Mike's Minutiae

• Omaha Beach & the American Military Cemetery
  
• St. Mere Eglise & Utah Beach
  
• Pointe-du-Hoc
  

U.S. soldiers in Iraq are giving nicknames and forming emotional bonds with bomb-defusing robots they have come to regard as teammates, according to the founder of the company that invented the machines.

IRobot Chief Executive Colin Angle said one group of soldiers even named its robot "Scooby Doo" and grieved when it was blown up after completing 35 successful missions defusing improvised explosive devices.

"Please fix Scooby Doo because he saved my life," a soldier told repair technicians, according to Angle's account at last week’s Future in Review technology conference.

Surgeons who warmed up by playing video games like "Super Monkey Ball" for 20 minutes immediately prior to performing surgical drills were faster and made fewer errors than those who did not, said Dr. James "Butch" Rosser, lead investigator on the study, slated for release Wednesday.

The research involved 303 surgeons participating in a medical training course that included video games and was focused on laparoscopic surgical procedures--which use a tiny video camera and long, slender instruments inserted through small incisions. The study was conducted by Beth Israel Medical Center in New York in conjunction with the National Institute on Media and the Family....

The results supported findings from a small study conducted by Rosser in 2003, which showed that doctors who grew up playing video games tended to be more efficient and less error-prone in laparoscopic-training drills. That earlier study suggested that playing video games sharpened eye-hand coordination, reaction time and visual skills.

A new study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation...found that despite increasing debate over the potentially harmful effects of television on young children, many parents believe that the benefits of a little tube time — whether for their children's development or their own sanity — outweigh the risk of raising a generation of crib potatoes.

The phrase "jumped the shark" has jumped the shark.

My group was very eclectic, there was a 70 year old woman, a blind violin player, a hotel manager, a performance artist, a race car driver, and an attorney most of you would recognize from the O.J. Simpson trial....

"OK, we’re going into our first parabola!" the coaches informed us, "You’re gonna feel heavy now." Sure enough, it became really difficult to raise my arm. They had given some of us Nerf balls to toss around. When I dropped it from my heavy hand, it landed with a thud on the mat next to me as if I had dropped a sack of sand. After about 20 seconds of this, someone said, "Here we go!" and suddenlythat extra weight was gone and we lifted off the floor. It was not that sickening feeling centered in the pit of your stomach that you get from a rollercoaster drop, it was just this pleasant lightness that you could give yourself over to, which is exactly what I did.

The strange and wonderful thing about weightlessness is that it somehow manages to be both completely unexpected and exactly what you had imagined. It is a feeling of incredible freedom that is just ripe with the possibilities of play. No matter how adult you feel, it is virtually impossible not to push off a wall and go flying through the air like Superman. Soon the cargo hold of the 727 resembled a 3 dimensional slow-motion mosh pit with bodies flying around every which way like cotton candy in a cotton candy machine.

Lillian Gertrud Asplund, the last American survivor of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, has died, a funeral home said Sunday. She was 99.

Asplund, who was just 5 years old, lost her father and three brothers -- including a fraternal twin -- when the "practically unsinkable" ship went down in the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg.

[...]

Asplund was the last Titanic survivor with actual memories of the sinking, but she shunned publicity and rarely spoke about the events.

At least two other survivors are living, but they were too young to have memories of the disaster. Barbara Joyce West Dainton of Truro, England, was 10 months old and Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean of Southampton, England, was 2 months old.

She is probably the most famous woman in the world...who came to fame in 1506. That's when Mona Lisa was painted. Yes...the voice, say Japanese experts, is what Mona Lisa would sound like....

Scientists at the Japan Acoustic Laboratory in Tokyo made Mona Lisa talk.

"Knowing her bone frame," says Dr. Matsumi Suzuki, "I can make her voice. What I believe to be very close to her real voice."

