally integrate with a prosthetic eye, due to their hemispherical shapes,” says Rogers. “One might also argue that they can provide a more human-like perception of the world.”Then there’s the question of how the prosthetic eyeball (the outer shell for the camera) will be made. The eyeball chassis has to close shut and be watertight.
Traditional prosthetic eyes are single pieces made with polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA), a flexible polymer that is also used in dentures. To fit a camera in, Bowen redesigned the prosthetic eye into two pieces that could snap shut.
But with a camera inside there’s something new to worry about. The modified prosthetic eye will be heavier than traditional ones and that could affect the eye socket, says Bowen. “The weight might stretch out the lower lid,” he says, potentially disfiguring the face.
In a time when Hollywood seems unable or unwilling to develop and execute new ideas for movies I’d like to take a crack at remaking The Love Boat.
I suppose that you can say that I got the idea from this story:
“(CNN) — A 30,000-ton luxury cruise ship outran pirates off the coast of Yemen this weekend, the ship’s owner said Monday.The Nautica was in an area patrolled by international anti-piracy task forces when two small skiffs appeared to try to intercept it, Oceania spokesman Tim Rubacky said.
The ship took evasive maneuvers and accelerated to its full speed of 23 knots or 27 mph. One of the smaller craft closed to within 300 yards and fired eight rifle shots at the cruise ship, he said, but the ship was able to pull away.
It was the first report of a pirate attack on a passenger ship of its size this year, said Cyrus Mody of the International Maritime Bureau, which runs a piracy reporting center.
“There have been a couple of passenger yachts hijacked, but they were much smaller,” he said. It is “quite common” for pirates to target ships the size of the Nautica and even larger, he said, but they tend to be cargo ships, not passenger vessels.”
In my Love Boat they’d have a series of adventures as they sailed through the horrible pirate blockade. There’d be lots of different characters:
A robot who’d say cool stuff like “Danger Shmata Queen”
A captain who’d be modeled sort of along the James T. Kirk character.
A goofy bartender who’d be a cross between Isaac and Moe.
And of course I’d make my own guest appearance as the quiet passenger who just happens to be an expert in whatever sort of expertise the plot of that episode required. Kind of a cross between Macguyver and the Professor.
It is rough, but there is potential. What do you think.
CNN is reporting that Harvey Korman has died. The great Hedley Lamarr is no more.
William Shatner said that having sex with fans was really hard because they always wanted him to beam them up.
In his new autobiography, Up Till Now, Shatner explains how women would pretend they were being “beamed up” by the Starship Enterprise commander, shrieking: “So, this is what it’s like to be in bed with Captain Kirk!”
He writes: “You can’t imagine how much of a downer that is in every sense of the word.”