Difference between this and traditional matches: they’re sulfur-coated instead of wax-coated.

You read that right, they even burn underwater.

Match sticks are extra long: 2.75 inches, for added safety, lest you burn your fingertips.

Demo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course lighting them up in extreme weather is another matter.

Price: about USD5 for a pack of 25 matches.

In other words, he’s the only person left in the world to have actually seen Hitler’s last moments before he committed suicide on 30th April 1945.

Misch at the age of 20+

Misch at the age of 90

His description of his first meeting with Hitler is vivid and chilling:

My first meeting with Hitler was rather strange. I’d been in the job 12 days when Hitler’s chief adjutant, a man called Bruckner, started asking me questions about my grandmother, about my childhood. Then he got up and walked towards the door. Being an obedient soldier, I flung myself forward to open it, and there was Hitler standing right behind the door. I felt cold. Then I felt hot. I felt every emotion standing there opposite Hitler.

He describes what it was like working among Hitler’s inner circle:

In the Fuehrer’s entourage, strictly speaking, we were bodyguards. When Hitler was travelling, between four and six of us would accompany him in a second car. But when we were at Hitler’s apartment in the Chancellery we also had other duties. Two of us would always work as telephone operators. With a boss like Hitler, there were always plenty of phone calls.

When Hitler retreated to the Fuehrerbunker, Misch followed him there and worked as the telephone operator in a small room with one telephone and teletype machine with outside lines.

Of course the next question would be: was the movie Der Untergang (2004) an accurate representation of the goings-on there? He answered emphatically:

This movie is an operatic drama. Everything is exaggerated! The bunker wasn’t like that at all. There weren’t all those people, all those generals and, of course, we weren’t drinking Champagne in those miniscule concrete cells!

He claims that he saw Hitler a few hours before the dictator died:

It was toward 11 am. He passes in front of me, stops, gives me a glance before turning around and disappearing. I went back to work. Down the hall, five or six meters away, I heard Hitler speaking to a group of men, including Goebbels: “And so that what happened to Mussolini, who was hung and stoned (on April 28), doesn’t happen to me, see to it that I am burned after my death.

He describes what happened when Hitler shot himself:

Suddenly I heard somebody shouting: ‘Linge, Linge, I think it’s happened.’ (Heinz Linge was the Führer’s personal assistant). They’d heard a gunshot, but I hadn’t. At that moment Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, ordered everyone to be silent. Linge passed in front of me before stopping in front of Hitler’s door. There was a deathly silence. We waited a half hour before anyone opened the door.

I was speaking on the telephone and I made sure I talked louder on purpose because I wanted to hear something. I didn’t want it to feel like we were in a death bunker.

Then Martin Bormann ordered Hitler’s door to be opened. I saw Hitler slumped with his head on the table. Eva Braun was lying on the sofa, with her head towards him. Her knees were drawn tightly up to her chest. She was wearing a dark blue dress with white frills. I will never forget it.

I watched as they wrapped Hitler up in gray blankets. His legs were sticking out as they carried him past me. Someone shouted to me: ‘Hurry upstairs, they’re burning the boss!’ I decided not to go because I had noticed that Mueller from the Gestapo was there – and he was never usually around. I said to my comrade Hentschel, the mechanic: ‘Maybe we will be killed for being the last witnesses.

Then he describes what happened the next day: the six children of Joseph Goebbels – whom Hitler had appointed Germany’s new leader were drugged and murdered by their own mother:

Straight after Hitler’s death, Mrs Goebbels came down to the bunker with her children. She started preparing to kill them. She couldn’t have done that above ground – there were other people there who would have stopped her. That’s why she came downstairs – because no-one else was allowed in the bunker. She came down on purpose to kill them.

The kids were right next to me and behind me. We all knew what was going to happen. It was clear. I saw Hitler’s doctor, Dr Stumpfegger give the children something to drink. Some kind of sugary drink. Then Stumpfegger went and helped to kill them. All of us knew what was going on. An hour or two later, Mrs Goebbels came out crying. She sat down at a table and began playing patience.

What happened next: Misch managed to leave the bunker a few hours before it the Soviets arrived. However he was quickly captured and spent 9 years in Soviet labour camps.

