Science

In September, the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation reported the development of an odor that makes gamblers bet more. In a study in Las Vegas, slot machines outfitted to emit the odor racked up 45 percent more business.

The neurologist who conducted the study predicted that the scent will become widely used in Las Vegas.

Researchers at Cornell University recently patented an artificial dog that would speed up the breeding of fleas for lab use.

Previously, the lab required 25 live, severely infected dogs to breed the 12,000 fleas per day needed in studies of humans' and animals' allergic reactions to fleas.

Seattle, Washington:
The new U.S. Weather Service radar on Camano Island and atmospheric profiler at Sand Point began to pick up a mysterious 20 mile per hour wind out of the south each night about a month ago, a wind that started about sunset and ended at dawn.

Forecasters finally realized the new instrument is almost too accurate for its own good: It was detecting no wind, but the annual nighttime migration of thousands of birds towards the north, said a meteorologist.

LOS ANGELES TIMES, October 8:
One of the passengers in a Soviet spacecraft is fooling around with the equipment, and his monkeyshines may end the flight prematurely. The passenger is in fact a monkey named Yarosha -- Russian slang for village troublemaker. Evidently bored on the fifth day of a scheduled 12-day flight, Yarosha slipped out of his harness and took a tour of the spacecraft. Tass, the Soviet news agency, reported that Yarosha was having a delightful time tampering with all of the equipment within reach. Watch out, Yarosha; if you break something, they'll probably dock your flight pay.

A prominent Polish scientist conducted very important experiment. He trained a flea to jump upon giving her a verbal command ("Jump!").

In a first stage of experiment he removed flea's leg, told her to jump, and the flea jumped. So he wrote in his scientific notebook: "Upon removing one leg all flea organs function properly."

So, he removed the second leg, asked the flea to jump, she obeyed, so he wrote again: "Upon removing the second leg all flea organs function properly."

Thereafter he removed all the legs but one, the flea jumped when ordered, so he wrote again: "Upon removing the next leg all flea organs function properly."

Then he removed the last leg. Told flea to jump, and nothing happened. He did not want to take a chance, so he repeated the experiment several times, and the leg less flea never jumped. So he wrote the conclusion: "Upon removing the last leg the flea loses sense of hearing"

You've been in graphics too long if...
by Chris Thornborrow

• Most of your friends can pronounce Gouraud first time.
• When you fist heard that some people used 16 million colours you wondered whatever for and continued to write colour-map tables for correct highlights on objects.
• You remember comp.graphics when there weren't enough articles for you to read, none of them included the word PC and nobody ever asked the difference between raytracing and rendering.
• You insist that DOOM does not use raycasting. (Technically, as it was first introduced, and anyway, who plays games at your age?)
• Your partner knows the difference between scientific visualisation and photorealistic rendering, even though they wouldn't know a polygon from a camel.
• You think an SGI Indy is OK for a quick hack but not a real graphics machine.
• You remember discussing how one day there would be graphics hardware to support rendering in desktop machines and people laughed.
• You watched the Last Starfighter in an empty theatre and marvelled thinking it was even better than TRON.
• You remember thinking that parallel computers would solve your graphics problems.
• You remember when you thought X was a high level graphics language.
• You get drunk and suddenly get really excited examining the light reflected through the whisky.
• You get despondent while walking in the woods and think "I'll never be able to render this in real time."
• You once sat up all night watching your home computer calculate the mandlebrot set with 16 colours and a resolution of 200x200.
• You sat up the next night with colleagues watching your home computer calculate the mandlebrot set with 16 colours and a resolution of 200x200.
• Your address book has email entries for Benoit, James F, and Prof David R and Eric.
• You think being a computer geek is only half way there.
• You wonder how nature processes all those photons so quickly.
• When people mention the word graphics you really insist they are more accurate in their terminology.
• You get irritated by people who say, "Oh, graphics, that's a solved problem" (even if they then go on to be precise about what they mean by the term "graphics").
• You own one or more of the following: a glass sphere, a prism, more then two copies of Foley and Van Dam, a computer which cost more than your car, a computer which cost more than your house, a pet named Phong, a graphics board from a defunct supercomputer (properly framed) or a Rubics Cube (original).

You get 75% or more of these jokes.

Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species.

To this end, I hold M&M duels.

Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.

I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theatre of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.

Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to: M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc. Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

1. 532.35 cm3 gluten
2. 4.9 cm3 NaHCO3
3. 4.9 cm3 refined halite
4. 236.6 cm3 partially hydrogenated tallow triglyceride
5. 177.45 cm3 crystalline C12H22O11
6. 177.45 cm3 unrefined C12H22O11
7. 4.9 cm3 methyl ether of protocatechuic aldehyde
8. Two calcium carbonate-encapsulated avian albumen-coated protein
9. 473.2 cm3 theobroma cacao
10. 236.6 cm3 de-encapsulated legume meats (sieve size #10)

To a 2-L jacketed round reactor vessel (reactor #1) with an overall heat transfer coefficient of about 100 Btu/F-ft2-hr, add ingredients one, two and three with constant agitation. In a second 2-L reactor vessel with a radial flow impeller operating at 100 rpm, add ingredients four, five, six, and seven until the mixture is homogenous. To reactor #2, add ingredient eight, followed by three equal volumes of the homogenous mixture in reactor #1. Additionally, add ingredient nine and ten slowly, with constant agitation. Care must be taken at this point in the reaction to control any temperature rise that may be the result of an exothermic reaction.

Using a screw extrude attached to a #4 nodulizer, place the mixture piece-meal on a 316SS sheet (300 x 600 mm). Heat in a 460K oven for a period of time that is in agreement with Frank & Johnston's first order rate expression (see JACOS, 21, 55), or until golden brown. Once the reaction is complete, place the sheet on a 25C heat-transfer table, allowing the product to come to equilibrium.

Taipei, Taiwan (AP) - Diners tempted to lick a plate after a delicious meal can now go a step further - eat the plate.

Chen Liang-erh, 50, an amateur inventor, announced Friday that he had perfected an edible plate made from wheat grain, and that he planned to mass-produce it and other edible crockery including cups, bowls and food containers.

Chen spent six years developing the plate, which he said would retail at about 7 cents each.

Diners who don't want to eat the items - which taste like unsalted popcorn - can boil them for a nutritious meal for animals, he said.

Chen said this can help reduce pollution caused by discarded crockery. The only disadvantage, he said, is his crockery cannot be washed and reused.

In January 1994, 'The Economist' magazine reported that one of Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary's success stories about government research scientists hired out for civilian business uses was the Argonne National Laboratory's helping McDonald's to find a way to speed up french frying. A team headed by physicist Tuncer Kuzay, who interrupted his work on advanced photons, placed sensors inside the frozen fries and was able to design special frying baskets to deal with the effect of steam created by melting ice crystals and to cut 30 to 40 seconds off each batch's frying time.