Doug Cornelius .com

What can you do with a few rolls of quarters, a black sheet and a video camera?

Create an excellent stop motion video.

You see each one of those little silver dots? They’re all quarters.

In 2010, an historic collision of timelines happened in Southern Florida. Super Bowl XLIV was taking place in Joe Robbie Stadium Pro Player Park Pro Player Stadium Dolphin Stadium Land Shark Stadium Sun Life Stadium while the 44th president was sitting in the White House watching the game. The line of presidents started in 1789 with George Washington. The line of Super Bowls started in 1967 with a battle between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Don Steinberg saw this collision coming and decided to have these two American institutions battle each in America Bowl. He mashed together the relative quality of each president with the relative quality of each Super Bowl. The result is odd mix of American history, sports history, presidential trivia and football trivia, as odd as the original inspiration.

As a kid, Steinberg had little plastic statues of the presidents. Since he was a boy, he of course pitted them in battles against one another, turning them into fighting action figures. He was destined to be a political science major in college. From there he found his true passion as a sports writer.

Steinberg finally found a way to combine his passions. “It’s the most fun you can have learning about America’s presidents and Super Bowls without having to read two separate books.”

I won’t give away the ending, but you can guess the one-sided start. It took a few years for the Super Bowl contests to become great games. Super Bowl III was a tremendous battle just before the merger of AFL and the NFL, pitting the Colts against the brash Jets. Unfortunately for the that football contest, it is lined up against Thomas Jefferson. The top of the presidential order is unstoppable: Washington, Adams and Jefferson.

I think the book is targeted to younger readers, filled with snazzy quips and graphics. Each contest is squeezed concisely into two pages. I was hoping to have more details on the games and the presidents.  (But I’m not a young reader.) I had fun with it.

The resort of Laax in Switzerland has created this fantastic 360 degree virtual reality snowboarding video.

You control the camera angle. At first, the camera is merely mounted on tripod, so you can take in the scenery and the grooming operation. It’s a nice lead in to the real action.

Then the camera is mounted on a skier as they head down the slopes you can rotate the view to take in the run, the mountain, and the scenery. (Based on the shadow and the tracks, it is a skier, not a snowboarder.)

I found this cool video via Barry Ritholtz’s Big Picture: 360° Interactive Snowboard Video and White Lines.

I was excited when I saw the press release that NASA was holding a press conference to “discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.”

NASA scientists announced that they found a form of microbe that apparently evolved the ability to use otherwise toxic arsenic in their biochemistry!

Although I thought it might have been discovered on Titan (or maybe Mars). The bacteria was found in Mono Lake, an extremely alkaline and salty lake in California near the Nevada border. That means it’s not really an alien, just very different.

Mono Lake has a pH of 10, about twice the saltiness of ocean water and a high concentration of arsenic. That’s going to kill lots of stuff. But not these little critters.

This constitutes the first discovery of a life form capable of replacing one of the “big six” (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus) elements in its genetic makeup. If something can live on a diet of arsenic, a potent poison to us humans, then the standard definitions of “life as we know it” will need a bit of revision.

Study lead author Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues Professor Davies and Ariel Anbar of Arizona State University initially suggested in a paper an alternative scheme to life as we know it. The scientists’ idea was that there might be life in which arsenic and arsentates could work in place of phosphorus and phosphates.

Putting it to the test, they began to study the bacteria that live in Mono Lake.

They grew the bacteria in a laboratory on a diet of increasing levels of arsenic. To their surprise, the microbes eventually took up arsenic and incorporated it into the phosphate groups that cling to the bacteria’s DNA.

However, the research found that the bacteria thrived best in a phosphorus environment. That means the bacteria are not second type of life on Earth, but merely adapted to work with arsenic in place of phosphorus.

See also:

• Mono Lake bacteria build their DNA using arsenic (and no, this isn’t about aliens) in Not exactly Rocket Science
• NASA’s real news: bacterium on Earth that lives off arsenic! by Phil Plait in Bad Astronomy
• Subsisting on Arsenic, a Microbe May Redefine Life By Dennis Overbye in the New York Times
• Arsenic-loving bacteria may help in hunt for alien life
  By Jason Palmer for the BBC

My six-year old is already asking how much it will cost. The British Royal Navy has put the the HMS Invincible is up for sale. I wrote about this story on GeekDad: The Perfect Christmas Gift: Your Own Aircraft Carrier.