Flickr user Travis Gohr posts pictures of his injuries after using his iPhone on a treadmill. Basically, the short version is his iPhone fell off of the treadmill, he watched it and ended up flying backwards off the treadmill causing what I would describe as a nasty scratch right above his spine. Here’s the sequence of events that led to Gohr’s injury:

Step 1. Purchase an iPhone. I’d recommend the more valuable one as that will make you more willing to risk life for it.

Step 2. Gain access to a treadmill.

Step 3. Use said iPhone while using treadmill.

Step 4. When your iPhone magically slides off the stand, hits the treadmill and rockets off behind you, make SURE to follow it’s trajectory with your head, not just your eyes.

Step 5. If you’ve completed step 4 correctly you should now be facing sideways on the treadmill instead of forward. Your head should also be cranked completely around behind you. The position of your body will lead to you being completely off balance. Let the treadmill do the rest.

Step 6. Your feet should fly out from under you and if your head is still facing backwards you should land flat on your back on the treadmill. It will then proceed to rocket you backwards.

Step 7. This is of UTMOST importance. You will only stay airborne for a quick second and when you come down, the back of the treadmill will strike somewhere on your body. Make SURE it hits you DIRECTLY in the spine.

Step 8. You should now have a broken spine. If not, repeat. Or, you might just end up blogging about how you ended up with a wicked pressure burst on your back.

One word… Ouch.

Thank you to our good friend Megan for the tip.

In case it wasn’t bad enough that Dateline NBC has basically turned from a relatively legit television “newsmagazine” into the Parade o’ Pedophiles with Chris Hansen as emcee, I watched portions of a show that aired last week that tracked down those rascals themselves… those who’re lower than the pedophiles Dateline has outed to date… IPOD THIEVES!

Yes… using the hidden camera tricks they’ve honed while doing the “To Catch a Predator” series, Hansen and his merry band of vigilante journalists are now in the biz of outing iPod thieves. Using iPods with specially-modified software on the install discs that phones home when the thief installs iTunes, Hansen confronts the iPod thieves with their crimes. The gravity of the situation is surely not lost on Hansen. I mean, some dude out there isn’t listening to his Britney Spears remixes because someone jacked his iPod. And that, my friends… is a fate worse than death.

Alright, I’m practically begging you to give me a shot and not dismiss this post altogether simply because of the title. But here’s the concept, work with me if you will:

• At the theater and at home, we have elaborate surround sound audio systems that do their very best to put us right in the middle of our entertainment action.
• Bass subwoofers or mechanical “rumbler systems” are further used to enhance the physical feeling of being immersed in the action.
• We’re watching shows and movies on bigger and bigger displays with increasing qualities of resolution – again, getting closer to real life.

Taking these commonplace technologies into consideration, my big question remains…

Why don’t we have standard Smell-o-Vision?

Say the scene in the movie you’re watching happens to be at the beach. You hear the beach. You see the beach. But why shouldn’t you be able to smell the beach? Well, if it’s a rotten smelling beach, like some are, fine, I understand.

But to share the ultimate ambiance of the salty sea breeze, I know aromatherapy-based technology exists to dial up a scent on the fly. In fact, I’m pretty sure I even recall reading about someone working on this idea a couple of years ago. But what happened and why hasn’t it taken off yet?

Not every single scent would need to be coded into a movie’s “smelltrack,” just the most important and influential smells. A large mister could expel highly concentrated food grade scent particulates much the same as a projector expels light beams. I’m certainly not an expert of olfaction, but couldn’t a large variety of recognizable smells be mixed up from a sampling of just few vials of odorant, much like the color palate?

I’m sure increased concession food sales at theaters alone would pay for the perfection of such a technology over time. They could even subliminally pump out the aroma of fresh hot buttered popcorn during the previews to further boost their sales.

Going beyond scentology, another sense would be really easy to cover at the movies and would be incredibly simple to encode into the source.

Can you guess what I’m thinking?

How about air movement? A couple of large but quiet fans could simply be placed strategically in the theater and used variably during the right moments of the show.

Driving down the two lane with the top down in a classic convertible? The fans accelerate and you feel the wind in your hair instead of just seeing it affect the actors’ hair. Just add temperature control to the breeze to take it to the next step.

Well ultimately, for most cinema buffs, these ideas are probably a worst nightmare come true. But for the rest of us, I know it could work!

If you ever get a hankering to find out what it’s like to drive a Japanese high-speed train, you’re in luck bucko.

From Japanese toymaker Tomy comes the Shrinkasan Simulator. It’s a self-contained unit a-la those Pac-Man games at Wal-Mart and Target, but it’s modeled after the control board for it’s namesake train. Sporting wicked 16-bit graphics (we love you Super Nintendo), the simulator promises to be quite the blast (or not).

Personally, I can’t see how train simulators are really any fun. You can’t really steer trains and from the description it doesn’t appear the simulator really requires you to be on time, so I’m not sure what the appeal is. Maybe you can race against your friend if you pick up two of them. Even better if you race on criss-crossing tracks.

Via Ubergizmo

“Michael Straw, 25, and Iana Straw, 23, pleaded guilty to two counts each of child neglect for starving their babies near death while they obsessively played online video games.”

Apparently, they got so wrapped up in Dungeons and Dragons they failed to feed their kids. One of the kids was found with matted cat urine in their hair and hadn’t showered in over 10 days.

Video game addiction is definitely a problem in the United States, a Harris Poll released in April of 2007 found that 8.5% of “youth gamers” in the United States could be “classified as pathological or clinically ‘addicted’ to games.”

I hope these neglected kids get a new home, one without “nutjob, loon cases” for parents.

via Fox News

Where else could this come from than Japan… makers of great TVs and weird, kinky crap?

The Angel Kitty Tail Cam is a webcam mounted on the end of the tail on a weird combination French maid/kitty kat costume that appears to be made of shiny plastic and white fur.  It’s about $145 after the currency conversion.

The kinky implications of this kind of thing are staggering, but it begs the question as to “why”.  Of course, the Japanese were also the ones who brought us the simulated lap pillow to lay on.