Boing Boing » travel

Book multi-city itineraries as one-ways and save

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:06:30 +0000

If you're booking a multi-city trip by air, you should really price it out as a series of one-way flights, rather than as a single ticket. As Mike Masnick discovered, the arcane airline ticketing rules require ticketing agencies to stick random, high-priced business-class tickets into multi-hop itineraries, which can double the cost of your trip. The ticketing websites -- Expedia, Travelocity, Hipmunk, Kayak, and Orbitz -- all either failed to show this information, produced suboptimal itineraries with unnecessary overnight layovers, or obscured the best flights in some other important way. Masnick got a spokesperson for Hipmunk to explain it all:

After going through all of this, I reached out to folks at Hipmunk, to see if they could explain the result. Hipmunk's Adam Goldstein kindly explained the basic situation, noting that airlines have all sorts of rules about what tickets can be combined with others. If you've never dealt with the insane details of fare classes (which go way beyond seating classes), you can spend way too much time online reading the crazy details. Given that, it seems that it is these kinds of "fare classes" that are the "culprit" -- and by "culprit" I mean the way in which the airlines force you into spending much, much, much more than you need to.
That said, Goldstein also argues that there are downsides to buying individual flights. He brings up, as we discussed above, the issue of connecting flights (and also having bags checked all the way through to destination) -- but as noted, that doesn't apply in this situation. He also points out that if you have to "change or cancel your whole trip, you have to pay separate change/cancel fees for each booking, instead of one for the whole thing." That's absolutely true, but is that "insurance" worth paying twice as much? I could rebook my entire trip with different times and dates... and basically pay the same total amount. So... that argument doesn't make much sense.
In the end, it really feels like a scammy way of making fliers pay a lot more than they need to, without them realizing it. What I do know, however, is that if you're looking for the best deals, do not assume that a multi-city search will turn up the cheapest prices -- and also recognize that the different search engines can give out extremely different answers. For example, if price was the only concern, and short flight times/non-stop flights were less important, then obviously that British Airways option at the end is by far the best price -- but it turns up on none of the other search engines. However, I'd imagine that most casual fliers have no idea, and I wonder if many people end up booking multi-city flight options, not realizing that they could save a ton by booking the exact same flights individually.

Flight Search Engines And The Multi-City Ripoff

HOWTO hotel-room upside-down cold-brew coffee

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:52:51 +0000

Kent sez, "Here's a travel hack that came to me all at once in a flash at SxSW this year: how to make cold-brewed coffee out of the horrible filter pack and inadequate equipment you often find in hotels in the USA."

Carefully unwrap (don't tear!) one or two of those premeasured filter-packs that came with your coffee service and stuff it gently into the cup. Ideally you want four parts water to one part coffee, but this is tough to estimate with filter packs.
Fill the remaining space in the cup all the way up with water. Tap water works; filtered or bottled is better. Try not to leave any air bubbles.
Don't worry if it seems it will result in a tiny amount of coffee; it will be concentrated, intensely flavored, and—assuming you're not stuck with decaf—highly caffeinated.

Kent's method is clever and upside-down-y, but I still like my method, which involves using your own coffee and a disposable plastic breast-milk bag.

Cold-Brewed Coffee In Your Hotel Room

Google's Field Trip - an iPhone guide to the "cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you"

Mark Frauenfelder — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:22:20 +0000

Field Trip is a free iPhone app was developed in conjunction with our friends at Altas Obscura. I'm using it on an upcoming road trip from LA to Phoenix.

Field Trip, your guide to the cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you is now on the iPhone! Field Trip runs in the background on your phone. When you get close to something interesting, it will notify you and if you have a headset or bluetooth connected, it can even read the info to you.

Field Trip can help you learn about everything from local history to the latest and best places to shop, eat, and have fun. You select the local feeds you like and the information pops up on your phone automatically, as you walk next to those places.

Field Trip for iOS (Via iDownLoadBlog)

Abandoned Russian cruise ship drifts toward Europe

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 12:22:27 +0000

Dina Spector reports on the Lyubivy Orlova, a Russian cruise ship adrift in the North Atlantic. It snapped free of towing cables while en-route from Canada to new owners in the Caribbean, and for various reasons no-one is taking responsibility. It, and its suspected payload of rats, is now just 1300 miles off the Irish coast. [BI]

Penguin stranded 1000 miles from home

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:09:10 +0000

A royal penguin, somewhat worse for the wear, was found stranded on a New Zealand beach after going on a 1000-mile holiday by mistake. [AP]

Awesome Chinese inventions for the long New Year's train ride home

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 19:58:14 +0000

Meg from Reuters Asia sez, "This is our latest video about some crazy gadgets that Chinese travelers are talking about and using for their long journeys during Chinese New Year. Our reporter (bravely) got on a train and tried some of them out and even spoke with one of the inventors. Most Boing Boing readers who haven't been to China might not know how crazy the rail system is and doubly-so during the New Year period. It's a short fun video piece that we are pretty proud of even though it's not breaking news. Here is our official summary: 'Millions of Chinese are heading home for the holidays, and social media is abuzz with wacky inventions that promise to make the grueling journey more comfortable. Jane Lee puts a few to the test.'"

200 million Chinese people make the trip home for the holidays, many spending three days or more on a train, often without a seat -- let alone a sleeper car.

Rubber chickens, ostrich heads ease China's rough ride home (3:39) (Thanks, Meg!)

