The dirty, lucrative business of the sperm whale excretion known as ambergris

Businessweek:

Ambergris, a waxy excretion formed in the intestines of sperm whales (thanks to their inability to digest squid beaks), is one of the most sought-after substances in the world. Ambergris sells for roughly $20 a gram, gold for $30.

...

Like truffle sourcing, the ambergris trade is shrouded in secrecy. Chris Kemp, a neuroscientist from Grand Rapids, Mich., spent years investigating the ambergris business, which he documents in his book, Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris, to be published by the University of Chicago Press this May. “If you believe what you read in the media,” he says, “you’d think ambergris is something that people just find by accident.” The truth, he claims, is far more clandestine. “There’s a whole underground network of full-time collectors and dealers trying to make their fortune in ambergris. They know the beaches and the precise weather conditions necessary for ambergris to wash up on the shore.” And when whale-poop gold is on the line, he says, “it can get violent.”

Read on.

Link roundup

1. How to create a snow globe that looks like your own home. Via.

2. How to fix Android's GPS.

3. "Parasitic flies turn bees into zombies before wiping them out completely."

*Buy snowglobes at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Penny Arcade's business manager participated in an interview at Reddit.

2. Deadspin's picks for the top 10 sports articles of the year.

3. Teddy Roosevelt once gave possibly the best start to a speech ever:

Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet - there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.

He wasn't joking.

4. The Smithsonian's top 10 science blog posts.

Hedy Lamarr helped invent GPS, WI-FI, and a homing torpedo

Wikipedia:

In 10 August 1933, aged 19, she married Friedrich Mandl, a Vienna-based arms manufacturer 13 years her senior. . . . Mandl prevented her from pursuing her acting career, and instead took her to meetings with technicians and business partners. In these meetings, the mathematically talented Lamarr learned about military technology. Otherwise she had to stay at their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau. She later related that, although Mandl was part-Jewish, he consorted with Nazi industrialists. In Ecstasy and Me, Lamarr wrote that Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler attended Mandl's grand parties. She related that in 1937 she disguised herself as one of her maids and fled to Paris, where she obtained a divorce, and then moved to London. According to another version of the episode, she persuaded Mandl to allow her to attend a party wearing all her expensive jewelry, later drugged him with the help of her maid, and made her escape out of the country with the jewelry.

Newsweek:

In 1940, while acting alongside Jimmy Stewart and Judy Garland in the MGM musical Ziegfeld Girl, the 26-year-old Lamarr spent her free time devising a radio-controlled submarine missile-guidance system to help the U.S. Navy in World War II. What moved her to do this? “She didn’t drink and she didn’t like to party, so she took up inventing,” Rhodes explains. Of course, there was more to it than that. The torpedo was not the starlet’s only invention: she also came up with an antiaircraft shell with a proximity fuse, and a fizzing cube that could turn a plain glass of water into soda.

There's a new book called Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

What do Hedy Lamarr, avant-garde composer George Antheil, and your cell phone have in common? The answer is spread-spectrum radio: a revolutionary inven­tion based on the rapid switching of communications sig­nals among a spread of different frequencies. Without this technology, we would not have the digital comforts that we take for granted today.

Only a writer of Richard Rhodes’s caliber could do justice to this remarkable story. Unhappily married to a Nazi arms dealer, Lamarr fled to America at the start of World War II; she brought with her not only her theatrical talent but also a gift for technical innovation. An introduction to Antheil at a Hollywood dinner table culminated in a U.S. patent for a jam- proof radio guidance system for torpedoes—the unlikely duo’s gift to the U.S. war effort.

What other book brings together 1920s Paris, player pianos, Nazi weaponry, and digital wireless into one satisfying whole? In its juxtaposition of Hollywood glamour with the reality of a brutal war, Hedy’s Folly is a riveting book about unlikely amateur inventors collaborating to change the world.

Preorder for 40% off at Amazon.

Crop circles

Crop circles (or more accurately circles of crops) caused by center pivot irrigation in Colorado and the Sahara Desert in southeast Libya. Thanks for the tip Marc.

