Debris from Japan earthquake and tsunami headed for U.S. west coast – including body parts and cars

When the devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, tons of debris and bodies were washed out to sea. Sailors have spotted entire houses, cars , tractor-trailers, capsized ships and whole houses floating in the ocean.

"It's very challenging to move through these to consider these boats run on propellers and that these fishing nets or other debris can be dangerous to the vessels that are actually trying to do the work," Ensign Vernon Dennis of the US Navy's 7th fleet said. "So getting through some of these obstacles doesn't make much sense if you are going to actually cause more debris by having your own vessel become stuck in one of these waterways." 

The debris, including human body parts, is going to wash up on the U.S. west coast in about one year. It will then turn toward Hawaii and back again toward Asia. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer is expecting human feet, still in their shoes, to wash up on the West Coast shore. While most body parts will come apart and break down in the water, feet in shoes will float and stay fairly well preserved.

"So you have to imagine a city say the size of about Seattle, put it through a grinder and what happens? You wind up with all kinds of debris - bodies, boats everything from a person's life including the living themselves and half that's probably going to float," said Ebbesmeyer. 

Predicted location of the Japan debris field

 

Related articles

• Japan Tsunami: Debris from Disaster Heading to U.S. West Coast (abcnews.go.com)
• Japan's Tsunami debris to (eventually) hit West Coast (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Politician seeking ban on McDonald's Happy Meals toys is a 335-pound tubby

Leroy Comrier

Do as I say, not as I do. This appear to be the motto of New York Councilman Leroy Comrier. Comrier, weighs in at a respectable 335 pounds and he is seeking a ban on McDonald's Happy Meal toys. His wife, Marcia, says he is a cautionary tale on the consequences of too many Big Macs.

"He doesn't do it in front of me - he knows it's the bane of my existence, but the results are there for anyone to see. He's not averse to healthy eating," she told the New York Post. "He actually enjoys when I make him a wholesome breakfast, and he likes when I cook him tofu. But by lunchtime he could be having spare ribs -- or a Big Mac."

In the bill that Comier introduced, fast food restaurants would be forced to pull toys from any kids meal with more than 500 calories.

The scary world of information brokers – your privacy is an illustion

We all realize that information about us is out there living in different digital databases and social web sites. This video shows how it is all collected and used. It doesn't go into how the government can use this data, but I think most of us are now realizing that "We Live in Public" has come to pass to some degree.

Twenty percent of Brits think Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple and Blackadder are real historical figures

Holmes (Wikipedia)

One in five British people surveyed believe that Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple and Blackadder are genuine historical figures. As well, others think that Clark Kent and Indiana Jones were actual people. It's a two way street with fictional and real: others believe Che Guevara, Florence Nightingale and outlaw Jesse James were fictional characters, not real.

Ask Jeeves commissioned the survey after seeing a rise in the number of questions it receives for biographies and details on the lives of fictional characters, such as a family tree.

A 2008 survey of British teens found that twenty percent of them believe Sir Winston Churchill was a fictional character, while many think Eleanor Rigby was real.

Speaking of the current survey, Ask Jeeves spokeswoman Nadia Kelly said, "Some of the confusion is possibly justified - a lot of people hadn't heard of Erin Brockovich until the movie."

Or possibly not.

Winston Churchill  (Wikipedia)

Drinking water in India a toxic, lethal brew

Image by Sree_ via Flickr

Scientists testing public drinking water in New Delhi found that it contained more than a dozen strains of bacteria, including ones that cause pneumonia and cholera. Even worse, the bacteria has mutated to become antibiotic resistant. I repeat that this is the public drinking water, not water found in a river or other open water. Drinking the water can lead to sepsis infection and death.

The bacteria have been found in patients traveling to Europe, North America, Asia and Australia since 2008, indicating that these mutant strains are now spreading around the world.

And now for the good news. Hmmm .... no good news on this. In fact it is plain scarey. Read more on Bloomberg.

Parents unhappy when children get to feel breast implant for career day

There are some unhappy parents in Virginia after their kids were allowed to feel a breast implant at school, as part of career day. The kids were learning about plastic surgery as a career and were given a little hands on experience.

"I'm still shocked and appalled that my 9-year-old saw and touched a breast implant," one parent wrote on Facebook. "Career day sure isn't what it once was," added another.

