Dr. Fredric J. Baur was so proud of having designed the container for Pringles potato crisps that he asked his family to bury him in one.
His children honored his request. Part of his remains was buried in a Pringles can - along with a regular urn containing the rest - in his grave at Arlington Memorial Gardens in Springfield Township.
Dr. Baur, a retired organic chemist and food storage technician who specialized in research and development and quality control for Procter & Gamble, died May 4 at Vitas Hospice. The College Hill resident was 89
Scientific American has a nice article listing the top five mistakes that photo-fakers make when they use photoshop to doctor piccies.
Surrounding lights reflect in eyes to form small white dots called specular highlights. The shape, color and location of these highlights tell us quite a bit about the lighting.In 2006 a photo editor contacted me about a picture of American Idol stars that was scheduled for publication in his magazine (above). The specular highlights were quite different (insets).
The highlight position indicates where the light source is located (above left). As the direction to the light source (yellow arrow) moves from left to right, so do the specular highlights.
The highlights in the American Idol picture are so inconsistent that visual inspection is enough to infer the photograph has been doctored. Many cases, however, require a mathematical analysis. To determine light position precisely requires taking into account the shape of the eye and the relative orientation between the eye, camera and light. The orientation matters because eyes are not perfect spheres: the clear covering of the iris, or cornea, protrudes, which we model in software as a sphere whose center is offset from the center of the whites of the eye, or sclera (above right).
Japundit shot a video of a gadget called “The Magical Water Princess,” which is installed in women’s public restrooms to mask sounds of using the toilet.
[A] device called Oto-hime … makes a chirping sound when ladies use the toilet, because Japanese women hate the idea of anyone being able to hear any sounds they make while they go. Before the device was introduced in the 1980s, it seems that female patrons in restraunts would flush the toilet multiple times to mask the sounds, which wasted an incredible amount of water…Here’s a video of how they work. Just wave your hand over the button and the sound of water will come out of the device, allowing you to do whatever you need to do with without nervousness of people listening to the sounds you make.
The US military has awarded an $80 million contract to a prominent Saudi financier who has been indicted by the US Justice Department. The contract to supply jet fuel to American bases in Afghanistan was awarded to the Attock Refinery Ltd, a Pakistani-based refinery owned by Gaith Pharaon. Pharaon is wanted in connection with his alleged role at the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the CenTrust savings and loan scandal, which cost US tax payers $1.7 billion.
As a purely coincidental aside: “Pharaon was also an investor in President George W. Bush’s first business venture, Arbusto Energy.”
U.S. researchers said they have made the darkest material on Earth, a substance so black it absorbs more than 99.9 percent of light.
Made from tiny tubes of carbon standing on end, this material is almost 30 times darker than a carbon substance used by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology as the current benchmark of blackness.
And the material is close to the long-sought ideal black, which could absorb all colors of light and reflect none.
“All the light that goes in is basically absorbed,” Pulickel Ajayan, who led the research team at Rice University in Houston, said in a telephone interview. “It is almost pushing the limit of how much light can be absorbed into one material.”
Dr Andrew Pask from the Department of Zoology at the University of Melbourne analysed the tissue samples from 12 foreskins and made the discovery.“This suggested that oestrogen could induce a thickening of the keratin layer of the foreskin epidermis in the same way as it acts in the vagina,” said Dr Pask.
Keratin on our skin acts a barrier to viral infection. We hope to be able to enhance this protection with the use of a naturally occurring, weak oestrogen,” said Professor Roger Short of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences who lead the research.
To confirm its effect, topical oestrogen was applied to the human foreskin for a two week trial. This resulted in a rapid and substantial increase in keratin thickness.
The US military has awarded an $80 million contract to a prominent Saudi financier who has been indicted by the US Justice Department. The contract to supply jet fuel to American bases in Afghanistan was awarded to the Attock Refinery Ltd, a Pakistani-based refinery owned by Gaith Pharaon. Pharaon is wanted in connection with his alleged role at the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the CenTrust savings and loan scandal, which cost US tax payers $1.7 billion.
