Valentine Dictatorship

Chuck Cunninghams Revenge

The Cunningham Equations by G.C. Edmonson & C.M. Kotlan.

 

 

Charles "Chuck" Cunningham, the eldest son of Howard and Marion Cunningham, older brother of Richie and Joanie, college student and basketball player, disappeared with little explanation early in the second season of Happy Days.  His Mother dismisses mention of him just the once by saying he's gone off to college.  Chuck was never seen, heard from, or mentioned again.  His Father completely denies his existence in later episodes mentioning how proud he is of his only two children (Richie and Joanie).

 

After Chucks bitter ostracization from the Cunningham family and his parents refusal to accept his homosexual life choices.  he vowed his revenge.  He spent his time in isolation developing a software system capable of transferring his army of genetically engineered, insectoid abductors through the internet.  His victims, enticed by the promise of greater intelligence and success, being processed as food for his ever expanding insectoid legion.

Battle Umbrella

The Unbreakable® Umbrella made by real Self-Defence, is the secret agent tool you've been waiting to for.  Just as strong as a steel pipe but only weighing between 590g & 822 g (depending on the model).  With has no unusual parts, no more metal than an average umbrella, it does not arouse suspicion, can be carried legally everywhere, unlike a walking stick or cane it does not cause strange looks if carried by an able-bodied person, and it even protects against rain! Sadly it won't stop bullets, nor does it spray concussion gas at the twist of the handle.

 

 

Available in three models: telescopic, standard, and premium.  The main difference between the models is in the frame of the umbrella, which is the structure that holds the fabric open, but they share the same “proprietary composite” core shaft.  In other words, all models are equally strong in the whacking department.  Apparently it has become standard issue for the Presidential Security Group of the Philippines. 

 

 

I like the telescopic one the most.  Here's the website link: http://real-self-defense.com/
 

Kiss Of Doom

He already knows she's bad for him. Six months time she'll be saying stuff like "Why do you always have ti rush off and go save people?"; "When are you going to stop flying around and focus on your career at the newspaper?"; "I don't want you rescuing other women from burning buildings anymore. Think about my feelings for a change."  The End indeed.

Santa Slay

Santa kicks arse!

 

Santa Claws is Coming to Town by Alice Cooper with scenes form the movie Santa Slay.  If you feel the need to know more about Santa and his gang of evil helpers you can read a previous years blog post on the subject here.

Bat-Confiscate

Batman will confiscate your strippers and there's nothing you can do about it.

Electromagnetic Immorality

Some time ago I posted about how magnets on your left temporal lobe can make you more artistic, but that opens up the question: what happens if you put the super magnet on the right temporal lobe?  Well you disrupt the brains moral compass that's what.

 

Want to make somebody lose her belief that harming somebody else is wrong? All you have to do is stick super magnets in the right side of their hat.  Using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in which magnets are used to disrupt neural activity in specific parts of the brain, scientists managed to "turn off" people's moral centres. 

 

Researcher Liane Young and colleagues applied transcranial magnetic stimulation  to disrupt neural activity in an area of the brain known to process information about beliefs and then asked twenty subjects to rate actions on a scale from one (morally forbidden) to seven (morally permissible). The researchers report that study participants judged actions in which a person believes he or she will cause harm to another person-but fails to do so-were more morally permissible during TMS application to the brain region responsible for processing beliefs, compared to when TMS was not applied, or applied to other brain regions.

 

Now we can see why most supervillan minions have elaborate headgear as part of their uniform.  In addition to making a bold fashion statement, having a switch to turn both creativity and moral reasoning on or off on a whim, built in to your employees uniforms has its distinct possibilities.  In other words, if you need an army of minions willing to kill for you without hesitation, you're going to need a lot of magnets. 

Magnetic Wizard

Lasssie-Bot

The Russians have been developing cold war, border collie battle cyborgs since the 1950's.  The project was shut down because the Lassie-Bots chase and retrieve when you throw a grenade.

 

Moustache Power

With great moustache power comes great responsibility.

He can also uses his armpit hair for endurance.

 

 

Superpowered Perception

If you want to supervillan level perceptual skils and mental reflexes, video games are the way to do it. But just clicking away at simcity isn't going to cut it, you needs to be playing fast paced action first person shooters for measurable results.  Several studies in recent years have shown that action-heavy video games can dramatically improve a skill known as visual attention, the ability to pick and choose relevant visual information from a chaotic environment.  Proof that some of my misspent youth was not as misspent as it would first appear.

 

Research published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science March/April 2011 showed that those who habitually play video games have been documented to outperform novices in a variety of visual attentional capabilities, including attention in space, in time, and to objects. Training studies have established similar improvements in groups of nongamers who trained using games improved their visual attention scores, leading researchers to believe that games of this sort could be used for education, workplace training, and in accident rehabilitation.  So ask your manager to make that next training workshop an inter-office Halo match.

