Lockheart's New Writeups

Kiss (thing)

2002-07-19T01:30:51Z

Used to refer to vampires in plural; e.g.,

A kiss of vampires.

Similar to:

a gaggle of geese
a murder of crows

Gad, I'm just full of avian references today, huh?

Neuromancer (thing)

2001-12-09T21:58:02Z

As of December 2001, Neuromancer has:

Won the following awards:

Been turned into a:

Computer game for the IBM PC and the Commodore 64.
Partial graphic novel.
An audiobook read by William Gibson.
An in-the-works movie.

along with having been translated into German, Japanese, and just about every other language in the book, including Finnish.

Information courtesy of William Gibson aleph: www.8op.com/gibson/en/

recipe for ice (idea)

2001-08-21T16:52:56Z

Personally, I prefer the following:

Take a cup. (I use a small plastic mug... something similar should work as well. Try not to use glass or ceramic, as it spoils the taste.)
Fill it up to about 3 mm. below the rim. Then, place in freezer.
Check in every ten minutes or so... You're looking for a protective coating of ice that seals the entire mouth of the cup to a thickness of about a millimeter.
Remove cup from freezer.
Using an index finger, tap the icy covering so it shatters in an extremely satisfying way.
Drink.

putrescine (thing)

2001-08-17T01:19:37Z

Also known as 1,4-diamino butane. Putrescine is a chemical compound similar to cadaverine. As you can probably guess from the name, putrescine and cadaverine smells like rotting corpses.

Putrescine Synthesis
Which is probably the bit you've been waiting for.

Putrescine is produced from the reaction of arginine decarboxylase with H₊ ions and water. It's created as a byproduct of stress reactions in plants, and in small basement labs around the country for personal use.

Several quick warnings:

Be extremely careful working with this stuff. You get it on your hands, it will not come out until the skin wears away.
If you apply this stuff to anything, be sure that:

It's not valuable.
You can dispose of it relatively easily.

I'm really not kidding.

A friend of mine soaked a few rags in…

sex in space (idea)

2001-05-22T16:33:18Z

According to unauthorized and unofficial studies done in NASA's neutral buoyancy tank, microgravitational copulation practices are rather similar to subaqueous practices of the same nature. Much of the research into this field has dealt with the observation of dolphins engaged in mating behavior, resulting in the following findings:

It requires three dolphins to successfully mate. This is because at the critical moment, groups of muscles in the body spontaneously contract and relax, causing the two to drift apart as they lose hold of each other. Thus, a third entity is required to maintain frictive contact with the fornicants, allowing a ideal connection.

Logical extrapolation would thus assume that we could mate in a microgravitational environment, assuming that:

You could find someone to hang on.
Alternatively, you could buy a whole lot of velcro and micropore tape.

Cap'n Crunch wrecked my mouth (idea)

2001-04-25T03:56:09Z

Geez...

Don't you people read Cryptonomicon?

"But Randy has, over time, worked out a really fiendish Cap'n Crunch eating strategy that revolves around playing the nuggets' most deadly features against each other...The important thing, for Randy's purposes, is that the individual pieces of Cap'n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation, shaped kind of like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap'n Crunch chew itself by grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, like stones in a lapidary tumbler." Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.