Håkan Dahlström got this delightful shot of one of San Francisco's steeper hills, turning his camera so that the road (and not the houses) were at level to convey the extent of the slope.
Long, drawn out negotiations between Walt Disney World and the Services Trade Council have not resulted in a contract for the 20,000 cast-members the STC represents. In this video, the affected cast-members explain how their wages have failed to keep pace with inflation, meaning a de-facto paycut that has some of them visiting local food-banks to stay fed. Disney's cast-members are some of the most remarkable people I've ever met; as a visitor to Walt Disney World, I want them to receive a living wage.
In this remarkable performance at the US naval academy, the Kings Firecrackers jump-rope team conduct a high-intensity, skip-rope-fuelled close-order drill that seriously agogified me.
A group of Philadelphia-area manual typewriter enthusiasts are staging a "type-in" with free typing paper, carbons and stamped envelopes -- it runs on Dec 18 at the Bridgewater's Pub in the 30th Street Station:
Long before the laptop or the mainframe, writers, reporters, and bureaucrats alike relied on the typewriter to get the word out. Today, only a few companies make typewriters--but thousands of classic Remingtons, Underwoods, and Olivettis are still around, waiting to be dusted off. Just as vinyl records have held their mojo in a digital world, these miniature printing presses are attracting a new group of fans, many half the age of the typewriters they've lovingly restored.
They'll be gathering to clack out letters, poetry, perhaps the beginnings of their next novel at the Type-IN, an off-beat gathering of manual typewriter users coming to Bridgewater's Pub at 30th Street Station. Typewriter aficionados will enter a typing competition, buy and sell at a typewriter swap meet, and consult with an experienced typewriter technician, who'll offer tips to keep that vintage machine cranking out words smoothly.
Awesome kids' book author and literacy activist Lorie Ann Grover sez, "readergirlz and First Book are partnering to give away more than 125,000 brand-new books to low-income teen readers. We need help getting the word out about the A Novel Gift campaign.
Let's get organizations serving these teens registered with First Book so they can be matched with inventory during the holidays. If you participate, drop us a note at readergirlz@gmail.com to be included in our blog roll of thanks to run December 31."
They're great books, too, donated by generous publishers. Among the three dozen choices are P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast's HOUSE OF NIGHT series and Alyson Noël's SHADOWLAND.
We need your help getting the word out about the A Novel Gift campaign. Right now! Right now! As in, now!
Rooster Teeth, creators of the brilliant Red vs Blue machinima series, produced this chortle-inducing short about the essential and creepy incoherence of the security theory that says aviation safety is improved by allowing the TSA to see and touch our junk.
Last week, as Kent Brewster was leaving his hotel room in the morning, he found a small piece of crumpled paper on the floor of his room; he realized that this had been used to plug up the peephole in the door, which had been doctored to allow people in the hallway to spy on the goings-on in the room. Says Kent: " The hotel manager took care of me--and was just as freaked as I was, and instantly sent housekeeping to check every room--so I don't want to call them out by name ... but still ... brrr! Creepy!"
The crazy, it burns: Loudon County, VA Board of Supervisors representative Eugene Delgaudio says TSA patdowns are part of the "homosexual agenda": "It's the federal employee's version of the Gay Bill of Special Rights... That means the next TSA official that gives you an 'enhanced pat down' could be a practicing homosexual secretly getting pleasure from your submission." (Thanks, Frank!)
Glenn Fleishman, @glennf, a Seattle-based freelance writer, is "G.F." at the Economist's Babbage blog, a regular panel member on the geeky media podcast The Incomparable, a senior contributor to Macworld magazine, a columnist for The Seattle Times, and an object-oriented perl programmer.
The streets of Seattle are no longer safe--for cute little dogs and fiber-optic cables.
First, The Seattle Times reported today on the strange case of a dog being electrocuted as it walked down the street. A privately and legally installed street light lacked proper grounding, and the dog was zapped walking over a metal plate on the sidewalk. My condolences to Lisa Kibben, who lost her 68-pound German shorthair pointer, Sammy, in this bizarre event. The utility dispatched a crew immediately, fixed the problem, and apologized, trying to reassure the public that we (and perhaps our sub-70-pound children) are not in danger.
This reminded me of the peculiar death of Jodie S. Lane in Manhattan (East Village) in 2004, walking down the street with her two dogs when one apparently received a severe shock, and Lane, unaware of what was happening, attempted to help the dogs. The dogs survived. Jodie's father, Roger M. Lane, received a massive amount of information about electrified Con Ed objects and shocks caused to people as part of a settlement. He created a Web site which showed the 31,900 objects found to cause electrical shocks between 2004 and 2009.
Seattle has no such history, but you can imagine that Emerald City denizens will be skipping metal panels for a while.
Second, local Seattle business site TechFlash reported that a bullet was fired into a fiber-optic cable owned by Comcast, severing access to 2,500 customers. The motivation is unknown, and the company isn't asking for a police investigation. Oddly enough, this is not the first time. A Comcast spokesperson told TechFlash, "About 13 years ago, someone shot a bullet into a main fiber line in Tacoma on New Year's Eve, knocking out service to about half the city."
Man, I guess people are really angry about Comcast's attempting legal contractual modification of a peering agreement with Level 3.
First they came for the fiber-optic cables, and I tweeted nothing.
Photo by Photocopy, used via Creative Commons.
Upcoming Appearances • April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP. •April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP. • April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs • April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere. • April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum • July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA
From the cover of the May 28, 1954 issue of Colliers. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is an illustration. Just lovely.
Paleo-Future blogger Matt Novak (whose presence in the Twin Cities is sorely missed) says this cover story is just the tip of a very big iceberg. Controlling the weather was right up there with flying cars in mid-century dreams of the Future.
Upcoming Appearances • April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP. •April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP. • April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs • April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere. • April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum • July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA
Don't tell the Double-Rainbow guy, but all those beautiful colors really can have a deeper meaning. That's because different chemicals reflect and absorb different wavelengths of light, leaving tell-tale patterns in the rainbow. If you know what colors specific chemicals absorb, you can look at the light reflected off a sample and use the rainbow to figure out what you've got. That's basically what a spectrometer does. And blogger Charles Soeder made his own.
The light source is an LED flashlight. The light shines through the sample (in this case a vial of chlorophyll) and gets broken up by a diffraction grating. This produces a spectrum which gets projected onto the photosensor. I pulled the sensor out of an automatic night light. It is mounted on a stand, which is taped to a TI89 which is taped to the table- so I can slide the sensor back and forth along the spectrum to get readings at different frequencies. I measured the frequency of light hitting the detector by noting where its shadow falls on the ruler in the background. The resistance of the sensor changes depending on how much light falls on it (which is an indication of how much light gets absorbed by the sample); I measure this with a multimeter.
Long before the laptop or the mainframe, writers, reporters, and bureaucrats alike relied on the typewriter to get the word out. Today, only a few companies make typewriters--but thousands of classic Remingtons, Underwoods, and Olivettis are still around, waiting to be dusted off. Just as vinyl records have held their mojo in a digital world, these miniature printing presses are attracting a new group of fans, many half the age of the typewriters they've lovingly restored.
They're great books, too, donated by generous publishers. Among the three dozen choices are P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast's HOUSE OF NIGHT series and Alyson Noël's SHADOWLAND.
This remarkable painting apparently hangs on a hotel wall in New Orleans. Anyone know anything else about it?
The streets of Seattle are no longer safe--for cute little dogs and fiber-optic cables.
First, The Seattle Times reported today on the 
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.
