Weekly Picture 156
Mae’s Mondrian, Austin, TX, 7.9.2009
Como Dios manda | The way it’s supposed to be
Or, as my Toronto photo-friend Jannx put it: “On the Lam(p)”.
bad manners in the sun
But urinating in the water was voted the most annoying violation of beach or pool etiquette, with 16 percent calling it the worst breach.
Perpetua, Inc.
Prosecutors on Thursday charged three gravediggers and a manager in an elaborate scheme in which hundreds of corpses were dug up at a historic black cemetery near Chicago and strewn in a weeded area or reburied with other bodies so that plots could be resold, authorities said.
18 Meters Over Tokyo
Did you ever want one of your toys to come to life? Well, a life-size Gundam robot has risen in Tokyo. It stands 59 feet tall (18 meters). So if you were standing on the sixth floor of a building, you would be at about eye level with it. This thing is enormous and the detail amazing. When available, it should be viewed large.
Gundam Project by Green Tokyo
.
A cactus flower
is not a turd blossom.
dear clusterflock
Andrew and I have talked a lot about how to integrate some of the activity that is generated outside clusterflock (twitter, flickr, facebook) so that it flavors some of what goes on here. Do you think this is desirable? Useful? Important?
Do you see a way to do it?
Thoughts and suggestions welcome.
Dear Clusterflock
First sentence in an article from the Houston Chronicle about jails with no a/c
Glowing like an atomic peach, the summer sun vaulted from Lake Livingston and hung in the cloudless sky like a thousand heat lamps from hell.
(thanks, Aaron)
The ‘lost’ NASA tapes
Detail of the Earthrise picture taken by the first Lunar Orbiter in 1966, as rendered at the time.
Detail of the Earthrise picture taken by the first Lunar Orbiter in 1966, rendered with modern technology.
A MacBook Pro and forty-year-old tape drives are helping restore the original Lunar Orbiter tapes.
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Graphene
What’s one atom thick, stronger than a diamond, and conducts electricity 100 times faster than silicon?
“It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured,” Andre Geim, a physicist at the University of Manchester, England, wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science.
“A few grams could cover a football field,” said Rod Ruoff, a graphene researcher at the University of Texas, Austin, in an e-mail. A gram is about 1/30th of an ounce.
Mike and Maaike, the atnmbl
Essentially an all-wheel-drive Internet sitting room, the solar and electric atnmbl asks you where you want to go and then takes you there. Speed and acceleration are “irrelevant considerations,” time savings is the key – that is, unless you ask the atnmbl to take the scenic route. Since you’re not driving, you’ll need something to do during the trip, hence the Internet browsing screen and open-source software architecture to download apps, social networking capabilities, and . . . a bar.
Fox News: Fair and Balanced and Non-Discriminatory
Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, “We are — we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other …”
Go watch the video at salon for the full effect.
from the comments
Not that goats relax, but they get away with it.
&
So one could bottle parrot breath and sell it and I’d buy it.
Hefner’s Novella
The one he bought, that is: Nabakov’s The Original of Laura.
Hugh Hefner’s Playboy has acquired the first serial rights to The Original of Laura, the final, unfinished novella of the late Vladmir Nabokov.
For years, Nabokov’s son Dmitri indicated that, per his father’s dying wishes, Laura would never see the light of day. Then last spring he had a change of heart and entrusted the super-agent Andrew Wylie to find a publisher. Knopf secured the rights for an undisclosed sum, and a publication date was set for this coming fall. When Amy Grace Loyd, Playboy’s literary editor since 2005, heard the news, she began an intense courtship process. “I did it with orchids, mostly,” Ms. Loyd said.
Belatedly: Peach and Cherry Martini Cobbler
The recipe can be found here.
Hail Rings
A big thunderstorm just swept through my part of Dallas, dropping hail. Dime to quarter-size, mostly, and a few larger ones that really made some noise pinging off the house. It didn’t last long, and when it was over I went out and picked up a few large stones on the lawn. Many were oddly disk shaped. I don’t know if they melted to that shape or fell that way, but it was lovely to see the rings in them. A kind of sky-scape in each one–waves of cloud within cloud.
A mi modo de pensar | To my way of thinking
Cam-phone photo. LG VX 11000. July 7, 2009. On the lam.
Do the math.
On Hacker News on Monday, I was amused to read some people saying that writing StackOverflow was hilariously easy—and proceeding to back up their claim by promising to clone it over July 4th weekend. Others chimed in, pointing to existing clones as a good starting point.
Let’s assume, for sake of argument, that you decide it’s okay to write your StackOverflow clone in ASP.NET MVC, and that I, after being hypnotized with a pocket watch and a small club to the head, have decided to hand you the StackOverflow source code, page by page, so you can retype it verbatim. We’ll also assume you type like me, at a cool 100 WPM (a smidge over eight characters per second), and unlike me, you make zero mistakes. StackOverflow’s *.cs, *.sql, *.css, *.js, and *.aspx files come to 2.3 MB. So merely typing the source code back into the computer will take you about eighty hours if you make zero mistakes.
Except, of course, you’re not doing that; you’re going to implement StackOverflow from scratch. So even assuming that it took you a mere ten times longer to design, type out, and debug your own implementation than it would take you to copy the real one, that already has you coding for several weeks straight—and I don’t know about you, but I am okay admitting I write new code considerably less than one tenth as fast as I copy existing code.
—Benjamin Pollack, The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News, July 1, 2009
(Via Daring Fireball & Kottke, jointly making this 99.9ºF on Fever)
Missed Connections
a century before Craigslist or the back page of the Voice:
Will Lizzie, or Clara, or Julia, or any other handsome and agreeable young lady that was seen on Broadway any day last week, and is matrimonially inclined, send her address, enclosing photograph, to Romeo, box 144 Herald office?
If any two young gentlemen who were on Broadway any day last week are desirous of forming the acquaintance of the two young ladies who crossed Fulton ferry one day last month, they can do so by addressing either Lizzie or Clara, at station A.
(Via Manhattan Users Guide)
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at a glance
Goat — or ferret?
You don’t want to go confusing your goat with your ferret — and, really, there is no need.
You might try offering the creature a square of carpet. Eats it? Goat.
Or try and force it down a rabbit hole. It doesn’t fit? Goat.
Or set it loose in a chicken coop. It emerges all bloody with feathers round its mouth? Ferret.
Join in the fun if you like and offer additional ways to separate your goats from your ferrets.
Quote out of context
After soaking the brain, it has the consistency and colour of canned mushrooms making it easier to slice, examine and photograph.
United Breaks Guitars
Dave Carroll tells the whole story here.
a couple favorite words
webinar.
unitard.
