By Rob Beschizza at 10:56 pm Monday, Jan 2
Did you know that Nokia has a "luxury" subsidiary that makes phones for stupid rich people?
As the European cellular industry's supernumerary nipple, Vertu has long specialized in calculator-display brickphones that look like dragon poo rolled in gemstones. It lumbers along the dried slugtrail of progress, having just announced its first touchscreen Symbian handset--sure to be an LG Prada-killer! Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 10:24 pm Monday, Jan 2
Just in time for the 75th anniversary, some photos of the "first" science fiction convention, in Leeds (shown here, Walter Gillings, Arthur C. Clarke, Ted Carnell, in front of Theosophical Hall). Although the site pooh-poohs the idea that the first Philcon was the first-ever con, I'm somewhat loyal to the notion, for the completely ahistorical and biased reason that I was Philcon's guest of honor this year, 75 years after its first gathering.
In January 1937, the Leeds chapter of the Science Fiction League brought something new into the world: the first ever SF convention. (A counter claim is made for an earlier visit of New York fans to meet Philadelphia fans at the home of one of their number, but this is hard to take seriously - see THE FIRST EVER CONVENTION, link below.) At a time when travelling any distance was much more difficult than it is today, several of those attending travelled hundreds of miles to be there. Held in Leeds' Theosophical Hall, at 14 Queen Square, the main order of business was setting up the Science Fiction Association, the UK's first national SF organisation.
THE FIRST CONVENTION (1937)
(Thanks, Paul!)
By Rob Beschizza at 9:36 pm Monday, Jan 2
Government Attic's latest FOIA haul is a compilation of FBI documents concerning the security of telephone services, 1952-1995. The collection is posted as a single 66MB monster PDF. Get cracking! On reading the PDF, I mean.
By Avi Solomon at 9:12 pm Monday, Jan 2
Avinoam Danin is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Evolution, Systematics and Ecology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He curates Flora of Israel Online. His latest book is Botany of the Shroud: The Story of Floral Images on the Shroud of Turin.
Avi Solomon: What first sparked your lifelong fascination with botany?
Avinoam Danin: My parents told me that when I was 3 years old I always said "Look father, I found a flower". My grandparents gave me the book "Analytical Flora of Palestine" on my 13 birthday - I checked off every plant I determined in the book's index of plant names.
Avi: How did you get to know the flora of Israel so intimately? Read the rest
By Madeline Ashby at 8:17 pm Monday, Jan 2
Illustration: Kurt Caesar (?)
Tell me the difference between these two pieces of text. Read the rest
By Rob Beschizza at 7:36 pm Monday, Jan 2
Aerodyne is Jeffrey Stephenson's latest hand-made Art Deco PC. In keeping with the (modern) times, it's a compact Mini-ITX affair in mahogany and aluminum, with an Intel i3 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB solid state drive. Stephenson plans to make no more than a handful of them, to order.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 6:17 pm Monday, Jan 2
The Next Web predicts this unauthorized Steve Jobs action figure will get the kibosh before it goes on sale in February. (Thanks, Rachel!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 5:30 pm Monday, Jan 2
When [Rock] Santorum was in high school, "Everybody called him 'Rooster' because of a strand of hair on the back of his head which stood up, and because of his competitive, in-your-face attitude. 'He would debate anything and everything with you, mostly sports,' [a friend recalled]. 'He was like a rooster. He never backed down.'" That profile also contains this description of the young Santorum, before he met his wife, courtesy of a cousin: "Rick was a funny guy. He sported a bushy moustache for a time, wore Hawaiian shirts and smoked cigars. He liked to laugh, drink and call things 'horsey-assey.' He was very popular and fun to be around."
From an article my cousin, Molly Ball, wrote for The Atlantic, called "
Who is Rick Santorum?"
By Mark Frauenfelder at 4:53 pm Monday, Jan 2
[Video Link] I'm looking forward to Into the Zone, a documentary about the Cacophony Society, which was a pranksterish underground cultural movement from San Francisco that paved the way for Burning Man. There will be a screening on Saturday, February 4, 2012 in Santa Ana, CA, followed by a Q&A session with the filmmaker Jon Alloway and Cacophony instigators that I'll be moderating. Hope to see you there!
Get advance tickets here!
