After 40 years of drugs and alcohol, Osbourne’s been institutionalized. He’s also been declared dead twice, mistakenly diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and survived a plane crashing into his tour bus. Oh, and don’t forget that he’s beheaded a bat, beheaded a dove, swallowed a bee, and, while filming The Osbournes, took 42 different types of prescription medication a day.
The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in Denver has delivered its usual array of outrageous audio gear, but this shockingly priced turntable would have to go pretty high on anyone’s list.
The Onedof One Degree Of Freedom turntable was designed by NASA award winning aerospace engineer Aleks Bakman, and includes some unusual features. The self-centering 50-lb platter uses a liquid suspension to damp resonances, while the platter itself is filled with some kind of damping fluid. Bakman also described its noise canceling vertical motor adjustment, but to be honest the description went over my head.
The Onedof can accommodate three tonearms; pretty good, but not quite the most we’ve seen. At $150,000, I wonder if One-off might be a more appropriate name, or will they find some equally crazy audiophiles to buy some?
In 2007, a Swiss woman in her late 20s had an unusually hard time crossing the U.S. border. Customs agents could not confirm her identity. The woman’s passport picture matched her face just fine, but when the agents scanned her hands, they discovered something shocking: she had no fingerprints.
The woman, it turns out, had an extremely rare condition known as adermatoglyphia. Peter Itin, a dermatologist at the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland, has dubbed it the “immigration delay disease” because sufferers have such a hard time entering foreign countries. In addition to smooth fingertips, they also produce less hand sweat than the average person. Yet scientists know very little about what causes the condition.
Little solace can be found in news that e-readers too get heavier when books are added. A 4GB Kindle only gains the weight of a single strand of DNA when a book is added. When it’s completely full it will be a billionth of a billionth of a gram heavier than when it was empty. That’s a wrist-snapping 0.000000000000000001g.
Forget about war, famine and global warming, the greatest threat to mankind is man boobs videos on YouTube. Thankfully the company discussed this horrible epidemic at a free speech and human rights conference in San Francisco.
“Recently we had the issue of man boobs–do man boobs need to be age-restricted or not?” Victoria Grand, YouTube’s director for global communications and policy, said today, referring to that unfortunate medical condition caused by abnormal development of male mammary glands.
Here’s the famous footage of the Apollo 15 astronaut that dropped a hammer & feather on the moon to prove Galileo’s theory that in the absence of atmosphere, objects will fall at the same rate regardless of mass.
