[Stephen] Gass, an avid woodworker who holds a doctorate in physics [and former patent lawyer], built a prototype for his device in 1999 out of a $200 saw and electronic parts he had around his home.

When the Oregon native showed his invention to his colleagues, David Fanning and David Fulmer, the patent lawyers were floored: An electrical current in the blade triggers a brake when it comes into contact with a body part.

“It seemed, for this industry, a fundamental discovery,” Fanning said. “I’d never seen anything like it.”

The trio unveiled the device at the 2000 International Woodworking Fair in Atlanta, wowing industry leaders with their demonstration on a hot dog. When they returned, they quit their jobs.

Over the next few months, they met with several large power tool manufacturers, hoping to license their patented product. They won Popular Science’s 100 Best New Innovations award. The Consumer Product Safety Commission awarded them the Chairman’s Commendation.

Below is their invention at work on a hot-dog.  The device detects the difference in electrical signals between a piece of wood and flesh and stops a blade, spinning at 4,000 rpms, instantly. 

I just wish the iPhone was available for Verizon, who seem to have the superior service and data network.

High praise indeed and certainly my dubious nature thinks this may be a bit of hyperbole. 

But then, consider it was written by Michael Lewis.  Vanity Fair has a lengthy excerpt and it’s quite good. 

The credit-default swap would solve the single biggest problem with Mike Burry’s big idea: timing. The subprime-mortgage loans being made in early 2005 were, he felt, almost certain to go bad. But, as their interest rates were set artificially low and didn’t reset for two years, it would be two years before that happened. Subprime mortgages almost always bore floating interest rates, but most of them came with a fixed, two-year “teaser” rate. A mortgage created in early 2005 might have a two-year “fixed” rate of 6 percent that, in 2007, would jump to 11 percent and provoke a wave of defaults. The faint ticking sound of these loans would grow louder with time, until eventually a lot of people would suspect, as he suspected, that they were bombs. Once that happened, no one would be willing to sell insurance on subprime-mortgage bonds. He needed to lay his chips on the table now and wait for the casino to wake up and change the odds of the game. A credit-default swap on a 30-year subprime-mortgage bond was a bet designed to last for 30 years, in theory. He figured that it would take only three to pay off.

The only problem was that there was no such thing as a credit-default swap on a subprime-mortgage bond, not that he could see. He’d need to prod the big Wall Street firms to create them. But which firms? If he was right and the housing market crashed, these firms in the middle of the market were sure to lose a lot of money. There was no point buying insurance from a bank that went out of business the minute the insurance became valuable. He didn’t even bother calling Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, as they were more exposed to the mortgage-bond market than the other firms. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, UBS, Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup were, to his mind, the most likely to survive a crash. He called them all. Five of them had no idea what he was talking about; two came back and said that, while the market didn’t exist, it might one day. Inside of three years, credit-default swaps on subprime-mortgage bonds would become a trillion-dollar market and precipitate hundreds of billions of losses inside big Wall Street firms. Yet, when Michael Burry pestered the firms in the beginning of 2005, only Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs had any real interest in continuing the conversation. No one on Wall Street, as far as he could tell, saw what he was seeing.

[via]

Is it just me or is SNL actually killing it this season?  Here’s the most recent digital short from Lonely Island (which was also on their album Incredibad), this time featuring Julian Casablancas of The Strokes.

Just remember, a boombox can change the world, kids, it’s definitely not a toy.

Imagine the possibilities of achieving 35mm depth of field with a digital camera. Of course it will set back some studio or director nearly $120,000, but still.

From Uncrate: “Sure, it costs as much as 47 Canon 5D MK IIs, but you’d need nearly that many — configured in some sort of crazy, Matrix-like setup — to match the unbelievable 1,052 fps high-speed 1080p recording of the Phantom HD Camera ($118,000). Other jaw-dropping specs include ISO 640 sensitivity, the ability to achieve 35mm depth-of-field, up to 32GB of in-camera memory with hot-swappable CineMag flash memory magazines up to 512GB, compatibility with 35mm accessories, an 11-stop dynamic range, 14-bit sensor depth, a maximum resolution of 2048×2048, and the ability to capture slow-motion gems like this and this.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, Robert Rodriguez dropped by SXSW this weekend with this nifty little preview of the new Predators movie he’s producing for director Nimrod Antal and 20th Century Fox.  Before seeing this, I wasn’t remotely interesting in a remake.  Now, hell yes.  I’m on board.

