Remember my post a few months ago about the Naga Viper, the hottest pepper in the world? It didn’t take long for someone to produce a chile that’s even hotter. An Australian chile grower has produced a pepper that he claims rates at 1.46 million Scovilles, which he calls the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T. Insert your own imitation of Crocodile Dundee saying “That’s not a knife…THIS is a knife.”
You might recall that last year I reported about the sudden death of He Pingping, who had been the Guinness Book record-holder for world’s shortest man, and the discovery of a challenger from Nepal who was even shorter than him.
Now, Weird Asia News says there is a young man in the Philippines who is only 22 inches tall (pictured above), a full 4.2 inches shorter than Khangedra. Just as Khagendra had to wait until his 18th birthday for confirmation from the Guinness Book, Junrey Balawing is currently only 17 and will also have to wait until June 12 before he can assume the title of “World’s Shortest Man”. At this point, I am completely out-classed and am going to switch over to the category of “World’s Smallest Giant” to see if I have any better luck there.
Just a few weeks ago, at the beginning of the nuclear disaster in Japan, I linked to a radiation chart posted at XKCD that attempted to show different levels of radiation in some kind of spectrum of severity. David McCandless at Information Is Beautiful was inspired by Munroe’s graphic to produce his own, which, unsurprisingly, is both lovely and informative. It’s too big to reproduce here, but you can buy a copy of it as a PDF, the proceeds of which are being donated to Japan disaster relief.
Okay, this one goes way, way, WAAAY back: in 2007 I posted about the launch of an intriguing device called the Chumby. It was interesting because it had the potential to bring lots of small apps (which were being called “widgets” then) and a dead-simple interface to users, along with a friendly design that put the electronic guts in a soft plushy cushiony cover. Chumby never caught fire as a consumer product at all, even though it became a popular toy for developers, and even though it was, in a very real sense, an ancestor of the iPad. But it didn’t disappear from the market, it continued on as both a product and a development platform, and Engadget recently posted about the latest iteration, the Chumby 8:
Here’s a product review from CNet. As you can see, as a product it has been completely re-imagined and now borrows very heavily from the iPad concept itself in its reformulation as a device that is more like an interactive picture frame than a cuddly toy. Its present functionality is a bit more limited than the iPad, being better used to display information than as a device for actually manipulating content, but with the right apps could be a useful tool. Now that the public imagination has been introduced to things like smartphones and iPads, the Chumby might actually have a chance as a consumer product.