Link roundup

1. Ice Worms:

In 1887, a glacial geologist named George Frederick Wright was hiking across the Muir Glacier in southeast Alaska when something strange caught his eye. Just as the daylight began to fade, the previously uninterrupted expanse of white snow around him began to develop what appeared to be a five o’clock shadow. These wriggling “whiskers” grew rapidly end emerged from the solid ice, leaving the snow crawling with an astonishing number of small black worms. Within approximately an hour there were tens of thousands of them criss-crossing the snow as far as he could see, leaving nary a square inch unwormed. A few hours later they began to slip effortlessly back into the ice, ultimately leaving nothing but pure white snow behind for the morning sun. The ice scientist brought news of these strange ice worms back to polite civilization, yet even over a century later little is known about the intriguing organisms.

(Been a long time since I saw the movie, but didn't they have something to do with Smilla's Sense of Snow?) Via.

2. Last week's mysterious lines in China are "are almost definitely used to calibrate China's spy satellites."

3. "By my calculations, at least 10 times as many girls are now trafficked into brothels annually as African slaves were transported to the New World in the peak years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade." Via.

Link roundup

1. The fake Jack & Jill Twitter account was almost certainly funnier than the film.

2. Rats enjoy being tickled and laugh.

3. Seems a little too cinematic to be a faithful report - - but this article about a death on Disney cruise ship is certainly interesting. And don't miss this article about what life is like for Disney cruise ship workers. Via.

4. The college football all-name team, including Yourhighness Morgan and Mister Cobble.

5. My 4 and 6 year-olds love Scribblenauts. Do you recommend any other educational iOS apps? (Math, science, reading, history, whatever).

Link roundup

1. Abandoned Chinese Disneyworld.

2. If you want to feel nauseous about the economy...

3. Great article about the search for rare earth elements in Alaska (add some super-smart bears and you have a Michael Crichton novel). A taste:

Dotson explained how he’d joined the first landing party as a surveyor to stake the mineral claims on Bokan in 1955. One of the geologists, Don Ross, of the Ross-Adams mine, had found the deposit by dangling a radiation detector outside the window of a tiny Piper Cub propeller plane while he skimmed the peaks of Prince of Wales Island.

4. And from the same issue of Businessweek, read about Amy Jo Martin, the woman behind Shaq's (and other athletes) success on Twitter:

At one point, in October of last year, 9 of the 10 trending topics on Twitter were related to her clients. The two-year-old company does in the “mid-seven figures” in annual billings, which are up 525 percent in 2011. Martin has done so well with teams and athletes that Digital Royalty picked up companies such as DoubleTree and Discount Tire Centers; non-sport clients now make up 70 percent of the business. She employs 15 people (mostly young, mostly women, mostly pretty) and is looking to hire at least five more.

Link roundup

1. Some people take Jurassic Park very seriously.

2. Provocative theory about the cause of early onset of puberty.

3. Jetpackage Project:

Back at the beginning of Summer, I started a project called 'jetpackage'. I was sat in my office one day and I was severely lacking in inspiration, so I looked around me at all the objects I have collected over the years and it got me thinking about how I am inspired. My office is full of collectable items that I have gleaned from car boot sales, flea markets and charity shops, whenever I am feeling uninspired I look at them and it spurs me on.

So I thought "What if a package came through the post, containing these things?" - what would they inspire me to create.

I have got a LONG list of designers, illustrators, artists, creatives that I would like to work with, and who inspire me with my work, so I decided to see how they would react to one of these packages.

4. "Parasite Turns Wasps Into Outsider Zombie Queens."

*Buy Mondo's Jurassic Park posters at eBay.

Link roundup

(I'm not entirely clear on whether the upcoming changes to Google Reader are going to wipe out my starred items, so I'll be clearing them out over the next few days.)


The Hans Solderer. Via.



Dramatic noirish photo shoot (might be a little too racy for work).



Underwater treadmills and other tools used for physical therapy for pets.



"House in Horinouchi" by Mizuishi Architect Atelier in Suginami, Tokyo, Japan. Via.



Gallery of stained glass featuring x-rays. Via these sites.

Video roundup

This kid LOVES Angry Birds.




Harrison Ford playing Uncharted 3.




Pink is the coolest color.



Avengers sweded.



Kayaking in Southern California near blue whales.