 

A previous studey at Leiden University in 2010 showed that playing first-person shooter video games is also associated with superior mental flexibility. Compared to non-players, players of such games were found to require a significantly shorter reaction time while switching between complex tasks, possibly because they are required to develop a more responsive mindset to rapidly react to fast-moving visual and auditory stimuli, and to shift back and forth between different sub-duties.

 

 

Yep, the research is in, supercharge your visual perception skills and speed up your mental reaction time between tasks by playing the latest Doom.  Go boost your workplace skills, get on the phone to HR and tell them they should buy you a copy.

 

Liam Neeson Can't Win

Hacking Your Brain

Can't solve that difficult engineering problem? Wish you could draw better? Need to think outside the box? Evil plans not planned so well? Or still haven't learnt to ride without training wheels?

Imagine that with the simple press of a button you could control the operation of your brain to increase the speed, capacity for problem solving or even creativity its self. Imagine if you could achieve this without surgically implanting circuit boards and optical fibre into your skull.

Well you can with magnets!

Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (or TMS), Australian researcher Dr. Allan Snyder tested his hypothesis that some savant and creativity abilities occur because the left hemisphere suppresses and confines the raw impressions of the right hemisphere. Using TMS to suppress the left anterior temporal lobe, Snyder found that subjects become better at drawing, better at estimating the number of dots on a screen, and better at recognising word duplications in proofreading.  Basically he uses magnets to create temporary brain damage and makes people better for it.

Allan Snyder, aside from having a bad sense of fashion, is the director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, Australia. You can find out more about his research at: The Centre for The Mind dot com.

Further studies, at the University of Gottingen in Germany, have shown participants given transcranial magnetic stimulation indicate an improvement of around ten percent in learning of motor skills and were three times more likely to solve a difficult, unfamiliar problem than those in a control group. Also some not so top secret investigations into transcranial magnetic stimulation funded by the US military, have lead to plans of flight helmets with a built in devices for the improving of pilot performance with the flick of a switch.

Now you can't just go sticking fridge magnets on your head. You'll look like an idiot and they don't have the magnetic field strength to mess up your brain. What you're going to need is an 70mm electromagnetic butter?y coil with opposing currents in each coil loop, creating a focal magnetic field below the intersection of both coils. The magnetic field intensity should be approximately 2 tesla on the coil surface which will roughly translate to around 0.5 tesla in the brain.  Stimulation is applied for approximately 15 minutes at 1 pulse per second and focused the left anterior temporal lobe area of the brain. If that sounds hard to make, try masquerading as a neurosurgeon, you can just go buy a pre-made one. It's a MagPro magnetic stimulator by Medtronic.

Once you've got your super magnet, you're ready to give yourself the creativity upgrade you’ve been waiting for. Just strap that baby on your head and plug in those kilowatts.

Funny Bunny

Shouldn't that type of childhood event turn her into a vigilante like Batman rather than a supervillan? One time back in school some kid knocked my chips out of my hand, but you don't see me dressing like a potato slice and calling myself Crinkle-Cut.

Scheming Seabiscuit

The truth behind the legend is that Seabiscuit was a bit like Lassy or Skippy but with evil supervillan tendencies.  What is Superboy doing talking to a horse anyway?

Parabolic Wok

It’s been a while since I posted an evil science project, so this one is to make a parabolic listening device. I recently saw a poeject where someone made a parabolic microphone from a $2 plastic umbrella and a bunch of other things from the cheap store. The problem with the umbrella is that the dish area is not entirely rigid and the amount of sound reflected to the micorphone is reduced because of this. Whats needed is a hard metal surface. You could sneak over next door and unbolt your neighbours TV dish. But no, for this project we are going to use kitchen cookware and create the Spy Wok 9000.

For this project you will need: a wok (get the old school kind with handles ether side); fisinging line or strong string; thin dowel or metal tube; a lapel microphone; headphones; a recorder (not the musical flute kind); some duct tape.

If you don’t have a wok you’ll have to go purchase one at the chinese grocery store. Be careful not to act suspicious in case the store attendant is an informant. Most of the other things you can get almost anywhere, but remember to wear sunglasses when you buy them so you can’t be identified later.

Tie the fishing line or string diagonally between the handles, you want two strands each diagonal. Its fine to use one long continuous strand looped around for the entire lot. Where they cross will be in the centre of the wok. You can do some fancy over under type weaving to make it more secure if you are so inclined. Spread the string where it all crosses and place the rod in the middle (Diagram 1).