One could probably write an interesting comparative study between She & Him’s new video for “In the Sun”, which is the first single off of Vol. 2, and Britney Spear’s video for “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)”.  The differences and similarities are fairly obvious and speak volumes about sexuality, female confidence and well, talent.  When you have it you don’t have peddle in sexual fantasies.

Here, we get the same school scenario, only Zooey is all wholesome and quirky.  Her dance moves are fairly awkward and not quite on time with the song.  Yet somehow, like all things Zooey, it comes across as whimsical and charming.

I think Twilight, is pretty lame, but I recognize there may be some of you out there that is mildly curious about the trailer for the third movie in the series, due out June 30, 2010.

This video has been making the rounds over the past few days and it includes two things I love a lot: The Beastie Boys and Battlestar Galactica.

Galactica: Sabotage is a shot-by-shot remake of the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video (dir. by Spike Jonze), using footage from Battlestar Galactica.   It becomes even more impressive when you watch the side-by-side comparison. 

I have a feeling that if Starbuck had always been refered to as “El Capitan” the show would have had much better ratings.  As such, the video makes BSG look like the greatest frakkin’ show ever created.  Which, it pretty much is.

Now, Nomah is coming home — signing a one-day contract to officially retire as a member of Red Sox Nation. 

“Everywhere I go I get so many [Red Sox fans] come to me and tell me ‘Thank you. We miss you. We still love you,’” Garciaparra told ESPN. “And it’s so genuine and the feeling is mutual. Hopefully from my actions throughout my career in that uniform and hopefully my actions today again tell them what it means to me.”

It feels right. 

It’s just too bad he wasn’t there during the best two months of being a player or fan the Red Sox organization will ever experience.

William Shatner recites a bevy of tweets from the Twitter account @ShitMyDadSays during last week’s Shorty Awards. 

It was recently announced that Shatner will be playing the Dad in a televsion version of “Shit My Dad Says” on CBS.  [via]

He looked 50, and probably peaked in life at 16.  Now, at 38, actor Corey Haim has died.    License to Drive, Lucas and The Lost Boys are a pretty damn good legacy.

There’s also something about Lohan having the same single name recognition as Madonna or Oprah or Pele or whatever and that the ubiquitous name “Lindsay” only belongs to her.  Her ignoramous chutzpah aside (never mind the self-agrandizement), this is probably the funniest thing you’ll read today.  And it’s not from The Onion! 

DFW’s archives will slide into UT’s Ransom Center in close proximity to Norman Mailer’s and Don DeLillo’s. 

Materials for Wallace’s posthumous novel “The Pale King” are included in the archive but will remain with Little, Brown and Co. — Wallace’s publisher since 1993 — until the book’s publication, scheduled for April 2011.

“I saw the ‘Pale King’ manuscript,” [Center director Thomas] Staley said. “It’s richly annotated, very thick with lots of changes so you can get the full trajectory of it.”

Little, Brown is also donating its editorial files relating to the author to the Ransom Center, including correspondence and internal memos relating to “Infinite Jest,” the story collections “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” and “Oblivion” and the nonfiction anthologies “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Consider the Lobster.”

Scholars and fans will get a special kick out of seeing Wallace’s juvenilia, including poems and a collection of letters that he wrote to his teacher in elementary school.

For some reason, Chuck Klosterman makes an appearance in the article talking about DFW’s influence on his writing.  How an editor let in a quote from another famous writer that has nothing to do with the article is beyond me.

According to Kottke, “The web site currently contains some tantalizing examples of what the archive will eventually hold, including the first page of a handwritten draft of Infinite Jest, his annotated dictionary — circled words included benthos, exergue, hypocorism, mendacious, rebus, and witenagemot — and some heavily annotated books he owned, including his copy of Players by DeLillo.” [via]

I became acquainted with what I’ve come to call great “purse partners” at a cancer clinic in Waltham. Every day these husbands drove their wives in for their radiation treatments, and every day these couples sat side by side in the waiting room, without much fuss and without much chitchat. Each wife, when her name was called, would stand, take a breath, and hand her purse over to her husband. Then she’d disappear into the recesses of the radiation room, leaving behind a stony-faced man holding what was typically a white vinyl pocketbook. On his lap. The guy — usually retired from the trades, a grandfather a dozen times over, a Sox fan since date of conception — sat there silently with that purse. He didn’t read, he didn’t talk, he just sat there with the knowledge that 20 feet away technologists were preparing to program an unimaginably complicated X-ray machine and aim it at the mother of his kids.

