Does anyone remember the Japanese anti-burglar mat for stores and restaurants I blogged a few months ago? Well, there’s another security system from Japan and it clearly raises the bar: It’s a new mechanism, dubbed Capture, for these places and it sprays stinky agent on thieves who won’t be able to get rid of the stench for a week.
The idea is to able for the police to easily identify the bad guys even after they manage to escape from the crime scene. All that store owners need to do is to push a button, and Capture will spray stinky agent from special gas carts onto the thief or burglar. The carts can be placed behind the counter, in the store’s ceiling or at the entrance, for example.
It takes three to five minutes for the agent to begin stinking and trying to wash it away won’t work as it will linger on for a week. And there’s even a reason for this five-minute time lag: It’s supposed to avoid making the bad guys so angry that they physically assault store clerks or restaurant staff who would then suffer from the stench themselves.
The system is the result of joint development by three Japanese chemical companies who plan to offer it for about $1,150, mainly to convenience store operators. (Apologies for the small picture. It’s the only one available at this point.)
Via Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun [JP]
By Chris Scott Barr
When it comes to passing gas, usually the thing people are most likely to argue about is the source. After all, most people don’t want to admit that they were the one who let it slip. Of course you do have the people that are rather proud of their gas, and will readily claim it. These people are more concerned about who is able to create the loudest and nastiest fart possible. A pair of computer engineering students at Cornell have crafted a device that can essentially measure a fart.
The two students used a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, thermometer and a microphone to rate the quality of one’s flatulence. The results from these tools is combined, and the device beeps and announces the fart rating, from 1 to 9. If it’s a nine, a small fan kicks in to get the air flowing.
If you’ve ever wanted to see a frat guy crap themselves, stick one of these in their frat house. Over the course of a couple of days, they’ll all be competing to see who can rip the nastiest one. Being the competitive guys they are, they’ll look for ways to one-up each other. Someone’s going to eat one too many bean burritos, try to squeeze out a juicy fart only to end up dropping a deuce in their boxers.
VIA [ PopularScience ]
Sorry, but social networks simply aren’t cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd. (I’m 23, and have all but quit Facebook (I stopped tweeting a few months ago), but that’s more of a function of me being an anti-social cad than anything else.) Why? It seems the older crowd—people 25 and older—has given social networks the unmistakable stench of being not cool. Why would an 18-year-old kid want to mimic the lifestyle of a 30-year-old?
Now, while I’m thrilled to read this news, there are a few caveats. It’s not like 15-to-24-year-olds are not using the Internet anymore. (No, they’re using YouTube to listen to music, and using Rapidshare to download TV shows.) And a lot of those older users (25+) are responsible for the growth of Twitter of late.
Breaking down the numbers—all these numbers come from a recent Ofcom study, which I should have mentioned far earlier in this post—some 46 percent of people aged 25-to-34 regularly check Facebook compared to 40 percent one year ago. Meanwhile, 50 percent of kids aged 15-to-24 regularly check Facebook, down from 55 percent one year ago. Our own DBru notes kids don’t like this stuff because it doesn’t feel safe.
And another data set suggests that kids under the age of 16 are still crazy for social network sites. So who knows what’s going on?
In any event, I look forward to the day when the word “Twitter” is expunged from the English language.
The recession has finally reached the stench filled bedrooms of ‘the gamer’, as gaming sales have plummeted to a nine-year-low. It initially seemed that gaming was part of the select band of recession proof industries, as people holed away in their bedrooms playing Call Of Duty 4 as opposed to squandering money on such frivilous things as “a social life”. But gaming sales plummeted 31% this year, down to $1.1 billion. Yes – down to. Console sales fell the most, at 38%, but this would make sence as their are, after all, only a finite number of viable gamers and this generation of consoles has been about for a while now. Game sales also fell while the Xbox 360 actually managed to increase its sales in July. (Via PCMag) 
