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Not The Magical Fruit, The MIRACLE Fruit

By Brian Filed in Food, Links, Science, Videos Tagged with , , , , September 28th, 2011 @ 11:32 am

Do you remember maybe three or four years ago there was a flurry of interest in something called “miracle berries”? They’re a small fruit that has a protein in it that makes sour things taste sweet. You rub the berry on your tongue, and then lemons take like candy, pickles are sweet, etc. You can’t really get the berries legitimately in the U.S., but people found a source and had “taste tripping” parties. Finally, somebody got smart and started making miracle berry tablets, and the novelty wore off and we all forgot about it.

Well, it’s probably due for a rebound, especially because of this Wired story today that explains how the protein, called “miraculin”, does its trick.

Here’s a clip from the Graham Norton Show from 2008 featuring none other than Gordon Ramsay trying the miracle berry, and he doesn’t seem all that impressed with the effect:

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Technology Unloved Is Technology Unused

By Brian Filed in Links, Tech Tagged with , , , , August 1st, 2011 @ 11:36 am

Just a couple of Wired stories I’ve come across recently about bits of technology that haven’t been embraced by the public:

The last time I posted about Chumby, it had just been re-designed away from its original soft pillow-like form factor and turned into a smarter version of the digital picture frame. Now, a few months later, it seems that the redesign has been a complete bust. This Wired review explains why.

When Google TV was launched last September, right off the bat I opined that nobody would want one the first moment they saw the monstrous remote control. Well, even my discouragement was outdone by the actual performance of the product. Sales of the device are actually outpaced by people returning the product according to this Wired story.

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Let The Battle Begin!

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , June 7th, 2010 @ 11:54 am

This Wired story and accompanying diagram offer a peek into how Iron Chef America is staged and shot in Food Network’s “Kitchen Stadium”. Because the pace of the show is so fast, with lots of quick shots and handheld camera, it’s not always easy to get a sense of where things are on the stage. For example, I always thought Alton Brown’s station was over by the Judges’ Table, sort of up and away from the action, but he is right in front of the chefs. That makes sense, actually, because often when Alton makes a comment about something he can’t quite figure out, the chefs will answer him directly, which they probably wouldn’t do if he wasn’t so close.

My guess is that the layout of the original Kitchen Stadium set at Fuji Television was probably similar, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any diagrams to corroborate that. Food Network stopped airing the original “Iron Chef” a few years ago, but their new network, the Cooking Channel, will be running it Monday-Friday at 11:00 p.m., so it might be possible to figure it out from watching a few of those episodes. While I have come to appreciate ICA for its own merits, I have to say that it definitely comes nowhere near the high camp entertainment level of the original show. Maybe ICA would be more entertaining if they dubbed all of Alton’s commentary into slightly-out-of-sync Japanese.

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Buggin’

By Brian Filed in Links, Science Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , May 14th, 2010 @ 11:51 am

One of my clients is an artist and she has been working on a series of bronze plaques that have engravings of various insects on them. On one of my recent visits to her, she showed me a book she had been looking at by an artist named Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, who has made hundreds of drawings of insects mutated by radiation in places like Chernobyl and other sites in Europe that were affected by that disaster. Earlier this week, coincidentally enough, Wired had a post about Hesse-Honegger that features a great slideshow of some of her excellent drawings. You can read more about her work here.

Last year, there were lots of reports about the huge losses of bee populations in the U.S. due to what is called “colony collapse disorder”. Sadly, things are only getting worse for bee keepers, as the latest survey shows that a full one-third of all managed bee colonies in the United States died over the winter, but only about 5% due to colony collapse disorder. Most of the die-off is being attributed to weather-related starvation and harsh conditions. You know, that “giant conspiracy of government and industry” called global climate change.

Last week, the NY Times had a story about the rise of Roundup-resistant weeds on farms that used Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant GM soybeans, and now there is this story from the Manchester (UK) Guardian about the emergence of huge insect infestations in China, where farmers have been using Monsanto’s GM varieties of cotton. On one hand, this ought to shut up all the people who continue to insist that evolution is “just a theory”, but on the other hand didn’t everybody SAY this was what would happen with GM crops about, oh, a BAJILLION TIMES?!?!

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Repeat After Me: “It’s Just A Website…It’s Just A Website”

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , , August 16th, 2007 @ 1:53 pm

Second Life

While the rest of us are watching the real stock markets around the globe taking a nosedive over the bursting bubble of the mortgage industry, people who are members of the “virtual world” website “Second Life” are watching their virtual economy collapse because an in-game “bank” (which was really just some guy in Brazil) couldn’t stay liquid and caused a bank run. “Linden Dollars”, the currency used in-game, are convertible to actual currency, and so people are losing real money as their pretend money crashes.

Second Life gets A LOT of media attention for some reason. It certainly isn’t because it’s a thriving community. This Wired article from July explores what happened when Coca-Cola decided they needed to have a presence in the virtual world, only to discover that the place is basically empty. Despite claims of having about 7 million registered users, the actual active user base is about 1 million, and at any one time there are no more than 30-40,000 concurrent users actually online (according to media analysts at Forrester Research). Writer Warren Ellis wrote this piece back in May, wherein he describes the surreal (!) experience of visiting a “shipwrecked and abandoned” place.

This is not to say that there aren’t such things as thriving virtual worlds. The wildly popular MMORPG “Worlds of Warcraft” hit the 6 million subscriber mark last year and also makes use of a virtual currency convertible into real cash. There’s also a real-world market for in-game items and characters that has spawned a “gold-farming” industry in South Korea. Second Life just hasn’t lived up to the hype, and this latest crisis might very well take the winds out of its sails altogether.

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