A precious article about being a decent husband from the perspective of an Breast Cancer Oncologist.

Last night Andy Samberg, Chris Parnell and the Lonely Island crew performed Lazy Sunday on Jimmy Fallon. This doesn’t ever really get old does it? Even a few years later this rhyme is crazy delicious.

Disney just released this brand-new Tron: Legacy trailer yesterday.  The dude certainly abides.  Between this and Iron Man 2, the summer movie season could certainly eclipse last year.

Ignoring the garish Comic Sans font used in this discussion by MIT professor Dan Nocera, the idea that an Olympic-sized pool of water could solve the world’s energy problems by using the sun to split water and store energy – thus, making the large-scale deployment of personalized solar energy possible — is kinda kick-ass, no? [via]

According to The Guardian, the quake occurred at4:32am local time in the Elazig province, where “stone or mud-brick homes and minarets of mosques were toppled in six villages.”

The first commercial for the iPad debuted last night over and over again during the 82nd annual Academy Awards.  The April 3rd release date should be a hard date, but there are concerns with the software OS.

No matter how many times people complain about the show going too long and no matter how many times the producers of the Oscars say, yes we hear this year will be different, the ceremony always seems to drag.

Not that I don’t appreciate Neil Patrick Harris, but did last night really need three opening numbers?  Regardless, in ten years time, people are going to be scratching their heads and wondering how the hell Avatar didn’t win Best Picture.  Much like people are still wondering how Annie Hall beat Star Wars. But them the breaks, I suppose.

Yup. Shit just got real. Great look at the entire flick without giving too much away.  Collapsible armor! I’d wager my first born child that this ends up being the highest grossing movie of the year.  [via]

What surprised me is that Sunkist Orange Soda has just about the same amount of caffeine as Mountain Dew.  And even more surprising is that Extra Strength Excedrin has slightly less amounts of caffeine that No Doz caffeine pills, but not much. 

It’s advised that a person not consume more than 400 mg of caffeine a day, which is basically the amount of caffeine in one 16-oz. Starbucks (Grande) double brewed coffee (380mg).  [via]

“We’re big fans of the show ‘Top Chef,’ “ [Carlton Cuse] explained. “Those guys all run through Whole Foods and they have to pull all of this stuff down — they have to get stuff they might not use in the dish. When they get to the kitchen, they have to decide whether or not they’re going to use it. Our process is kind of the same.”

“There’s a lot of little questions that unfortunately we just don’t have time to answer in the amount of time that we have left,” co-creator Cuse told the uber-fans.

If you read between the lines, it sounds as if Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are hedging their bets against the inevitable tidal wave of disappointment from the show’s final episode. 

Not having enough time isn’t good enough since they were the ones who imposed the show’s time limit.

Well, say hello to Bea Arthur Mountains Pizza.

Now that Tim Burton and Timor Bekmembatov have signed on to produce a film adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s just-released novel Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter, we can safely say the movie will look nothing like book trailer above. 

Still, the concept alone sounds intriguing enough for both novel and film: the  story begins under the Illinois moonlight with the revelation that Lincoln’s mother was killed by a supernatural creature, fueling his passion to crush vampires and their slave-owning helpers.  The book depicts the “true history” of the 16th US president – as an axe-throwing highly trained vampire killer. 

Burton and Bekmembatov teamed up to produce the animated flick 9, by director Shane Acker.  There are no studios involved just yet, so there’s hope that this could be something special.

We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do for our delight, and that is to be done heartily: neither is to be done in halves and shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all. Perhaps all that we have to do is meant for nothing more than an exercise of the heart and of the will, and is useless in itself; but, at all events, the little use it has may well be spared if it is not worth putting our hands and our strength to. It does not become our immortality to take an ease inconsistent with its authority, nor to suffer any instruments with which it can dispense, to come between it and the things it rules: and he who would form the creations of his own mind by any other instrument than his own hand, would also, if he might, give grinding organs to Heaven’s angels, to make their music easier. There is dreaming enough, and earthiness enough, and sensuality enough in human existence, without our turning the few glowing moments of it into mechanism; and since our life must at the best be but a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the blast of the Furnace, and the rolling of the wheel.