A school district spokesperson says he spoke with the principal and there's nothing to report and nothing central office would get involved in. At least they didn't bring in strippers and let them feel the end product.

Related articles

• Christina Aguilera Breast Implants? (popcrunch.com)
• Heidi Montag's New Breast Implants (popcrunch.com)

Near-Earth asteroid with strange horseshoe orbit

Researchers at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland have been studying this weird asteroid that has a near-Earth orbit that resembles a horse shoe. It does an about face mid-orbit completely changing directions. It's the competing gravitational forces of the Earth and Sun that cause this strange effect. The asteroid was discovered in 2010 by the WISE Earth-orbiting observatory.

The name of this wild and crazy asteroid: "Asteroid 2010 SO16". The Cry Baby is giving it the much cooler moniker "Crazy-ass".

Asteroid 2010 SO16's crazy-ass orbit (Credit: NASA)

Government worker takes every Friday off for 17 years

Image by Dallas75 via Flickr

The Italians are famous for their love of government jobs, some of which you never have to show up for. It seems this gentleman in the state of New York felt a kindred spirit with those workers. As well as falsifying travel claims, he took every Friday off for 17 years, rewarding himself with a permanent four day work week. Howard Dean, director of the Department of Corrections’ Food Production Center was busted during a audit by New York State auditors and investigators, together with the State Inspector General’s office.

“There is never a good time to rip off the taxpayers,” said New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. As part of a plea deal, Dean is expected to be sentenced to 6 months in jail and five years probation.

Attendance, I understand, is mandatory.

Infographic: The aftermath of the Japan earthquake

This is from graphic.is and is an excellent graphic view of the Japanese situation. It's worth a trip to graphic.is to have a look at more of their excellent graphics.

Ready or not: It's the Taser Gernade

We all know about the Taser: the good, the bad, the ugly. It's a good weapon when used when and how it should be used, but a spate of deaths related to its use, show that it can be misused as well. Now there is a new Taser product packaged as a gernade. The 50,000 volt projectile can incapacitate at distances of up to 900 feet. Quite impressive. Watch as The Daily's Justin Rocket Silverman becomes the first civilian to get hit with the Taser Gernade.

MUST SEE: "Just the Way You Are" played on invisible instruments

This cover of "Just the Way You Are" by Bruno Mars, performed by Tim Soo on the Invisible Instrument is incredible. Soo: “Originally, I built an extremely simple ‘invisible violin’ in part because I left my violin back at home and needed to perform a short composition for an intro music theory class,” he says. “I thought it’d make for an easy grade. The concept, however, took hold.” Read more on Mashable.

Remarkable video of skyscrapers in Japan swaying during earthquake

This home video is a testimonial to Japanese engineering –– at least when it comes to building construction (we'll leave out the nuclear plant design/construction for the moment). The fact that these buildings can withstand the amount of movement is incredible. Unfortunately, there's no information on where in Japan this is, which would be very interesting to know.

Charlie Sheen posts his video - sadder and crazier than ever

Exactly why Charlie Sheen would make this video is something I'll let you figure out. He's been retweeting comments on it this morning, but after watching it, I have to say it's just sad, sad, sad.

"RT @RDisher This @charliesheen video made me laugh harder than the whole 8th season of 2.5 men After the flameout in the motor city on Saturday night, perhaps this was supposed to give him a boost, but it just keeps on going in the wrong direction for Charlie – straight down."

Have a watch of the video and see for yourself.

Scientists break a law of nature – very briefly

Particle paths after gold ion collision

For a very, very brief instant, scientists at Brook­haven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken. Sounds a bit like a detective thriller at this point. The law of physics that had been violated is called "parity", which in simple terms means all things are equal; the universe is neither right or left handed.

The scientists created a quark-gluon plasma — a kind of "soup" that results when energies reach high enough levels to break up protons and neutrons into their constituent quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of matter. The plasma was created by accelerating gold nuclei to 99.999% of the speed of light and smashing them together. Theorists believe this plasma, which has a temperature of four trillion degrees Celsius, existed just after the Big Bang, when the universe was only a microsecond old. The plasma "bubble" created by the scientist lasted for a mere millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.

Have I lost you yet? A little more ..... The break in parity was detected by the way particles, quarks in particular, traveled along the huge magnetic field produced by the plasma — the strongest ever created.

