YOUTUBE SURVIVOR SERIES #88: FIRST RULE OF MR EDDY’S DRIVING SCHOOL: NEVER TAILGATE. EVER.

“This is where mechanical excellence and 1400 horsepower pays off.”

Just finished watching Lost Highway for the first time in years. It’s still a head-scratcher, but a good one.

Road trip,

This is dF

CAREFUL WITH THAT AXE RAQUEL

Good morning. It’s Monday. Hope yr well rested.

Because some of us aren’t.



Chop chop,

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TELEVISION: DRUG OF A NATION

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Assuming we're talking about current US television here, the honest answer is, of course, "At least 95% of every show on television."

If we're talking the last 15-20 years, the answer would be: "At least 95% of every show on television in the last 15-20 years". 

But then I don't watch much TV in the first place, which means I haven't seen a lot of the more popular shows. Also, I live in Hong Kong, which means anything that's in its first season now hasn't made it over here yet (Glee comes to mind). 

But generally speaking, most TV shows don't do a thing for me. There are exceptions, of course, and I won't go into them here. But overall, I'd rather be watching movies, the news, cartoons or professional wrestling (and even the latter isn't what it used to be).

As for why people like them, I think it's just a matter of taste combined with a sense of community. People like what they like, and they like being able to talk about what they like with other fans, and in many cases it gives them something to talk about with people they might not otherwise have anything to talk about (office colleagues, for example). 

So you won't be getting a "People watch Desperate Housewives/Ugly Betty/The Vampire Diaries/Any Given "Reality" Show because they're corporate-brainwashed morons" post from me. Besides, the coolest, hippest and smartest people I have think Friends is hilarious and Nickelback are pretty good, so I've learned to be tolerant of other people's entertainment preferences.

Also, I think Gilligan's Island is one of the greatest TV shows ever made, so it's not like I can talk.

TV party tonight,

This is dF

WEARABLE SOUND

ITEM: Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science and principal investigator at MIT's Research Lab of Electronics, has been working to develop fabrics that can detect and produce sound, and interact with their environment.

They’re called acoustic fibers, and potential applications for include turning clothes into microphones, for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain, or loose nets that monitor the flow of water in the ocean and large-area sonar imaging systems with much higher resolutions.

In other words, in future yr t-shirt will not only monitor yr vital signs but also serve a a mike for yr augmented-reality goggles. Maybe.

Also, the fibers can produce sound as well.

"You can actually hear them, these fibers," says Chocat, a graduate student in the materials science department. "If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current" — an alternating current whose period is very regular — "then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it."

I am now imagining the impact of this on amplification systems at rock concerts, wherein the audience becomes a sort of collective Marshall stack.

FROOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Okay, it may take another 30 years to get there. Still, wonderful things we can do with technology these days.

Pret a porter,

This is dF