Into the Zone: The Story of the Cacophony Society
Benefit Preview Screening at The Yost Theate 307 N Spurgeon St, Santa Ana, CA 92701
The Cacophony Society Zone Show: You May Already be a Member
Grand Central Art Center
125 North Broadway, Santa Ana, CA 92701
Runs February 4 - April 15
More information after the jump:
Read the rest
By Mark Frauenfelder at 4:11 pm Monday, Jan 2
[Video Link] Scott Siepker set me straight about Iowa! (NSFW) (Via Steve Silberman)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:06 pm Monday, Jan 2
Mighty God King lives up to his handle with this fab series of truth-in-advertising shoops of old Atari game box-art, in which the true nature of the games is revealed in their titles.
Fun From Yesterday!
By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:54 pm Monday, Jan 2
From
Futility Closet:
In 1944 a children’s book club sent a volume about penguins to a 10-year-old girl, enclosing a card seeking her opinion.
She wrote, “This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.”
American diplomat Hugh Gibson called it the finest piece of literary criticism he had ever read.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:47 pm Monday, Jan 2
Radley Balko says:
Maybe there’s a legitimate law enforcement reason to strip a man naked, strap him to a chair, tie a “spit hood” around his mouth, put a hood over his head (see video at the link), and douse him with pepper spray until he dies. That’s what sheriff’s deputies in Lee County, Florida did to 62-year-old Nick Christie two-and-a-half years ago.
I certainly can’t think of any such legitimate reason. But Lee County State’s Attorney Stephen Russell apparently can. Because he cleared the deputies involved of any wrongdoing.
The New Professionalism
By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:37 pm Monday, Jan 2
UPDATE: Leigh Walton of Top Shelf just let me know that Gingerbread Girl is available in its entirety as a free webcomic!
In Gingerbread Girl, a graphic novel by Paul Tobin, and illustrated by Colleen Coover, Anna Billips is a outwardly-cheerful and carefree 27-year-old woman who is convinced that her Penfield Homunculus was surgically removed from her brain when she was 9 years old.
Here is how one of the characters in the book (her off-and-on girlfriend Chili) defines the Penfield homunculus: "a physical phenomenon named after its discoverer, Wilder Penfield. It's right here in each of our brains, and it's a human-shaped template for your sense of touch. It's stunted and twisted but it's there. If I touch someone's hand, their Penfield Homunculus registers the sensation in its own corresponding region."
Anna claims her father removed her homunculus when she was 9 years old, around the time that her parents were having vicious arguments leading up to a divorce and her father's abandonment. Anna believes that her homunculus (which resembled a gingerbread cookie when it was removed from her brain) developed into a twin sister she named Ginger. When Anna was young, Ginger was her sister and playmate, but as she grew older Ginger drifted out of her life. Because Anna lost her original homunculus, she is unable to sense the world in a subtle way. A primitive homunculus grew in the void in her brain, but it only allows her to feel things in "black and white."
In Gingerbread Girl, Anna is always on the lookout for Ginger. In between searches through parks and shops, she dates a woman named Chili and a man Jerry, enjoying the fact that they are jealous of each other.
Author Paul Tobin's story is as complex and engaging as possible for a small-format 104-page graphic novel. It's a kind of story I probably wouldn't have enjoyed much as a text only novel, but I found this graphic novel to be enthralling. It's told in the fake documentary style of The Office, where characters occasionally address the reader to give background information. It's a gimmick, but an effective one that works well here.
I'm a sucker for Colleen Coover's art style: clean solid black-and-white art with monotone color shading. I want to seek out more of her work.
Because of the adult themes, Gingerbread Girl is probably best for readers 16 and older.
Buy Gingerbread Girl on Amazon.com
By Cory Doctorow at 3:15 pm Monday, Jan 2
On the CBC Ideas podcast, a lecture by Ethan Zuckerman on the connection between LOLcats, Internet activism and the Arab Spring:
In the 2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture, Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, looks at the "cute cat" theory of internet activism, and how it helps explain the Arab Spring. He discusses how activists around the world are turning to social media tools which are extremely powerful, easy to use and difficult for governments to censor. The Vancouver Human Rights Lecture is co-sponsored by the UBC Continuing Studies, the Laurier Institution, and Yahoo.
