Random Awesome Shit – Page 4

A Wonderful Problem to Have

Sometimes you have to look on the bright side of things. For example, an increasing percentage of our species suffers from being overweight:

In 1980, there were 857 million overweight and obese people on the planet. Today that number is 2.1 billion, which means that nearly 30 percent of the world’s population is obese or overweight, concludes a study published in The Lancet yesterday. And what’s more worrisome is that no nation has managed to significantly decrease its obesity rates in the last 33 years.

The horror! 30 percent of the population is overweight, which puts a burden on our socialized healthcare systems! Overweight people obviously hate society!

OK, let us step back for a moment and consider the problem. Having one third of our species overweight is actually an incredible problem to have. Consider what it means. It means that a considerable amount of our species no longer has to invest every waking hour into obtaining enough food just to survive. In fact for those people food is so plentiful that they have to swap some of the time that used to be necessary to obtain food to deal with the side effects of having too much food. Instead of complaining incessantly about people being fat we should be celebrating how far we’ve come as a species. We’re damn lucky to have reached a point where we have to deal with these sorts of problems.

Brass Balls

All I have to say about this is that there are men out there with brass balls:

On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They’d marked the spot “Ground Zero. Population 5” on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them.

As we watch, directly overhead, two F-89 jets roar into view, and one of them shoots off a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead.

They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb. One of them, at the key moment (he’s wearing sunglasses), looks up. You have to see this to believe it.

Here’s the video footage of the event:

You couldn’t pay me enough to do that.

Glorious Super Mario World Hack

I’m a huge fan of hacking, which should be made obvious by my yearly pilgrimages to Defcon. Although I’ve seen many hacks that have impressed me few have impressed me as thoroughly as this one:

It’s at 1:39 in the video where things really start going pear-shaped, as the fabric of the game’s reality comes apart at the seams for a few seconds before inexplicably transitioning to Mario-themed versions of Pong and Snake. Understanding what’s going on here requires some deep knowledge of the Super NES’ internal sprite and memory management, which is explained in detail here and here.

Suffice it to say that the first minute-and-a-half or so of this TAS is merely an effort to spawn a specific set of sprites into the game’s Object Attribute Memory (OAM) buffer in a specific order. The TAS runner then uses a stun glitch to spawn an unused sprite into the game, which in turn causes the system to treat the sprites in that OAM buffer as raw executable code. In this case, that code has been arranged to jump to the memory location for controller data, in essence letting the user insert whatever executable program he or she wants into memory by converting the binary data for precisely ordered button presses into assembly code (interestingly, this data is entered more quickly by simulating the inputs of eight controllers plugged in through simulated multitaps on each controller port).

What makes this hack so impressive is that it didn’t rely on any emulator glitches. Instead the hack was performed on an actual Super Nintendo using only a standard controller as an input device:

Last week’s Awesome Games Done Quick “total control” demo is also notable for being run on actual, bare-bones SNES hardware rather than on an emulator (as is standard with most TAS videos). The robotic player at the event was powered by a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a special adapter (mounted amusingly to an NES R.O.B. controller) that let the computer send its preprogrammed controller inputs into the controller ports at superhuman, frame-level speed. Thus, the demonstration proved that this exploit was present in the actual system and cartridge released by Nintendo and not some sort of artifact of faulty emulation. That isn’t a foregone conclusion, either, as syncing up the vagaries of split-second timing and memory management between real and emulated hardware are not trivial (this is yet another area where the idea of perfect emulation accuracy might come in handy).

I can only tip my hat in awe at the sheer quality of this hack. Here is a video of the hack:

The Spirit of Metal in Nature

Mother nature again proves that it was metal before the gods of metal bestowed the heavenly music upon us:

This assassin bug sticks the corpses of it’s devoured prey (ants!) onto it’s back for camouflage and to hide it’s scent from other ants. On top of being an obvious “meat shield”, this also allows the assassin bug to infiltrate ant colonies while posing as one of their own.

And this is what the thing looks like walking around with the corpses of its enemies stuck to it:

Obviously this thing belongs on the cover of a death metal album. In fact this song came to mind as I was reading about nature’s little genocide machine:

It’s not Wise to Disturb Elves

The Icelandic people are wiser than most other people. For example, in Iceland the threat of disturbing the local elven population is a good enough reason to halt a highway construction project:

Elf advocates in Iceland have joined forces with environmentalists to urge authorities to abandon a highway project that they claim will disturb elf habitat, including an elf church.

The project has been halted until the supreme court of Iceland rules on a case brought by a group known as Friends of Lava, who cite both the environmental impact and the detrimental effect on elf culture of the road project.

The group has regularly mobilised hundreds of people to block bulldozers building a direct route from the tip of the Álftanes peninsula, where the president has a property, to the Reykjavik suburb of Gardabaer.

