Are you a “Clusterhead?”

Not tech related, but I saw this on the American Dialect Society’s e-list and thought it was interesting — and scary. Please, dear Gopod, do not add this nightmare illness to the laundry list of ailments that already assail me, your humble cyborged servant:

If you don’t know what a cluster headache is, thank God or whomever or whatever you believe in. Clusters differ from migraines in that, in the case of the former, there is no aura, no increase in sensitivity to light and sound, no nausea, and no throbbing. A cluster headache is just pure, unadulterated pain that has to be felt to be believed. In any case, here is the tiny vocabulary of cluster headache-specific jargon:

Clusterhead: a person who suffers from cluster headaches

Cluster headache: a kind of pain that beggars description, generally affecting only one side of the head and face

The Demon: the personification of cluster-headache pain

The Dance: one’s physical reaction to cluster pain, whatever that may be

Shadow: a kind of premonitory pain that tells you to get ready, because The Demon is about to strike

Mark Tilden Interview

Fun, loose-brained interview with BEAM guru and robot toy designer Mark Tilden on You Review Network. Contains some details on the next generation of robots coming from Tilden/Wowwee Toys.

I also found out via the piece that there’s a “doc sci-fi feature film” about Tilden that’s been making the rounds. Hope that’s made widely available at some point.

MythBusters at Starwars.com

Jamie, Adam, Grant, and others in the MythBusters posse are interviewed at Starwars.com. The piece is supposed to be about busting the “myths” of Star Wars (Can you drive an opentopped Podracer at 900 mph? Can you fall 50′ into a snowbank? Can you survive a freezing night inside a dead animal’s carcass?) This interview part of the piece is surprisingly lame, but the rest of it, about the MythBusters’s work at ILM and their work on the show, is worth the read.