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Jun 29
2009

Michael Jackson to be Plastinated: Report

The late King of Pop to join his monkey Bubbles in the plastic afterworld, claims .

bubbles’s apparent attempts at cheating death have failed: he missed the deadline to be cryogenically frozen. The British newspaper The is reporting German doctor Gunther Von Hagens, the man behind the process known as “plastination” has an agreement in place to do what he’s already done to Bubbles the Chimp: pump polyurethane into the veins of and dip him in a plastic coating.

Apparently this has been “plan-b” for months.

Von Hagens’ process is behind the wildly popular The Body Worlds & Mirror of Time exhibition at the O2 Centre in London — the same place Jackson was to perform 50 concerts — a schedule 5 times greater than he signed up for, and believed to be responsible for enough stress to lead Jacko to tell a reporter he wished to die. Blame the Nation of Islam: they reportedly acted on Jackson’s behalf during the concert negotiations and signed him up for more than the 10 concerts he told them he would do.

The “Plan A” of cryogenics couldn’t be fulfilled: the process requires the body to be frozen almost immediately after death, yet the sudden death at age 50 required an autopsy — and a second one will be performed by a private laboratory, too.

How Plastination Works

The Plastination Process

The fourth step in the plastination process: curing the polymer-impregnated body with gas, heat or ultraviolet light to harden it in the chosen pose.

The biggest issue in Plastination is getting the water out of the body. After the body is embalmed to halt decomposition, the body is placed in a bath of acetone, drawing out the water and impregnating the cells with the chemical. It’s later boiled off in a low heat scenario in a bath of liquid polymer. As the acetone is vaporized out of the cells, the polymer replaces it. The body is posed at this time, kept in place by a frame. The polymer is cured either with gas, heat or ultraviolet light to harden it.

Gunther von Hagens established the Institute of Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany in 1993 after spending 15 years perfecting the process. He started on vegetable tissue and worked his way up to humans. He has a body donation program set up in Germany with over 9,000 donors signed up for the process. 340 people work at five laboratories in China, Germany and Kyrgyzstan. The lab in China focuses on animals, with it’s most difficult specimen being a giraffe — which took 3 years to complete, 10 times longer than the human body.

plastination1

Body Worlds was first shown in 1995 in Tokyo, and has since traveled to more than 50 museums and other venues around the world.

Source: Michael Jackson set to be ‘plastinated’ after missing the deadline for cryogenic freezing, Mail Online
Source: Plastination, Wikipedia
Source: Body Worlds, Wikipedia

Source: ‘I’m better off dead. I’m done’: Michael Jackson’s fateful prediction just a week before his death, Mail Online

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Jun 28
2009

How to type faster on your #iPhone, save the Twitterverse and pick up at the museum

While HAINSWORTH.COM’s move into Twitter @mhainsworth was expected to be mostly a one-way broadcast affair, there’s been some genuine interaction. This video was suggested by @AjaySavvy after tweets indicated an iPhone is headed our way.

It seems, however, that for @AjaySavvy, his Twitter “interactions” haven’t been as positive:

ajaysavvy
Because @AjaySavvy included “iphone” in his tweet, it automagically got added to the public stream of consciousness — searchable by the universe. Not everyone in this universe is as altruistic as @AjaSavvy, and those types are mining the “@names” of everyone who’s firing off thoughts into the Twitterverse(tm).

The tweet that put @AjaySavvy on the spammers radar.

The tweet that put @AjaySavvy on the spammers radar. The gold star indicates I've marked this tweet as a "favorite" and is visible to anyone who reads @mhainsworth's profile page.

One of the issues that’s keeping Twitter from making the leap out of Fad and into Trend is spammers. They’re not a problem on . If Twitter hopes to get halfway to the goal of having a “What are you doing?” entry box in the top right corner of every browser, like Search does, it’s going to have to clean up its act or it’ll never reach critical mass.

Howcast Studios is taking the video technology a step further. Since its HOWTO videos are step by step instructional, it offers a "follow along" step guide you can skip through quickly (Click to enlarge)

Howcast Studios is taking the video technology a step further. Since its HOWTO videos are step by step instructional, it offers a "follow along" step guide you can skip through quickly. A Wikipedia-like text page offers the steps and the ability for viewers to leave feedback -- or improve the HOWTO with accountable public editing (Click to enlarge)

The altruistic and helpful tweet from @AjaySavvy is Twitter’s best asset. Unless, of course he turns out to work for Howcast, the makers of the video.