Next you need to find the distance the microphone needs to be from the dish. If your wok is shiny you could use a laser pointer and see where the beam reflects most on the shaft. Alternatively you could do it by ear with the Wok Awound the Clock method. Put a ticking clock on the far side of the room, point your wok at the clock and slide the microphone laong the shaft untill you find the best point on the shaft it collects the sound. It will work better if you use headphones.

Cut the shaft to length. Secure the shaft to the wok with a hot glue gun. If you think your wife might get mad at you for this, you could use a bit of chewing gum like MacGyver so she won’t get suspicious. My wife is Chinese and whenever I’m trying to explain myself she gives me suspisious, sideways, slanty eyed looks. She could be a spy. Alternatively you could try using some sticky rice because it is a wok after all. Attach the mocrophone to the shaft with the tape and while youre at it tape the microphone chord to one of the lengths of string. Plug it all in and you are ready to wock and woll with your Spy Wok 9000 (Diagram 2).

Wok on!

Australias First Supervillan

Today is the Anniversary of the Glenrowan Shootout between the Victorian Police and the Kelly Gang led by Ned Kelly, Australias first Supervillan.

Ned was son of Red Kelly who died in 1866 when Ned was eleven, so he left school to help his mother support the family.  Ned's criminal life started early, his mother would often chastise him yelling "Edward, get that bloody bucket off your head!"  When he was fourteen, he was arrested for allegedly assaulting a Chinese man called Ah Fook. At fifteen he was arrested for being a suspected accomplice of the bushranger Harry Power. Both these charges were dismissed, but police regarded him as a "juvenile bushranger". Eighteen charges were brought against members of Ned's immediate family before he was officially declared an outlaw, half of them resulted in guilty verdicts.

Some years later, in April 1878, an unreliable police officer named Fitzpatrick went to the Kelly home, hoping to arrest Ned's brother Dan for stealing horses. He claimed that while he was there, Ned shot him in the wrist, however, Ned may have been interstate at the time of the incident. Ned's mother Ellen was arrested for aiding and abetting an attempted murder. During this time Ned was constantly irritated by the neighbours son, Nudge, who would drop in unannounced, greet Mr Kelly, then help himself to their pantry. So Ned and Dan went into hiding, and were later joined by Ned's friend Joe Byrne, and Dan's friend Steve Hart.

 

Being of Irish decent, they planned to run a whiskey distillery to earn enough to appeal their mums sentence.  On receiving a tipoff that four policemen were planning to track them down. The gang ambushed the police camp at Stringybark Creek and shot three of the policemen.  From this moment on these four men were officially outlaws: the notorious Kelly gang. In 1879 the Kelly gang began constructing their suits of armour from plough mouldboards, as they were all big enthusiasts of the Steam-punk.

On 9 December 1878 the Kelly gang took possession of a sheep station near Euroa, locking up twenty two hostages in a store-room. While Byrne guarded the captives, the other three went and held up the National Bank. The outlaws then gave an exhibition of horsemanship which entertained and surprised their hostages. After which they had supper, told the hostages not to raise the alarm for another three hours, then left.

On 8 February 1879, the gang struck again, this time at Jerilderie. They locked up two policemen and took possession of the police station and remained there until Monday morning. Wearing police uniforms, they held up the Bank of New South Wales and rounded up sixty people in the Hotel next door. Ned gave a written statement of over eight thousand words to a bank-teller as explanation and justification of his conduct.  He probably felt he had a lot of explaining to do.

A friend of Joe Byrne's, became an agent for the police, and on 27 June 1880, was shot dead by Byrne in his own doorway while the four constables assigned to guard him hid in a bedroom. Byrne and Dan then joined Ned and Hart at Glenrowan, where they took possession of a hotel and detained about sixty people. The Kelly Gang was equipped with their armour, had little sleep and consumed much alcohol. They knew that a passenger train carrying a police detachment was on its way and ordered the rail tracks pulled up in order to cause a derailment, however, police stopped the train before it reached the damaged tracks after being informed by some of the hostages that had been let go.

At around 2am Ned and Dan declared it a non-event as the train had not arrived. Just as they told the hostages to go home the police laid siege to the hotel and much shooting occurred.  Dan, Byrne and Hart took refuge inside and Ned went bush. The police continued to fire Byrne was shot in the thigh and bled to death.  About 5am Ned returned, still clad in armour, and was brought down by bullet wounds in the legs. Most of the captives in the hotel had succeeded in leaving the building, the last of them emerging about 10am. With Ned captured and Byrne dead, only Dan and Hart were not accounted for, so the police continued to fire sporadically until 3pm, when a policeman set the building on fire. Dan and Hart had apparently taken poison and were burned beyond recognition.  Or maybe they escaped, it's hard to tell when the evidence has been burned beyond recognition by the police.

