A skin cancer patient who had her ear removed has grown a new one on her arm. Doctors later attached it once it was mature enough.
The slideshow of pictures are a little gross but fascinating at the same time.
via Boing Boing
Replacement referee Jerry Frump was interviewed by Time Magazine. He talks about how he became a referee in the first place and how the NFL prepared him for what could be argued as one of the most disliked moments in the history of American football.
I suppose you really felt bad for your colleagues when they blew a call, or there was one that was getting a lot of negative media attention. Again, everybody goes out there and they work hard, and we kind of stand side by side. When somebody makes a call, obviously, the microscope is very big at this level. I think the NFL in one of our conference calls indicated that “there will probably be no one in history has gone through such a high level of scrutiny, and the microscope has never been as big as it is on you guys at this time.” We went in with the media reporting that we’re everything from high school officials to almost no experience at all, and so the public’s perception of us was: These guys are just going to mess up the game, and they’re not qualified at all. You had to overcome that mindset that people had this negative opinion of you, so everybody worked hard to overcome that.
It’s just an uphill battle the whole way. It’s a no-win situation. We knew going in we were pawns. We were pawns for the union, we were pawns for the NFL. We just tried to make the best of an opportunity that was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences – in my case, twice-in-a-lifetime experiences. It’ll be great memories to share with my grandson someday.
I’ve only watched one or two games this season and none of the calls made seemed so controversial. But I’ve seen some of the other questionable calls the day after – when everyone is a Monday morning quarterback. Clearly, some mistakes were made.
Still, it’s easy to feel bad for guys who were doing the best they could and getting unfamiliar attention for it. And let’s not forget the regular refs have made historically famous calls which were judged to be completely wrong the next day. Finally, very few critics would even do what the replacements signed up for in the first place. I hope this interview makes people think twice about the words they said.
Everyone has heard of the iPhone by now and that it – and the copycat devices that followed – have a touchscreen display made of glass. It turns out it’s a special glass made by Corning who also made Pyrex. It’s code name during development was Gorilla Glass and it’s now famous for its use in not just the iPhone but most touchscreen displays.
Where once the iPhone was almost scrapped because certain things just wouldn’t work, so was Gorilla Glass. In fact, it was shelved for years before the right use came to be. Wired has that story. An excerpt:
The idea to dust off the Chemcor samples actually cropped up in 2005, before Apple had even entered the picture. Motorola had recently released the Razr V3, a flip phone that featured a glass screen in lieu of the typical high-impact plastic. Corning formed a small group to examine whether an 0317-like glass could be revived and applied to devices like cell phones and watches. The old Chemcor samples were as thick as 4 millimeters. But maybe they could be made thinner. After some market research, executives believed the company could even earn a little money off this specialty product. The project was codenamed Gorilla Glass.
By the time the call from Jobs came in February 2007, these initial forays hadn’t gotten very far. Apple was suddenly demanding massive amounts of a 1.3-mm, chemically strengthened glass—something that had never been created, much less manufactured, before. Could Chemcor, which had never been mass-produced, be married to a process that would yield such scale? Could a glass tailored for applications like car windshields be made ultrathin and still retain its strength? Would the chemical strengthening process even work effectively on such a glass? No one knew. So Weeks did what any CEO with a penchant for risk-taking would do. He said yes.
After several rounds of intense iteration, Corning was able to make their product to Jobs’ satisfaction. The rest, they say, is history.
Of course, the whole article is worth reading because it highlights two things I find fascinating – how failure can lead to tremendous success and timing is everything. And, yes, the science behind the glass and how it’s made is also interesting so, if you want to know what goes into making your iPhone, Android, or Blackberry touchscreens, read this article.
Kyle Baxter pointed me to this article on dissolving electronics:
A new class of electronics can dissolve and disappear on a pre-set schedule, within a few minutes or a few years, depending on when you want them to go away. They could live in the body and deliver drugs, they could stick on the exterior of buildings or tanks, and they can become compost instead of metal scrap–in other words, they turn the common conception of electronics completely upside down.
Think of the possibilities.
Aaron Mahnke talking about those who complain the new phone or music album is too similar to the one before it:
Here's a great rule of thumb: until you create something yourself and then actually ship it, try to first find the positive in the products around you. Those products are the result of someone's passion, hard work and innate genius. When we compare them to our own twisted, entitlement-driven expectations, we do nothing but insult their creators.
It goes beyond phones and CDs. People just expect to get everything they want from someone else. No one owes them anything. Get over it.