Link roundup

1. Irritating. Very irritating. (The Duck is apparently George Parros, a Princeton graduate.)

2. Bathroom signs. Via.

3. Lee Bretschneider is currently accepting commissions to draw Twitter profiles.

4. Blog dedicated to analyzing the accuracy of information written on the blackboards in pornographic movies. Via.

Link roundup

1. From an article at Grantland about WWE wrestlers not having union protection:

Jesse Ventura tried to organize a union in the 1980s6 but, according to the New York Times, "found it hard to find wrestlers willing to join him." When he later sued the WWF to reclaim royalties he thought were owed him (Ventura eventually won a more than $800,000 judgment), it was revealed in the proceedings that Hulk Hogan ratted out his union scheme to Vince McMahon. It's hard to imagine a more blatant example of a top star protecting his status by sabotaging collective action.

2. Two interesting articles by Walter Russell Mead: politics in Thailand (which has an Office of Prevention and Suppression of Information Technology Crimes); China's trouble in Burma.

3. NPR:

It's 1940. The Nazis have taken Copenhagen. They are literally marching through the streets, and physicist Niels Bohr has just hours, maybe minutes, to make two Nobel Prize medals disappear.

These medals are made of 23-karat gold. They are heavy to handle, and being shiny and inscribed, they are noticeable. The Nazis have declared no gold shall leave Germany, but two Nobel laureates, one of Jewish descent, the other an opponent of the National Socialists, have quietly sent their medals to Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics, for protection. Their act is probably a capital offense — if the Gestapo can find the evidence.

Read on. Via.

4. And speaking of science, "Daniel Shechtman, who has won the chemistry Nobel for discovering quasicrystals, was initially lambasted for 'bringing disgrace' on his research group." "He recalled how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and a double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening 'crusade; against him."

Link roundup

1. Beer bottles are irresistibly sexy to Australian beetles. Yes, there's a picture.

2. What to order at a bad restaurant. (Although I disagree that ribs are a good bet.)

3. Carving pumpkins with cookie cutters and a mallet. Via.

Illustration roundup

Big collection of science illustrations by Sam Hiti. Via.



The Adventures of Herge, an illustrated biography.



Hairy legs by Tyler Parker for Motif Magazine.



Nicholas Delort's series of illustrations based on Harry and Dumbledore's horcrux search continues.



Kill Bill illustration by Max Dalton for Spoke Art's upcoming Tarantino-themed show.




Nate Hallinan (he's done a lot of Marvel Super Hero Squad work). Via.

Link roundup

1. Hellbreed's a fun, free Diablo clone that ran smoothly on my ancient computer.

2. And speaking of free games, I haven't tried it, but there's a free game based on The Thing. Via.

3. Futurama on the speed of light (which might not be the fastest thing in the universe anymore). Via.

Portal 2, Cave Johnson, Combustable Lemons - Quote

Here is a quote from Portal 2's Cave Johnson - Seriously, everything in this game is hilarious! (yet, serious at the same time! XD)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO HIM SAY IT!

Portal 2, DLC will be free

Portal 2 came out not too long ago, but Valve has already announced that they're releasing DLC (downloadable content) for the game. Now, it has been revealed that the DLC will be free - and they didn't specify a console, so I'm guessing that means it's free on PC, PS3 and 360.

I'm surprised, because Valve usually only gives it away for free on PC and has to charge on the 360 to cover costs of releasing on the platform; however, this time they have released a game on all three platforms, two of which have Steam - allowing for instant updates through their own systems and cross-platform play between PS3 and PC.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6310911.html 

Portal 2, Cave Johnson CEO of Aperture Science

Portal 2 is a hilarious game and almost every line of dialogue will make you laugh or be surprised. So, here is a hilarious line from Cave Johnson, the CEO of Aperture Science (the company that performs those evil experiments on everyone in Portal), and what he think of lemons...

When life gives you lemons... Throw the lemons back at life!

Portal 2's Ending Song! Now on YouTube!

Portal had the song 'Still Alive' sung by GlaDos, and now there's a new song out from Portal 2. It's leaked onto YouTube! Watch it if you want, it doesn't spoil much (unlike the ending that was also leaked!)