if i remember the bbc documentary mentioned above from when i last saw it, the explanation was a layer of lemon juice on top of the oil. so the the leidenfrost effect combined with optical illusion.

Actually the mall near where I live here in NY has had one of these for several years. Might be a different model though. Its got this sort of high pitched ear splitting chirp thing going on. Thing is I'm in my mid twenties, and I can still hear the damned thing. As can my mother, who's almost 50.

so frankly I don't think these things work as advertised.

that checker shadow illusion is rather interesting. the first thing that popped into my head was photography. most the intricacies of exposure and lighting revolve around the fact that film doesn't do what our brain does in just this situation. you often have to compensate with lighting. or expose for in between square a and square b to get a somewhat similar image.

read of a few of the list (including the one for my age group 06). a good deal of the items appear on multiple lists, some of them are flat out wrong. It seems to assume that people are completely unaware of the world around them prior to middle school, and that that pop culture doesn't hang around at all.

besides that most of the lists seem to boil down to "hey they aren't baby boomers!" or "HEY they missed the sixties". i get the feeling these things are put together by a bunch of aging college professors with little knowledge of whats since 1980.

My dad's a cop. He does child porn investigations, and while he's never heard of anyone being mistakenly arrested because of an open network he has had a few cases that hit a brick wall. If the cops have any sense at all your not going to get arrested or even really investigated if a pervert jumps your connection. its just going to make it difficult to find the pervert in question.

Besides that in college I ran an open network, as did my neighbors who were good friends of mine. they're internet went down and they never bothered to fix it so they ended up jumping my connection for around two months. the added burden of three extra computers running WOW left my connection running at a crawl whenever I went to use it. I probably wouldn't have minded if they had told me about it or made any effort to have their connection fixed before I yelled them.

For these two reasons I run a closed network now.

I used to work at a camera shop in Philly. There quarters of the Casios we sold would be returned within two weeks, and we were constantly receiving them in for repairs (usually brand new cameras). Another constant at the shop was Casio owners coming in to buy 2 or 3 new batteries. It seems that they didn't power the cameras too long, and tended to fail completely after a month or two.

Beyond that the pictures coming out of the things were awful, incredibly yellow no matter what you did with the white balance, subtly pixelated regardless of mp count, and the focus was always just a smidge off.

Now this was about 2 years ago, but my brother owns one of their newer cameras. The pictures are just as awful as the older models and he's on his 3rd battery.

So I guess my point is I don't care how many fps it shoots at what price point. If the picture look terrible no matter how I set the thing, and I'm going to be knocked up for pricey parts and repairs on a regular basis I don't want the camera.

You can't talk about beer culture in the us and just focus on the craft/micro brew movements. if you actually look at it a HUGH proportion of American beers are all made by the same 3 companies. not only are the top 3 beers uniformly crap but there are hundreds of less popular brands that are essentially just variations of those top three.

and the small brewers do the same exact thing. when companies like victory and magic hat are making 30 different beers a piece, and the only distinguishing factor is how far each ones take the policy of cramming as much hops and alcohol (at the exclusion of all other flavors) into a beer as possible i don't call that exciting.