Two months after the end of the war, Winston Churchill visited it, posing for photos outside, even sitting on a chair recovered from the shelter.

Source
The BBC, 3rd Sept 2009
Le Monde, January 2005

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In the course of upgrading one’s photography equipments, there might come a time where the usual elements of rivalry and “my stuff is bigger than yours” is taken to extremes, and showing off of the following gadgets or similar could take place.

First up, the ultimate telezoom lenses for your DSLR. The zoom range of 200-500mm is not extraordinary, but the maximum aperture of f/2.8 throughout the focal range is. Perhaps the wow factor is worth the task of lugging this 15.7 kg monster around. And yes, be careful, it might be mistaken for a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) launcher!

The Sigma APO 200-500 F/2.8

While a lot of tele lenses have a distinct cannon barrel look, Sigma have apparently done all they can to enhance that trait, giving the lens a leafy green finish. The end result is an extremely fast tele zoom lens that could easily be confused with a surface-to-air missile launcher.

If you think possession of the above makes you the king of the photography world, think again. Next up, a truly extraordinary lens, the Carl Zeiss Apo Sonnar T* 1700 mm F4, apparently the only one ever made 2 years ago for a Qatari. Don’t even think of lugging this around: it weighs 256 kg, that’s even heavier than The Big Show. It’s a 1,700mm f/4 lens medium format (equals 750mm in 35mm SLR format). It’s reputed to be the largest non-military tele lens in the world. You can guess that the price paid was in the region of several million Euros. Interestingly, the intended use for the lens is reportedly “antelope photography”.

The small blob on the right would be your camera

The same lens, viewed from the top

Next up is the world’s ultimate point-and-shoot digital camera. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the USD42,000, 5kg humongousity that is the Seitz 6×17”. It is unique in that it basically scans the view through the lens. End result: 160MB images in a panoramic format. It’s incredibly quick: a full-sized frame of 21,250 x 7,500 pixels is done in a mere 2 seconds.

Don’t you think you’d look rather silly bringing this around?

How about the world’s top DSLR camera? People usually rave about Canons and Nikons, but how about Hasselblads? Usually extreme high end products bear brands that most people never hear about; Hasselblad’s flagship camera is the H3DII which costs about USD40,000 (that’s more than RM120,000: and I thought RM20,000 is the ultimate already!). Swedish camera manufacturer Hasselblad is at the very top of the game, its achievements include being selected as NASA official camera provider: and famously not one but three Hasseblads were carried aboard the Apollo 11 mission. That means possibly the most famous photograph ever taken was taken with a Hasselblad. Some more details: 39 megapixel backpiece, 48x36mm sensor.

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Luis Eslava designed the Maria USB stick / thumb drive with a rallying marketing cry of “is there anyone who hasn’t sometimes wished for holy backup to protect their most precious data? It’s finally available in the form of the Maria USB!”

Capable of holding 512MB, it sells for a quite costly 69 euros.

Perhaps this is the first time religion and data backup are so visibly intertwined.

Her LED “heart” even “beats” all the time, slowly when in passively connected, and quicker while data transfer is in progress. Even her halo has a prayer engraved: “Oh Maria, keep my data safe!”

The designer Luis Eslava, 31 of Spain.

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KitchenAid makes high end dishwashers that do not need the usual, tiresome procedures needed for lesser dishwashers. Yes, that means no more pre-rinsing, no more pre-soaking and definitely no more pre-scrubbing, ever!

You just need to plonk anything: plates, pots, pans into one of their dishwashers, even the greasiest ones you can find, switch it on, and it will do everything.

The secret to this is the proprietary ProScrub™ cleaning technology, where concentrated, powerful bursts of water will get rid of any unwanted mess.

Logically, all this should make an almighty racket, but incredibly, their dishwashers are amazingly quiet. I have even checked at epinions.com, and reviewers concur. This is due to another proprietary technology they’ve developed called the Whisper Quiet® sound reduction system, which basically provides noise insulation.

So, if you’re in the market for the coolest-looking, quietest dishwasher available anywhere, you might want to consider
KitchenAid Dishwashers.

The ad was for the Swiss-made IWC Schaffhausen Big Pilot’s Watch, a luxury watch designed for pilots which carries a USD12,500 price tag.