Measuring her fingers give them a guess at her height...about 5-feet-6 inches. Using the painting they determined the structure of the skull. Finally, they turned it all over to a computer with a data base of 150-thousand voices...and a special program by Microsoft...and out it came.

Were he alive, Konrad Kujau, the man who forged the Hitler diaries and countless paintings, would no doubt feel a tingle of pride for his great-niece, Petra.

She is being prosecuted for forging his signature on hundreds of cheap, Asian-made copies of works such as the Mona Lisa and selling them at an inflated price as "original Kujau fakes".

so in the kitchen here at the office there are two bottles of dish soap for us to wash our grimy coffee mugs and scinece experiment containing tupperware with. one of them is Ultra Joy. The other one is Non-Ultra Joy. not just Joy, but expressly Non-Ultra. who would buy a product labelled as non-ultra? why would someone call their dish soap that? it seems that any potential "we're being totally up front with you here" brownie points, consumer-appreciation wise, would be totally obliterated by people's unwillingness to buy something that's labelled as inferior. are they trying to tap into people's pity or sympathy for an underdog detergent? "it may not be all 'ultra' but it gets my dishes clean and i love it." i just don't get this at all.

I have to admit that when purchasing dishwashing liquid, I am drawn to one in particular: Non-Ultra Joy. Because, let's face it, there is just something charming about a product that comes right out and declares that it it NOT the tops! Not super-concentrated, not extra-strong, not to-the-max.

I'll admit that it isn't the best dishwashing liquid out there. You have to use a lot to get the job done. But, hey, it's darned cheap, and at least you know going in that it's non-ultra!

So, I went to Albertson’s on Friday to get the weekly groceries. We’ve been running out of dishwashing liquid so I scanned the shelves for the Ajax but it looked as though they were out so I grabbed the next cheapest thing I could find, which was a bottle of Joy. When I got home Mike started to help me unload everything. When he pulled out the dishwashing liquid, he started to chuckle. “What?” I asked. Apparently, I hadn’t bought just any bottle of Joy. I had bought a bottle of Non-Ultra Joy, because really, who in all of worlds creation could possible want a bottle of Ultra Joy.

OK, maybe it takes marketing genius to figure out this one. I'm no genius. Heck, I'm not even "your average consumer".

So I noticed on a bottle of dishwashing liquid the words in rather bold type "Non Ultra Joy".

WTF?!

I looked closer for the sub label "Because your dishes shouldn't be clean enough" or something like that. I guess I wouldn't have been miffed it if just said Joy or Joy Classic or even Moderately Elated. But there it was like it was something special "Non Ultra".

On the back there was buried in the directions (like you need directions to use dish soap) that "for greasy dishes, try Ultra Joy".

Because you have a product called Ultra Joy you have to name your other product Non Ultra Joy? Is this some kinda new law? Will I soon see "Non Peanut M&Ms"? Will second order siblings be named "Non Dave"?

Wow how random. I just got back from refilling my water glass in the small kitchenette here in the office. The dish soap now stocked in there is “Non-Ultra Joy”. Now I can understand the marketing of the “Ultra” version of a product, but what genius came up with Non-Ultra. Why not just call it old formula, unimproved? Or ½ strength from the other bottle you could be buying? This must be why I am in engineering not marketing.

I just got back from Safeway where I had to buy some dishwashing liquid. I scanned the shelf and came across 'Non Ultra Joy', as in, not 'Ultra Joy'. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

When Tufts music student Abigail Al-Doory sought inspiration for her opera, she looked not to Wagner's "Ring" cycle but to the Olympic rings, where themes like power, envy and greed are plentiful.

In "Tonya and Nancy: The Opera," Al-Doory provides 18 movements on the scandal that turned the once-dainty sport of figure skating into a soap opera of whacking, wailing and time spent in jail.

Scheduled for two Tuesday night performances, the production portrays the skaters not as rivals but as a pair, singing for the audience's sympathy as the tawdry affair unfolds.