EWC extends heartfelt congratulations to Oakland A’s International Scout Adam Hislop, whose wife Nicole gave birth to their first son, Lenny Zen Hislop on Wednesday.  Lenny is the the Hislop’s second child, but since Adam and his wife are both of the Mormon faith we can only assume that a starting lineup of Hislops will be [...]

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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which operated a HD camera-equipped probe called Kaguya scheduled to crash on the surface of the moon June 11, recently uploaded its video to it’s site and You Tube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJmT3dPbwHE

The first video (embedded above) was shot from an altitude 7 miles up, at between 45 and 52 degrees south latitude [...]

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Not remotely related to anything here, except maybe brains, but this article in Wired called Total Recall: The Woman Who Can’t Forget is one of the more fascinating things you’ll read today or tomorrow.
You might have heard of Jill Price, the woman who remembers everything. The piece is written by Gary Marcus, a cognitive psychologist [...]

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I’ve been looking forward to an extensive article about the Texas Rangers new approach — which is actually a very old idea — to pitching strength and conditioning. Courtesy of team president Nolan Ryan the Rangers are shying away from modern day concepts about pitch counts and pitching health, by implementing things like long (long) [...]

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I’m no expert in sports medicine, but this strikes me as something that could be a significant development — a computerized, sensor-based mirror that analyzes muscular activity and shows real-time computer-generated images of how hard the specimen’s muscles are being worked while exercising.
From Pink Tentacle:
The magic mirror, developed under the leadership of professor Yoshihiko Nakamura [...]

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Some incredible Web cam footage of yesterday’s eruption at Mt. Asama, an active volcano straddling the border of Gunma and Nagano prefectures north of Tokyo. The eruption occured on Feb. 2 between 1:55 and 2:30 a.m. Video here.
You can find more videos at Pink Tentacle. Story in the Daily Yomiuri here.

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Here’s Peter Gammons talking about health, pitchers and the WBC. This is something that Bobby Valentine brought up on the MLB Network WBC telecast, something that came up in Jayson Stark’s article that drew my ire, and something no one, and I mean no one, has a real answer for.
This week, the Cubs learned Carlos [...]

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Last year a Japanese diner had to undergo a serious operation to remove a spermatophore lodged in his throat after he ate a deep sea squid.
Put simply, spermatophore are basically packets of sperm, so says this article in Practical Fishkeeping. But the methods by which males introduce the spermatophore has been something of a mystery. [...]

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Some good, clean, fun from PT:
The clione, a.k.a. sea angel, is a cute, translucent swimming sea slug that glides gracefully through icy ocean waters by flapping a pair of appendages that resemble tiny angel wings. Don’t let the innocent, angelic look fool you, though —the clione is a vicious demon come feeding time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqUlKSGcI8Q

You can find [...]

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I don’t know if I think this is a good or bad thing. Could save time by exposing bad relationships before they get bad. Could be useful in catching criminals. Actually, come to think of it projecting images while politicians are giving speeches might be the best idea.
From Pink Tentacle:
Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience [...]

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Japanese scientists have developed a new method for identifying Mad Cow disease by measuring the brain waves produced in response to audio stimuli. The cows developed the typical symptoms of Mad Cow (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) 24 months after being infected, however the researchers found that the cows had a delayed reaction to sound just 22 [...]

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And if they did come out of the water it might be at Jangsaengpo Port, Ulsan, near where I live, where there is a long row of  whale restaurants lining the coast. More on that in a minute.
From the Telegraph:
Scientists in Japan have given a beluga whale a vocabulary of three words, the first time [...]

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In the year I’ve been working on EWC my body shape has changed somewhat. I’m not fat by any means, and heck, can’t do much about aging…but what the hell is up with this breast development I’m always fighting?
Well, according to the New York Times help is on the way —
For all who have wondered [...]

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Korea Beat, as part of a new cross-posting venture with Feet Man Seoul, a site dedicated to street fashion in Seoul, has translated a story on the rising popularity of calf-reducing surgery for women who want slimmer legs.
Obviously, many women want to have slim legs, but it’s taking care of your calves that is especially [...]

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I’ve got all this great baseball stuff stuck up in my brain, yet the post I’ve been the most excited to write is about this 80-year-old Japanese robot named Gakutensoku.
Gakutensoku was built in 1928 by biologist Makoto Nishimura, and first exhibited in Kyoto as part of the formal celebration of the ascension of Showa [...]

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Imagine sitting down to watch a baseball game. You have your beer, your coffee, what have you. You turn on the game and put on your trusty  retinal imaging display (RID) device, which looks like a pair of eye-glasses, and works kind of like something you’ve probably seen in the Terminator movies. You watch the [...]

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Join me on a trip back in time, to a time when personal computers and electronic mail were still relatively new, Roberto Kelly manned the outfield at Yankee Stadium, and Ozzie Guillen ran to his position, his mouth…closed.
The year is 1992 and the New York Times has just published an article called Personal Computers; fantasy [...]

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Having just flown over the good ol’ Sea of Okhotsk two days ago I couldn’t help but be curious about these amazing cloud formations (called cloud streets) on Pink Tentacle.
This photograph (above), taken June 18 from a Japan Coast Guard aircraft off the northeastern coast of Hokkaido, shows a bird’s-eye view of cloud streets over [...]

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Picture this: A kid named Karl Kolseth swings and strikes out in a little league game. He walks back to the dugout, his little 28 in. bat on his shoulder, and what do his teammates yell?
“Hey K! Hey everyone it’s K! K just K’d! K for K!”
Or something to that effect.
Well, according to a recent [...]

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This is always a sure fire way to get people fired up about culture, and by virtue of that race. This piece comes from Live Science and concerns a study that postulates that culture not only effects the kind of music and food you like, but that it also impacts the hard-wiring of your brain.
The [...]

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