Well, with taglines like these I suppose you’re courting trouble:

Often seen on stewardesses’ bedside tables.

Its seven-day power reserve “means you can afford to stay in bed that little bit longer than usual.”

Copies of SCMP are carried on board Cathay Pacific and Dragonair flights and given free to passengers. No wonder lah!

A flight attendant said summed it up: “…seems to make out that flight attendants are loose women who sleep with pilots just because they’ve got a nice watch.”

Interestingly, John Findlay, the general secretary of the Aircrew Officers Association, which represents Hong Kong pilots said no pilots in the association wore such a watch.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem find a copy of the advertisement anywhere. Anybody can help?

Now a little bit about the watch itself. According to its desciption at armstrongrockwell.com, it is “in a 46.2mm, stainless steel case, with a black dial and illuminating Arabic numerals. This watch features the automatic Pellaton winding system. The dial displays a date window in the six o’clock position, seven day power reserve with indicator, and second hand with stop function. The convex sapphire crystal has antireflective on both sides. Water resistant to 60 meters. The watch is on a black crocodile strap.”

This is a video of the launching of the watch in 2002:

source
rawstory.com

But what is it? According to wikipedia:

Lichtenberg Figures are branching electric discharges that sometimes appear on the surface or the interior of insulating materials. They are named after the German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who originally discovered and studied them. When they were first discovered, it was thought that their characteristic shapes might help to reveal the nature of positive and negative electric “fluids”. In 1777, Lichtenberg built a large Electrophorus in order to generate high voltage static electricity through induction. By discharging a high voltage point to the surface of an insulator, he was able to record the resulting radial patterns in fixed dust. By then pressing blank sheets of paper onto these pattens, Lichtenberg was able to transfer and record these images, thereby discovering the basic principle of modern Xerography. This discovery was also the forerunner of modern day Plasma Physics. Although Lichtenberg only studied 2-dimensional (2D) figures, modern high voltage researchers study 2D and 3D figures (electrical trees) on, and within, insulating materials. Lichtenberg figures are now known to be examples of fractals.

The specimen in the picture above was created via double irradiation:

This specimen was irradiated on the left side, rotated 180 degrees, and irradiated again on the right side, creating two independent internal charge layers. The right side was then manually discharged, causing a 3-D “lightning storm” inside the rightmost layer, which then spread into another series of discharges between layers. The specimen is lit from below by blue LED’s. Unlike low detail laser crystal art, each Lichtenberg specimen has a unique and incredibly detailed fractal discharge pattern. As they branch, the discharge channels become increasingly finer, becoming hairlike as they finally disappear. The smallest discharges may ultimately go to the molecular level.

Here’s a video of a Lichtenberg Figure being created, where:

…an 18″ x 18″ x 1″ piece of plexiglas was charged to 2.2 million volts with a particle accelerator, resulting in a layer of excess electrons to become trapped inside, and when discharged, escaped with a bright flash and a loud bang. The hot, lightning-like discharge created thousands of microscopic fractures inside the acrylic, resulting in a branching “Captured Lightning” sculpture (or Lichtenberg Figure).

Interestingly, Lichtenberg figures can also appear on the skin of lightning victims, like so:

Apparently, these “lightning flowers” may remain visible for hours or even days before disappearing. They are thought to be caused by the rupture of small capillaries under the skin due to either the passage of the lightning current or the shock wave from the lightning discharge.

Check out this Lichtenberg Figure resulting from a lightning strike on a flagpole on a golf course:

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This is a tiny mobile phone that will ever only do voice.

Done by an amateur:

…as straightforward as a phone can possibly be. What a concept: a 3.14-inch cellphone that just makes phone calls. Easy as Pi.

There’s no email, no Web browsing, no garage door opener—nothing but the necessary voice in-and-out functions and four simple keys, each of which lets you enter three numbers. Rock the key to the left and you’ve entered one number, push it downward, there’s another and rock that key to the right, and you’ve entered another. Simple.

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Tags: phones, gadget, gadgets, mobiles, mobile phones, handphones

• smartphone,
• shoot and store photos,
• surf the Web,
• check e-mails,
• listen to music files

Enter the Blackberry Pearl

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Tags: blackberry, pearl, blackberry pearl, gadget, smartphone, PDA phone