The Vancouver Human Rights Lecture - Cute Cats and The Arab Spring
MP3 link
By Rob Beschizza at 2:50 pm Monday, Jan 2
Here is someone who hates everyone. [SMH]
Update: Though the deletion was widely reported, the tweet is evidently still live.
By Xeni Jardin at 2:36 pm Monday, Jan 2
A soldier carries ammunition on a naval ship during the Velayat-90 war game on Sea of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran December 31, 2011. Iran test-fired a new medium-range missile, designed to evade radars, on Sunday during the last days of its naval drill in the Gulf, the official IRNA news agency quoted a military official as saying. (REUTERS/Fars News/Hamed Jafarnejad - IRAN)
By Cory Doctorow at 2:00 pm Monday, Jan 2
Alan Turing will get his own UK commemorative stamp in 2012. It will be fun to use it on sealed envelopes, as a kind of cherry-on-the-top for the traditional crypto argument that scrambling messages is the same as putting them in an envelope, as opposed to writing them on postcards.
The computer pioneer is one of 10 prominent people chosen for the Royal Mail's Britons of Distinction stamps, to be launched in February, which includes the allied war heroine Odette Hallowes of the Special Operations Executive, composer Frederick Delius and architect Sir Basil Spence, to mark the golden jubilee of Coventry Cathedral.
Turing worked as part of the team that cracked the Enigma code at Bletchley Park, and went on to help create the world's first modern computer. This year marks the centenary of his birth.
Codebreaker Alan Turing gets stamp of approval
(Image: Alan Turing, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from zoonabar's photostream)
By Xeni Jardin at 1:55 pm Monday, Jan 2
[Video Link]
Above, a PBS NewsHour report by science correspondent Miles O'Brien which I helped shoot, on the subject of tissue engineering. The goal in this field: Grow tissue or even whole organs to repair damaged or diseased human bodies.
The report focuses in part on Isaias Hernandez, a 26-year old Marine whose leg was badly injured in an artillery attack on his convoy, in Iraq. "It looked like a chicken, like if you would take a bite out of it down to the bone," he tells Miles.
Dr. Steve Badylak of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh harvested material from a pig bladder to grow replacement muscle in the young Marine's leg.
Full transcript for the story is here.
By Cory Doctorow at 1:16 pm Monday, Jan 2
Writing in Wired, Adam Rogers tells the story of how Canadian mycologist James Scott started his career by tracking down an ancient fungus that had adapted to growing on whiskey fumes and had infested a town around a Hiram Walker warehouse. Relatives of the fungus had been found around Cognac distilleries in 1872, but it had never been systematically studied with modern techniques. It turns out to be an extremophile fungus that can grow on pretty much anything, even stainless steel.
But by then, Scott had become obsessed with discovering how Baudoinia worked. After all, his name is next to it in the books. How did the mold use the angels’ share? A genetic analysis showed that it was only distantly related to cellar fungus, and researchers at a Department of Energy genomics lab—always looking for potential new ways to turn plants into ethanol for biofuel—added Baudoinia to their list of fungi-to-do. Physiological studies suggested that the ethanol helps the fungus produce heat-shock proteins, protective against temperature extremes, which might explain how it can survive the wide range of temperatures in habitats from Cognac to Canada to Kentucky.
Even weirder, how does a fungus that’s millions of years old, older than Homo sapiens, find a near-perfect ecological niche amid stuff people have been making for only a couple of centuries? Presumably somewhere in the world, naturally occurring Baudoinia lives adjacent to naturally fermenting fruit—or maybe it’s everywhere, a sluggish loser until it gets a whiff of ethanol. Evolution is full of stories of animals and plants fitting into hyper-specific man-made niches, as if nature somehow got the specs in advance. “It’s an urban extremophile,” Scott says. Typically we don’t think of cities as being particularly extreme environments, but few places on earth get as hot as a rooftop or as dry as the corner of a heated living room. Fungi live in both. Now Scott sees urban extremophile fungi everywhere. The black smudges along roadsides and on old buildings that look like soot, he says, are usually some hardy fungus that tolerates (or loves) diesel fumes, smog, and slightly acidic rain. Baudoinia might have been a bit player on prehuman Earth. But then we came along and built distilleries, Baudoinia’s own bespoke microparadises.
The Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus
(Image: Need a drink?, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from trippchicago's photostream)
By Rob Beschizza at 1:10 pm Monday, Jan 2
5star's Lords of Graphite is a series of sculptures made from pencil segments: "The vision that haunts me still is a landscape of dark brooding mystic air - raw rough lines drawn forcefully throughout by the Lords of Graphite."
By David Pescovitz at 12:35 pm Monday, Jan 2
BB pal and former guestblogger Marc Weidenbaum, of the excellent Disquiet site asked 25 ambient musicians "who also enjoy using Instagram to create original short pieces of music -- call them "sonic postcards" -- inspired by each other's Instagram photos." He's posted the entire lovely collection of tracks and also a 58-page PDF of the Instagram images and background on the artists. From the Instagr/am/bient project page:
Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?
Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards.
"
Instagr/am/bient: 25 Sonic Postcards"
By David Pescovitz at 12:29 pm Monday, Jan 2
Above is the Iberian Peninsula as photographed from the International Space Station. Light pollution looks pretty from space. From National Geographic:
This photograph from space also shows airglow, a faint green arc seen along the horizon that's caused by chemical reactions among the gas molecules of Earth's upper atmosphere.
"
Iberian Night"
By David Pescovitz at 12:25 pm Monday, Jan 2
My son and I were looking at volcano videos on YouTube and got a chuckle out of this (faux) "European Railways" commercial.
By Glenn Fleishman at 12:24 pm Monday, Jan 2
Roboto, the new "house" font for Android 4, was branded a haphazard mash of classic typefaces. The longer you look at it--and the technological constraints that it aims to transcend-
the clearer its virtues become.
— Glenn
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:22 pm Monday, Jan 2
We have a new T-shirt design! I drew this one, and it's called "Critter." It comes in a baby snapsuit size, too, for $8.95.
By David Pescovitz at 12:20 pm Monday, Jan 2
Seen above is a proposed 1912 design for the Lincoln Memorial by John Russell Pope, who would go on to design the Jefferson Memorial. According to historians quoted in Smithsonian magazine, Pope didn't like the site for the memorial so he "created radical designs in a last-ditch effort to discourage the Lincoln Memorial Commission from using the swampy location, west of the Washington Monument." Those of us familiar with the imagery of the Illuminati may beg to differ with that alleged rationale.The illustration is part of an exhibition at Washington DC's National Building Museum called "Unbuilt Washington."
"The Monuments That Were Never Built" (Smithsonian)
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 11:36 am Monday, Jan 2
For Christmas, some Oxford geologists built an amazing cake based on the geologic time spiral—a way of visually representing the order and flora/fauna of the different stages of deep history.
It's a pretty damn epic cake. It's creation involved 32 eggs, 3 kg of marzipan, 7 people, and 30 hours of labor.
Video Link
Via Evidence Matters
Here's another SOPA supporter for you to boycott: Elsevier, publisher of many medical and scientific journals. You might also remember them from a 2009 scandal where Elsevier published fake journals as covert advertisements for pharmaceutical companies. Maybe it's time for scientists to consider not submitting papers to Elsevier journals or serving as peer reviewers for their journals. (Via The Quantum Pontiff and Jani Kotakoski)
— Maggie
Ikea has
announced a new cardboard shipping pallet, which uses fiendishly clever folding to give a loading capacity of 1,650 lbs: "As Ikea uses some 10 million pallets a year, if the experiment is a success it's a good bet that other retail giants will take notice. But the thing that has analysts skeptical is that the pallets can only be used once."
— Cory
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 10:56 am Monday, Jan 2
Over the past few years, I've heard several people in the natural gas industry estimate that the United States is sitting on 100 years worth of natural gas. Every time I've heard the 100-year estimate batted around, it's been presented as a positive thing, a shorthand way of saying, "We've got tons of home-grown energy, people! We don't need to worry about the future of energy at all!"
It's an interesting example of the fundamental disconnect between short-term and long-term thinkers.
All things considered, 100 years is not really a very long time. Especially given the fact that estimates like this are based on current natural gas usage rates, but are presented with an implication that we should be using more natural gas than we currently do. I don't think that a 100-year-supply of something as critical as energy represents a time of plenty. I think it represents a ticking clock. At best, what you've got there is a transitional energy source—something with the potential to be cleaner and less politically complicated than coal and oil, that you can use while you build up an energy infrastructure based on something other than fossil fuels.