Issues about Huldufolk (Icelandic for “hidden folk”) have affected planning decisions before, and the road and coastal administration has come up with a stock media response for elf inquiries, which states in part that “issues have been settled by delaying the construction project at a certain point while the elves living there have supposedly moved on”.

This is the first time elves have prevented or delayed construction projects in Iceland. I think the Icelandic people know that trespassing on the land of elves can only end in misery as the creatures are known for their mischief.

I have a deep interest in mythology and folklore. One of the reasons Iceland interests me is because the island still holds onto their myths and folklore. While blocking the construction of a highway because of elves may seem ridiculous to most people I find it quite charming. It demonstrates a deep connection with the past and the last, which is something I feel is lacking in most developed nations.

A Good Use for Prisons

Prisons have few uses beyond being a source of slave labor for the state and its cronies. At least that is until you give a prison to some creative people who are interested in providing their computer a product. After that you can turn that worthless old facility of cages into a wonderful distillery:

WARTBURG, Tenn. — Voters in Morgan County have approved a referendum that allows an old prison to be turned into a distillery.

WATE-TV reports voters approved the measure Tuesday night by a margin of 1,224 ballots.

The station reports the vote clears the way for a developer to turn the old Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary into a distillery with a campground and other attractions.

I would love to see more prisons receive this kind of treatment.

Karma is a Bitch

It seems that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) new multi-billion dollar data center is having some problems:

The NSA’s new data-storage center in Utah has suffered a series of mysterious meltdowns in the past year.

Officials told the Wall Street Journal that 10 fiery explosions, known as arc-fault failures, have ripped apart machinery, melted metal and destroyed circuits. The repeated meltdowns have delayed the opening of the one-million square foot facility by 12 months.

I love karma.

Playing the Bankers’s Game

It is becoming more difficult to see the line that divides legitimate bankers from loan sharks. Between one-sided mortgage terms and interest rates on credit cards that would make a loan shark blush it’s pretty obvious that the banks have simply because another apparatus to separate people form their money. Ironically bankers don’t like it when somebody plays their game against them:

The idea of beating the banks at their own game may seem like a rich joke, but Dmitry Agarkov, a 42-year-old Russian man, may have managed it. Unhappy with the terms of an unsolicited credit card offer he received from online bank Tinkoff Credit Systems, Agarkov scanned the document, wrote in his own terms and sent it through. The bank approved the contract without reading the amended fine print, unwittingly agreeing to a 0 percent interest rate, unlimited credit and no fees, as well as a stipulation that the bank pay steep fines for changing or canceling the contract.

Agarkov used the card for two years, but the bank ultimately canceled it and sued Agarkov for $1,363. The bank said he owed them charges, interest and late-payment fees. A court ruled that, because of the no-fee, no-interest stipulation Agarkov had written in, he owed only his unpaid $575 balance. Now Agarkov is suing the bank for $727,000 for not honoring the contract’s terms, and the bank is hollering fraud. “They signed the documents without looking. They said what usually their borrowers say in court: ‘We have not read it,’” Agarkov’s lawyer said. The shoe’s on the other foot now, eh?

Mr. Agarkov, I salute you.

I’d Give Them a Medal

Last week a group of Satanists did the entire world a giant favor by trolling the shit out of the Westboro Baptist Church. The group held a “pink mass” on the grave of Catherine Idalette Johnston, the mother of the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, which they claimed would turn her gay in the afterlife. Finally, to add insult to injury, the man who officiated the ceremony, Lucien Greaves, placed his penis on the tombstone. While I don’t support defacing graves, I also don’t support the douchebaggery performed by the Westboro Baptist Church. In the end I have to deal with the latter so I’m willing to overlook the former in this case.

I was about to nominate this group of Satanists for a medal of awesomeness but, as is often the case, the state took a slightly different view of the event:

The officiant of a ritual in which gay couples kissed at the gravestone of the mother of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps Jr., has been charged with desecration of a grave in Lauderdale County, Miss.

In a phone interview with The Huffington Post July 24, Meridian Police Capt. Dean Harper confirmed that the spokesman for New York’s Satanic Temple, who goes by the name Lucien Greaves, faces a misdemeanor charge stemming from the July 14 incident.

Fortunately, they’re only being charged with a misdemeanor. Still, I’d strongly consider giving the group the keys to the city for proving themselves to be excellent trolls trolling for a good cause.

Do it Yourself Glock

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Man, I really want a Glock but I don’t want to register a firearm.” Fear not, the same man who brought up an AK receiver fabricated from an old shovel has now posed instructions for building a Glock frame out of scrap metal pieces.

Have I mentioned the fact that gun control is dead?