…which, as it turns out, wouldn’t upset me half as much as it should.

Howcast is hilarious. I wish I thought of this site myself. With professional looking self help videos titled How to use your cellphone as a wingman to a guy standing outside a museum in How to meet women at a museum the premise is great. Even storied magazine Popular Science posts its video content.

The videos are also broken down into Wikipedia like articles. But where Howcast bests the world’s largest collection of what we think is right, Howcast requires those who edit to at least put a name to their work by creating an account. It’ll keep out the casual idiot, I suppose.

But back to the idiots. When the videos end, there are four boxes that pop into frame. Much like YouTube’s suggested videos feature, Howcast is using some of that real estate for advertising. And adding to the evidence that spammers are everywhere, the end of video advertiser? A Twitter spammer.

The tweet comes full circle. Twitter certainly has a big dragon to slay.

The tweet comes full circle. Twitter certainly has a big dragon to slay.

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Jun 27
2009

Movin’ on Up!

HAINSWORTH.COM switches web hosting providers to Bluehost.com to improve site reliability after sluggish database response from previous provider, Pair.

HAINSWORTH.COM now lives in a dee-luxe server in the sky.

HAINSWORTH.COM now lives in a dee-luxe server in the sky.

If you’re seeing this, then you’re using our new server. I decided to pull the plug on my relationship with Pair after more than a year of “Error Connecting to Database” messages and useless technical support. They’d tell me the database server was functioning just fine, and would ask me to replicate the error and send them the URL. Of course, a refresh of the page would eliminate the error — but will a visitor bother or just walk away? Most likely the latter.

Bluehost is recommended by the people behind WordPress, the software used to run HAINSWORTH.COM. I’m not finding the site comes up much faster, but I’m hoping the service is more reliable. The back-end to BlueHost, the Admin Control Panel, is far more robust. BlueHost is also cheaper: by $2/mo and offers unlimited disk storage and bandwidth — and offers a free domain name.

I might take them up on that free domain name offer and start an unrelated website one day.

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Jun 20
2009

HAINSWORTH.COM now iPhone Friendly

75 years of content is now formatted for iPhone. Editor in Chief still mooching off others to enjoy the experience.

Click to embiggen

Click to embiggen

Your Editor in Chief may not own an iPhone (yet, thanks to a screw-up with my account at ) but if you do, HAINSWORTH.COM will automagically recognize you’re surfing the site from your wizbang gizmo using the Safari web browser and reformat everything to accommodate a more Cupertino-like experience.

The red circles with numbers next to the dates indicate the number of comments our 4.5M viewers have made to each article.

And at the bottom of each page there’s an option to turn off the iPhone experience to view the whole site as the gods and nature intended.

Oh, and this works for other smartphones, too. If any other exist.

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May 29
2009

The Senator Restaurant, Toronto

A landmark, the Senator has been a part of the city since 1890.
Click-drag the mouse to look around the restaurant.

In the late 1800s, a house was built at 249 Victoria Street in . A Macedonian entrepreneur, Robert Angeloff, converted the house into a diner named The Busy Bee Diner. In 1948, George Nicolau renovated the Bee, re-opening it under the name The Senator. Nicolau’s son Nick and nephew Cecil Djambazis purchased the diner in 1964.

With Nick quietly toiling in the kitchen and Cecil cajoling with the customers, the Senator became a downtown landmark, earning accolades for the `best egg sandwich in town’ and coffee to go from the three famous urns still in our front window. – from the menu

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May 27
2009

Looking into the past

An awesome Flickr photo pool offers a window into the past lives of neighbourhoods.

May 20
2009

POLL CLOSED: iPhone Rumour Reality Check

The countdown to the June 8th World Wide Developers Conference has begun. The rumours are flying fast and furious about the next generation iPhone being released at the Apple geekfest.

May 16
2009

Hollywood dinosaur thrashes in tar pit, again

If the quote below is an accurate reflection of his opinion, I’m surprised Sony CEO Howard Stringer hasn’t called for Michael Lynton’s resignation. Period.

May 09
2009

Roomba: a powerful past

The wonder robot’s connection to the U.S. military industrial complex, ancient China, and the Devil.

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