But the critique of that "100 years of gas" estimate goes even deeper. That's because any estimate of fossil fuel reserves is made under the limitations of corporate secrecy. Different well owners estimate reserves in different ways, so you can't just add up everybody's estimates and compare apples to apples. There's no way for independent sources to check estimates. And there's not really any independent bodies reviewing the state of fossil fuel reserve estimation science. (The closest you'll get to that is a review of oil reserves done in 2009 by a small group of researchers in the US and UK.)
Meanwhile, as energy analyst Chris Nelder points out on Slate.com, if you take a close look at the information about the estimates that is available, you'll find that "100 years of natural gas" doesn't necessarily mean 100 years of natural gas.
But what is that estimate based upon? Those details haven’t been made freely available to the public, but their summary breaks it down as follows here and in the graph below: 273 tcf are "proved reserves," meaning that it is believed to exist, and to be commercially producible at a 10 percent discount rate. That conforms with the data of the U.S. Energy Information Administration. An additional 536.6 tcf are classified as "probable" from existing fields, meaning that they have some expectation that the gas exists in known formations, but it has not been proven to exist and is not certain to be technically recoverable. An additional 687.7 tcf is "possible" from new fields, meaning that the gas might exist in new fields that have not yet been discovered. A further 518.3 tcf are "speculative," which means exactly that. A final 176 tcf are claimed for coalbed gas, which is gas trapped in coal formations.
I'd recommend reading Nelder's full article. It's a nice summary of why estimates of fossil fuel reserves need to be approached skeptically, why the job of measuring this stuff is difficult to begin with, and why we don't really have enough information to declare a "Golden Age" of natural gas.
Image: Natural Gas Flare, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from rickhurdle's photostream
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:52 am Monday, Jan 2
How do you decide whether or not to trust someone you've never met before renting them your car or apartment? Christopher Maag looks for answers in an interesting article he wrote for credit.comcalled, "Collaborative Consumption, Trust and the Evolution of Credit."
Jeremy Barton owns a nice Subaru Impreza, but he rarely drives it. As a co-founder of a tech startup in San Francisco, he usually just rides his bike to work. So when Barton heard of a new website called Relay Rides that lets regular people rent out their own cars, it sounded perfect. “Not only does it help pay my car payment and my insurance, but I also get a really good feeling knowing that someone can use it,” says Barton, who’s 27. But getting started as a do-it-yourself car rental company proved more difficult than Barton expected. For weeks after he joined Relay Rides, his Subaru continued sitting in its parking spot, unused. With no reviews of Barton or his car on the website, borrowers skipped over him to use cars that already had been well-reviewed.
And when Barton finally received a text message informing him that the car would be rented, he had some concerns. Who was this mystery borrower? Would they trash his car?
“I was nervous about it, to be honest,” says Barton. “I didn’t panic. But I would’ve liked to know more information about the person. It would’ve given me a bit more ease.” [Article: Companies Consider Credit Card Purchase Data for Ad Targeting] So Barton, the very definition of an early adopter, decided to do something about it. His company, Legit.com, uses data culled from social media sites including Twitter and Facebook to help users on websites similar to Relay Rides figure out who’s trustworthy and who’s not. After all, if Barton had a moment of trepidation about lending his car to a stranger, imagine how much work lies ahead for Relay Rides, as it tries to expand its network of car lenders and borrowers across America. “To create a true collaborative consumption industry, finding a way to establish trust between strangers is an absolute requirement,” says Shelby Clark, co-founder of Relay Rides.com. And yet, despite the hurdles, it’s happening. Tonight in Manhattan, fewer visitors to the city will sleep in a hotel bed than in beds reserved through Airbnb.com, a website that lets people rent out their apartments directly, says Rachel Botsman, a writer and entrepreneur who focuses on collaborative companies. In the United Kingdom, 10 percent of all lending is done through peer-to-peer websites like Zopa.com, Prosper and Lending Club, Botsman says.
Collaborative Consumption, Trust and the Evolution of Credit
Seriously. If you haven't figured out by now that the world is not ending and that any Mayan predictions claiming otherwise are largely fabricated pseudoarchaeology, then I'm not sure that I can help you. One last try, though.
Please read this excellent FAQ, written by actual archaeologist (and my former professor) John Hoopes.
