Through the corner of your eye you’re deviously keeping focus on the wall-sized prints of the underwear models. It’s okay. Nobody’s looking.
Yeeeeeaaah, heheh. You nasty thing.
The electric fusion music on the store’s overhead PA system switches to static. A “sales” associate is presumably about to tell the kitchen wares department that there is someone waiting on line two. (There’s no one waiting on line one. You know it’s a ploy to give the illusion of consumer popularity.) However, instead of words you expect – like “paging tammy” or “tammy, line two” or “get to the phone in wares tammy before I fire your ass” – you hear a tepid voice say “Code black.” then *click* and back to that part of the song where the electric organ is flailing off a cliff.
You’re still set on the underwear models, but now all the curves and the airbrushing lack priority. Code black, people. Code black. Why wasn’t it a normal color? Are the primary colors not good enough? Black isn’t even a color for crissakes.
Code black could mean Joey the toddler left a present next to the fragrances counter. It could also mean there’s a missile headed for your face.
This is serious business. Code BLACK, man! You experience a surge of adrenaline. Shit is going down. Or it is about to go down.
…
Something is definitely going to move from a position of higher elevation to a position of lower elevation.
You check your cart.
(Yes, you’re actually there to buy something.)
If the world is about to end, are you really going to need that candy-stripe wrapping paper? Why the hell are people so selfish anyway? EXPERIENCE THE GIFT OF LIFE. Go wrap yourself.
In a skillfully calculated maneuver, you reach for the lonely roll of paper in your cart and launch it toward the ground like a flaming sack of crap.
That’s right. At least now you can say that in the final moments of your life you were a badass.
From the walkway to your left, a middle-aged sales associate (Tammy?) rolls forth a rickety wireframe presentation bin, sprouting out of which is a circus-like tree of black lingerie. A sign at the top of the tree advertises, “code black | new luxury underwear by michele blanc.”
Wait. wait. wait.
Isn’t blanc French for white?
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I’m B, the new editor for the lifestyle, social, and arts sections of the StormEffect.com blog.
Come on, it can’t all be about science. If DowJones has taught us anything with its eerie “Human Element” commercials, it’s that chemical elements are a cheap substitute for home-cooked prose. Who cares about hydrogen anyway?
My responsibilites around the blog also include improving content presentation (forthcoming graphic development), story-editing, grammar nazi-ing (when I feel like it), and working with E on feature stories.
My brother decided to show me this fairly random website, a flash video embedded into a picture. It depicts the trials of tech guy vs. sales guy, told from tech guy’s perspective. I laughed, I cried, I loved all the seriously nerdy comedy. Be warned, F Bombs and other inappropriate language galore. 
Google’s own indexing algorithm has been very popular with the masses over the last several years, it ranks pages based on their interconnectedness and adjacency, or at least that is what I’ve come to believe. Cuil apparently uses a method that delves more deeply into the actual content of the page. In other words, nobody really knows the inner workings of the search algorithms, besides the creators themselves.
I think EVERYONE has considered how solar powered air conditioning would be a perfect solution to one of our biggest energy needs. As it gets hotter, you get more cooling! Right? Well, sort of, in reality central air conditioners use so much energy (several thousands of watts) that they would quickly overwhelm a standard residential solar panel installation even during sunny summer months.
Researchers at Harvard have developed a hand-held device capable of detecting anything, anywhere. The device’s primary application will be diagnosis of disease. It borrows technology used in MRI machines, known as NMR, or Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. In an MRI, NMR generates images by exposing the atomic nuclei in your body to magnetic fields and then bombarding them with radio waves, causing a telltale wobble in the atom detected by a current induced in special coils. The new device, instead of generating an image with this data, simply detects if the molecules are present. It does this by taking a small blood sample and carrying it through detector coils. Each coil is filled with a few magnetic nanoparticles bonded to special detector nanoparticles.