This door is made out of slats that retract just enough for somoone or something to pass through. Here’s an action vid. The illegible site has images that suggest uses like being a garage door or handicap access, but I’m pretty sure it its first application will be something that rhymes with “lorry toll”.

BTW – I’ve added “Japan” as a posting category. They deserve it.

From New Scientist:

Airport security guards already use hand-held electromagnetic wands to detect metal hidden under clothing. The same wand can also sniff for traces of the gases some explosives emit into the air.

If the passenger is a suicide bomber who realises the wand has found something, the guard might not have enough time to pull out handcuffs or a gun. So the new wand will have a hidden secret – a transformer which steps the detector’s battery power up to 100 kilovolts and feeds it to disguised metal electrodes at the end of the wand.

If the wand gives a silent warning of explosives, the guard can then subtly slide the pads onto the passenger’s neck or hands and press a shock button. The patent reassures that the effect is “temporary and reversible”.

“Hidden Secret”? Guess what? They know now!

No, it sounds like a good idea. Passengers will line up to get accidentally electrocuted by some clumsy TSA employee. Soon they’ll even have their own code words for their faux pas like “fried eggs” or “Abu Ghraib”.

Since the cat’s out of the bag, why not just put sniffy bits at the end of a loaded rifle and rub that over passengers?

For those who want something more objective than the cupped hand method, here’s a meter that indicates how stanky your breath is. This all fine and good, but I think we can all agree that a more useful device would measure swamp-ass at a distance. Values:

1. None
2. Light
3. Moderate
4. Gamer
5. Feugi

Every year there’s a hacker conference, called DefCon, that allows black hats and white hats to come together to out-impress each other. It just let out this weekend and there’s usually a good flow of interesting news. Here’s a bit.

While trying to get hotel pr0n without paying for it, this guy discovered some interesting vulnerabilities in the TV-remote-based system that most hotels use. Here are some of the things that can be done:

• Get free smut (gotta start with that one)
• Unlock the minibar
• View and alter the bills of other guests
• Read another guest’s email

So the next time you’re at a conference with an annoying colleague, just throw 20 nips of Smirnoff and a showing Kookoo for Cocoa Cocks on her bill.

An IMAX cinematographer must have decided that his life is too tame because he built this Death Race 2000-esque vehicle for the purpose of driving into a tornado. Take luck.

Not as much as bacon or boobs, but I love trebuchets. Not sure why. Maybe because it’s feat of engineering as a large-scale application of mechanical advantage. Maybe it’s because it’ll fuck you up from afar. It was always the first thing made whenever I got a new building toy set whether it was Legos, Erector, whatever. Many Weebles were lost to an overly-powerful Tinker-Toy siege engine.

Getting on with it…
Here’s a Flash game that lets you tweak a bunch of variables on your trebuchet as you’re tested for distance, accuracy, and power.

Most new US driver licenses have two-dimensional barcodes like this:

Someone found an interesting way to decode that barcode and find out what information is hidden within. You scan or take a digital photo of your license and upload the image. I’d be interested to see the results, but ‘taint likely that I’ll give that kind of personal information to unproven website x.

Google Maps added a feature where you could seamlessly switch to a satellite view of the map that you’re looking at. Looking at my old digs in Foggy Bottom, I noticed that there were several intentionally obscured areas:

• White House, Old Executive Bldg, Treasury Dept.
• Capitol Hill – Capitol Bldg, Senate office bldgs, but not Library of Congress or Supreme Court. They used the Japanese vaj method of obscurity here.
• Pentagon was strangely left unadulterated. Guess they don’t keep their SAM launchers on the roof.

I’m curious if there are examples of this in other cities.