 

The Victorian Police had been told three times by informants of the existence of the armour and that it was capable of deflecting bullets but dismissed the information as "nonsense" and "an impossibility". Despite these warnings none of the police realised the gang were wearing armour until after the siege was over.

Until Ned fell the police even questioned whether he was human. Constable Arthur, who was closest, thought he was a "huge blackfellow wrapped in a blanket", Constable Dowsett exclaimed it was "old Nick" and Senior Constable Kelly called out "Look out, boys, it’s the bunyip. He’s bullet-proof!". Constable Gascoigne, who recognised Ned's voice, told Superintendent Sadlier he had "fired at him point blank and hit him straight in the body. But there is no use firing at Ned Kelly, he can't be hurt".  Although aware of the information supplied by the informant prior to the siege, The Superintendant later wrote that even after Gascoigne's comment "no thought of armour" had occurred to him.  In hind sight, it was probably not a good plan for the Victorian Government to use Keystone Cops for their law enforcement.

Working Freeze Gun

The other day I ran into someone I hadn’t seen for a while and they asked me why I didn’t use my genius for niceness instead of evil.  What nonsense.  If you're an evil genius and you stop being evil, they you will just be a common genius and what would be the point of that?  To that end here’s my first Supervillain Workshop: Building a Freeze Gun.  Building a working freeze gun is actually really easy.

At its core premise this freeze gun spurts liquid nitrogen (LN2) via the power of compressed gas.   A simple one could be built by converting a paint spray gun. The down side is most of these devices work of mains power supply.  There’s the hassle of getting out the extension chord, finding a convenient power outlet, if you’re in a foreign country you need the correct adaptor and there’s always the risk that some kid disables your super weapon by pulling the plug out when you’re not looking.  Overall it’s an unprofessional look.

What you want is a design similar to a portable, three tank flame thrower having two fuel tanks and one compressed gas tank.  There are many advantages to a freeze gun over a flamethrower.  Primarily being the type of weapon it is, a freeze gun doesn’t need the ignition system a flame thrower does.  Additionally with a flame thrower the fumes from the fuel give you a headache, you have to clean burnt debris of the gold bars, and besides every man and his dachshund has a flame thrower.  Nitrogen is odorless, colorless, tasteless and evaporates away leaving no mess.  On top of this anyone who remembers their Adam West lore will recall that Mr Freeze was always surrounded by the most attractive minions in fur-lined, eskimo hooded miniskirts.  A freeze gun is by far the choice for the decerning mastermind.

As can be seen in Diagram 1, the pressurised gas connects to the LN2 tanks.  To avoid any unwanted reactions it’s probably best to use nitrogen (N2) as the compressed gas.   The pressure from the gas pushess the LN2 through the delivery hose into the hand held section.  The liquid tanks have screw on tops for easy refill and are vacume flask in design, not unlike your drink thermos, to prevent tempreture transfer between the environment and the LN2 sitting on your back.  The expansion rate of LN2 into gas is 1:694 which is an aweful lot of unexpected pressure if your tanks heat up. 

Safety tip: Use steel not brass valves. In 2006 the pressure-relief devices of a tank of liquid nitrogen at Texas A&M University were sealed with brass plugs. As a result, the tank failed catastrophically and exploded. The force of the explosion was sufficient to propel the tank through the ceiling immediately above it.  Fortunately, the dean always said he would like a skyelight.

The hand held section consists of a simple valve kept in place with heavy springs.  When the trigger is squeezed it releases the valve sending the pressureised LN2 to the nozzle which adjusts the spray acording to taste.  A flamethrower of similar design can shoot it’s stream about 45 meters.  Half that range is plenty for a domesic level freeze gun.  Because of the evaporation of the  liquid nitrogen when it hits the surrounding air this will reduce the effective range.  You may need to experiment with the nozzle to get a good compromise of distance and spread of the stream.  Wider spread will saturate your taget better but at the cost of distance.  If the spread of the stream is too wide evaporation will inhibit saturaion.  A bit of testing on the neighbours plants should help you find the right balance between distance and a coverage with the stream.

Safety tip: Handle liquid nitrogen with care.  Because of it’s extremely low tempreture inproper handling can result in cold burns and frozen limbs or pets.  Be sure to wear an insulation suit.  The suit will also have good intimidation value in the field and let the guards to the casino valt know you mean business.  I recommend sticking with a clasic silver suit, if you wear a green or camoflage suit you’ll look like a paramilitary extremest and people wil think you’re crazy.

Now you’re ready to strap those potentially explosive canisters of  freezing death to your back and away you go!