"If the effect proves to be real, it could help scientists understand a similar asymmetry that led to one of physics' most fundamental mysteries — namely, why the universe is dominated by ordinary matter today when equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created by the Big Bang,"  concludes the Yale University press release.

Jesus Christ face appears in a cheese pizza

There's been bedsheets, waffles, walls and shrouds, all said to be bearing the face of Jesus. Now from down under, comes the pizza with Jesus' face in cheese. The face appeared in a three-cheese pizza made at Posh Pizza in New Farm, Brisbane. The pizza was listed for sale on eBay, with proceeds going to charity. (Too late if you were thinking of bidding, the auction has closed.)

Posh Pizza's Maree Phelan said "I can definitely say this isn't a fake, the three-cheese pizza always comes out with very different colours.'' The owners said the pizza has already brought good luck to them. "After discovering it, the owner of the store parked in a loading zone and didn't get a parking ticket,'' they wrote on eBay.

I'm actually pretty sure that's an image of George Harrison in that pizza.

God-man' s supernatural powers exposed in video

This is an Indian God-man. He can create water from air and draw evil spirits from people into coconuts. Or can he? Watch this video to the end to find out.

April 3 – the 38th anniversary of the first cell phone call

Wikimedia Commons

April 3, 1973 should be marked at a national – make that international – holiday. It was on this day that Martin Cooper, now 82, made the first public cell phone call. That first cell phone was so big that it was often described as resembling a shoe, or a brick, weighing 2½ pounds.

Standing on Sixth Avenue in New York City, Cooper made a phone call from a prototype handheld cellular phone before going to a press conference upstairs in the hotel. The phone connected Cooper with the base station on the roof of the Burlington House (now the Alliance Capital Building) across the street from the hotel and into the AT&T land-line telephone system.  As reporters and passers-by watched, he dialed the number and held the phone to his ear and made a call to to Dr. Joel S. Engel, head of research at Bell Labs. 


"As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call."

There had been forms of mobile phones before that time, but they were essentially radios, powered by heavy duty components hidden in the car trunk. Cooper was the general manager of Motorola's communications systems division, and believed that people wanted to be able to use the telephone as a mobile device and not be tethered to a wire.

"People want to talk to other people -- not a house, or an office, or a car. Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire."

Cooper was certainly a visionary, who we can either thank or curse, depending on your viewpoint. A big thank-you Martin Cooper from the Cry Baby.

Charlie Sheen's "My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not an Option" show bombs in Detroit

Not that I was expecting a whole lot from Charlie Sheen's wacko tour, but the reviews seem even worse that expected. The show opened in Detroit and here's a sample of the reviews by BuzzFeed:

• Linda Fugate, 47, of the Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park, left the theater and walked up the street yelling, “I want my money back! “I was hoping for something. I didnt think it would be this bad.”
• “Brutal. I expected him to at least entertain a little bit. It was just a bunch of ranting.” - Rodney Gagnon, 34, of Windsor, Ontario.
• Attendee Chris Acchione, a self-described Sheen fan who traveled all the way from Toronto for the show, says his entire mezzanine row walked out. He's making a fool of himself, he says. Is there a bigger loser in the world? He'll be begging Chuck Lorre for his job back by the end of the week.
* “He was babbling on and on until I wanted to throw up in my seat.”
• Bob Orlowski said he brought six clients to Saturday's performance, thinking it would be an event, but instead witnessed a train wreck. One of his clients said Sheen's performance replaced a Milli Vanilli concert as the worst show he'd ever seen. Now he feels good about Milli Vanilli.
* Tina Mighion, Sterling Heights, MI: “It was the worst thing Ive ever seen in my entire life.”

A roundup of some unfortunate headlines

The history of the world in 100 seconds

Have a look at this 100 second video produced by Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin. It shows the location and dates of 14,238 historical events between 499 B.C. and 2011 A.D., as recorded by Wikipedia, using only the entries that had geotagging information. From Lloyd's blog:

A static map version on the dataset

"The 'spotlight' is an overlay on the video that tries to keep about 90% of the datapoints within the bright area. It takes a moving average of all the latitudes and longitudes over the past 50 or so years and centres on the mean coordinate. I love the way it opens up, first resembling medieval maps of "The World" which included only Europe and some of Asia, then encompassing "The New World" and finally resembling a modern map."

This is obviously a very Eurocentric, and there are some large gaps in the dataset, but it's very interesting non-the-less.Watch it to the end to get the full effect.


A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.