I did an interview with Dr. Hoopes last year about the 2012 as a phenomenon, but the new FAQ covers, in detail, why a 2012 apocalypse is bunk, and what sources you can check out to find further accurate information about the confluence of ancient Mayan mythology and modern Western mythology. And that is all I have to say about this for the rest of the year. Coming in 2013, though:
Lots of stories about Mayan archaeology. Just to mess with you.
— Maggie
By Cory Doctorow at 10:01 am Monday, Jan 2 
Espen sez, "This is an excellent essay by Jonah Lehrer on the increasing difficulty of finding direct causation in medical (or, indeed, all) research. Highly readable, though I would have liked to see a little more about how to address this problem (i.e., with network analysis tools)."
David Hume referred to causality as “the cement of the universe.” He was being ironic, since he knew that this so-called cement was a hallucination, a tale we tell ourselves to make sense of events and observations. No matter how precisely we knew a given system, Hume realized, its underlying causes would always remain mysterious, shadowed by error bars and uncertainty. Although the scientific process tries to makes sense of problems by isolating every variable—imagining a blood vessel, say, if HDL alone were raised—reality doesn’t work like that. Instead, we live in a world in which everything is knotted together, an impregnable tangle of causes and effects. Even when a system is dissected into its basic parts, those parts are still influenced by a whirligig of forces we can’t understand or haven’t considered or don’t think matter. Hamlet was right: There really are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
This doesn’t mean that nothing can be known or that every causal story is equally problematic. Some explanations clearly work better than others, which is why, thanks largely to improvements in public health, the average lifespan in the developed world continues to increase. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, things like clean water and improved sanitation—and not necessarily advances in medical technology—accounted for at least 25 of the more than 30 years added to the lifespan of Americans during the 20th century.) Although our reliance on statistical correlations has strict constraints—which limit modern research—those correlations have still managed to identify many essential risk factors, such as smoking and bad diets.
Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 9:46 am Monday, Jan 2
My new obsession: Cockpit landing videos taken during approaches into technically challenging airports.
Yesterday, Phillip Bump posted a link on Twitter to a detailed rant, written by a pilot, about why pilots don't like to land at (or take off from) Washington DC's Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. That post is pretty interesting, especially if you've ever wondered—as I had, while waiting on the tarmac at National last fall—how large jets manage land and take off from that airport while simultaneously avoiding all the no-fly zones that are very, very close by. (Hint: It is difficult, and occasionally terrifying.) But the money shot is at the end, where you can watch a video that will show you the pilot's eye view of a National Airport landing approach.
Turns out, there is a whole, beautiful genre of YouTube videos devoted to this kind of thing. The video above is one of my favorites, showing the approach in to Hong Kong's old Kai Tak airport. Closed in 1998, Kai Tak had one of the most challenging landing approaches in the world. It involved flying at heights of less than 1000 feet over the top of crowded neighborhoods and close to nearby skyscrapers, then executing a sharp right-hand turn, while continuing to lose elevation. Oh, and, the turn had to be done without the help of the Instrument Landing System. Instead, pilots made the turn based on a checkerboard marker painted on the side of a hill. And the runway ended in water. And the wind was often less than favorable to this kind of maneuvering. Fun!
The video above is a bit long, but if you fast forward to about 3:00 minutes in, you'll see the best parts. By that point, you can see the checkerboard marker off to the left and get a feel for just how low these planes had to be. Although, frankly, I'm having a hard time deciding which is freakier: What these landing looked like from the sky, or what they looked like from the ground.
Video Link
By Cory Doctorow at 9:02 am Monday, Jan 2
(Image: GoMA Blog)
Yayoi Kusama's installation The Obliteration Room at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art started as a stark white room, and then thousands of passing children were given brightly colored dots with which to decorate it. The result is exuberant and marvellous.
(Image: Stuart Addelsee, used with permission)
This is What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers to Thousands of Kids
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:02 am Monday, Jan 2
Mark Nathan Stafford made this "Bones" teapot fashioned in the likeness of DeForest "Dr McCoy" Kelley's noggin: "Stoneware. Dimensions: 11 inches in height by 9 inches in width by 9 inches in depth. 2011. Pours from left ear."
“Doctor Bones” Teapot
(via Neatorama)
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