Marcel Proust, author of Remembrance of Things Past, elucidates on the nature of craft and hard work.  It’s great to see him differentiate between the work we do for our bread and the work we do for our delight, but that both of them must be done strenuously and with much heart. [via]

Keeping with the Lego movie theme today, Great White Snark points out this video created by Fancy Pants Productions — based on The Force Unleashed videogame. 

In truth, this is better than anything from TFU or even the three prequels, well, okay, except that showdown with Darth Maul in Episode I.  That was pretty badass.

But still, you’ve got to give them credit for the superb polish here. Everything is top notch — from the camera movements, sound editing, and action choreography.

And no, we’re not talking about this in terms of herpes or the clap, but rather the above chart demonstrating that Twitter has become bonafide over the last year.  Even if, say, half of all tweets are sent by SEO marketers.

From the Twitter blog:

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.

Really, it’s quite good, a bit freaky, but good. The title kind of explains it all.  In case you’re still scratching your head, this is the final scene with Rutger Hauer’s replicant.  What I’d really rather see is the entire movie done in legos.  Afterall, some enterprising soul did create a lego spinner car for Harrison Ford’s Deckard. [via]

This ad definitely doesn’t make me want to eat Tostitos salsa anymore than I already don’t.  But it is a nifty little add.  You might even want to just go visit the ad on Vimeo to see its full effect.

Google has just purchased the small Seattle company for an undisclosed sum.  Hopefully, the search behemoth won’t mess too much with the site and will incorporate many of its fine features into Picassa.

This happens every year when it’s apparent the Oscar race will be primarily between two movies and all others should just sit on the sidelines.

Which is fine.

I told my friend that if I had to choose between one of those two movies it would be The Hurt Locker. Which then segued into a conversation about the movie’s realism.  To be sure, I’ve long suspected there is nothing realistic about the movie, though it is a fine work of action/suspense film making by Kathryn Bigelow.

Which in turn raises another question of what is a movie’s responsibility? To entertain? To reflect reality? Both?  Are there certain obligations when making certain types of movies? The Hurt Locker is the perfect intersection of all of these questions.

Coincidentally, the New York Times’ Lens blog features an essay by photographer/videographer, Michael Kamber, who has been covering bomb squads in the Iraq War over the last six years. He says The Hurt Locker is completely unrealistic.  And then proceeds to tear the movie a new one.  And the thing is I completely agree with Kamber as much as I found The Hurt Locker to be riveting cinema.

If you’re writing and directing a war movie (as Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow have done) then you owe it, not to your audience, but to the soldiers you’re essentially piggy-backing on to get it right.

E.O.D. teams are highly specialized. They do not fire sniper rifles, clear buildings full of insurgents, single-handedly engage a squad of enemy combatants or drive the streets of Iraq alone. What they do in reality is amazing enough: one of the most nerve-wracking and dangerous jobs on earth. It is done a disservice by this degree of dramatization.

When a filmmaker gets that many details wrong, it’s hard to believe she got the war right. “The Hurt Locker” is not a drama about a make-believe event. This is a movie about an ongoing war that has affected millions, in which 100,000 Americans are still serving. It deserves a minimal degree of historical accuracy and attention to detail.

Krugman explained that he’d become an economist because of science fiction. When he was a boy, he’d read Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy and become obsessed with the central character, Hari Seldon. Seldon was a “psychohistorian”—a scientist with such a precise understanding of the mechanics of society that he could predict the course of events thousands of years into the future and save mankind from centuries of barbarism. He couldn’t predict individual behavior—that was too hard—but it didn’t matter, because history was determined not by individuals but by laws and hidden forces. “If you read other genres of fiction, you can learn about the way people are and the way society is,” Krugman said to the audience, “but you don’t get very much thinking about why are things the way they are, or what might make them different. What would happen if ?”

Now, if we can just get Ryan Iverson, the twisted genius behind the internet meme “Werner Herzog reads children’s stories”, to include Three Billy Goats Gruff or Seven Chinese Brothers I could rest in peace.  [via]