Travel guide to Detroit written by seventh-gen locals: "Belle Isle to 8 Mile"

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 22:46:26 +0000

Rick Prelinger sez, "I'm not a Detroiter, but I've been visiting from time to time since the 1980s, and I hope you will too. It's really unfortunate that most of what we see and hear about it amounts to repetition of the same old cliches -- deindustrialization, poverty, ruins, hipsters, cheap houses. But Detroit's much more than that. It's one of America's most fascinating cities, and if you want to see its unique combination of long-term residents, mostly African American, with rock-hard faith in their city, and new Detroiters aspiring to build Utopia, you better get on a plane soon.

"And when you go, bring Belle Isle to 8 Mile. I just got my own copy, written by three siblings who are seventh-generation Detroiters. It's full of hundreds of city landmarks, eating places and arts spaces, but it's more than the ordinary hip insider travel guide. I see it as testimony to places and businesses that have survived years of adversity and disrespect, as well as an incredibly deep guide to the new Detroit, which is an uncommonly exciting city. Excellent, inspiring read."

Belle Isle to 8 Mile: An Insider's Guide to Detroit (Thanks, Rick!)

Snake actually on a plane

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:05:37 +0000

Reuters: "The three meter-long (9.1 foot) non-poisonous Amethystine python appeared about an hour into the Qantas flight between Cairns in northern Queensland and the Papua New Guinean capital of Port Moresby on Thursday."

Over the river and through the woods

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:28:50 +0000

We still don't know exactly what causes motion sickness. NASA has some working theories, though.

Rhino horns aren't really horns

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 15:50:53 +0000

Last week, I got to visit the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City. It's an amazing collection — well worth driving out of your way to see. I was expecting just a selection of different animal skeletons. The actual collection was a lot bigger and more awesome than I'd guessed it would be, and included some really nice exhibits on evolutionary adaptation, convergent evolution, deformed skeletons of both humans and animals, and the process of stripping a body down to a clean and shiny bone structure.

One of the things I found really fascinating was the skeletal features that you can't see just by looking at the outside of an animal. Take this Indian Rhinoceros, for instance. You'll notice that his horn is not a part of the skull. That's because the horn isn't really bone. The "horn" isn't a horn, at all.

Horns are made of bone. They're hard on the outside thanks to a thin layer of keratin — the stuff that makes up your fingernails and hair. But the majority of that material is living bone. Rhinos, on the other hand, have "horns" that are almost 100% keratin. They're really thick bundles of protein fibers.

That's a pretty well-known fact. But it's one thing to know it intellectually, and another thing entirely to see the place where that keratin horn attaches to the animal's actual bone structure. The intricate, lacy network of spongy bone was absolutely fascinating to me. It reminded me of the way ceramic artists will attach one piece of clay to another by scoring little cuts into both pieces and then applying a layer of thin, goopy clay that cements the cuts together as it dries. Seeing the rhino skull really drove home the idea that the "horn" was something else entirely. The horn was attached to the bone. It wasn't part of the bone.

The medical implications of space tourism

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:48:10 +0000

This article from the British Medical Journal should give aspiring space tourists some food for thought. The basic gist: Traveling into the heavens is not really comparable, physically and medically, to Earth-bound travel. In fact, up until now, extreme physical fitness has been a major factor in how we select space travelers. What happens when less-fit people start flying? What happens to sick people? These are questions that matter a lot, given the fact that current astronauts report everything from reduced eyesight to potentially dangerous immune system changes. (Via The Inkfish blog)

Photos of a simpler time ... in North Korea

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:38:32 +0000

Retro DPRK is a blog that collects images of North Korea from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Getting into North Korea from the United States and Western Europe is not easy today. But up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was even more difficult. If you weren't also from a Communist country, chances were good that you weren't going to get even a glimpse of the place.

But, at the same time, North Korea was also promoting itself through propaganda, and as a tourist destination for citizens of the USSR. Christopher Graper — who leads tours into North Korea today from Canada — has scanned scenes from postcards and tourism brochures — rare peeks into the little-documented history of a secretive country.

The collection blends familiar scenes that wouldn't look terribly different from American advertisements of the same era with an amusingly odd sensibility (who wouldn't want a whole book of postcards documenting every detail of Pyongyang's new gymnasium?) and quietly disconcerting scenes like the one above, where a seaside resort town appears eerily empty — like a theme park before opening time.

Retro DPRK

Thanks for pointing me toward this, Gidjlet!

The risks of visiting volcanoes

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 21:57:21 +0000

In 1993, Stanley Williams survived a close-encounter with a volcano. A volcanologist, he was standing on the rim of Colombia's Galeras volcano when it erupted with little warning. Six of his scientific colleagues and three tourists were killed. Williams fled down the mountain's slope — until flying rocks and boulders broke both his legs. With a fractured skull, he managed to stay conscious enough to huddle behind some other large boulders and dodge flying debris until the eruption ended and his grad students rescued him.

Williams and the other scientists were there to study Galeras, and hopefully get a better idea of what signals predicted the onset of eruptions.

This is something we still don't understand well.

While volcanologists have identified some signals — like distinctive patterns of small earthquakes — that increase the likelihood of an oncoming eruption, those signals aren't foolproof predictions. There are still volcanoes like Galeras that give no warning. And volcanoes like Mt. St. Helens. In 2004, that volcano gave signals that it would erupt. And it did. Sort of. The Seattle Times described it as "two small burps and a lava flow". Basically, the signals don't always precede an eruption, and even when they do happen it doesn't tell you much about how big any ensuing eruption will be.

And that presents an interesting question, writes Erik Klemetti at Wired's Eruptions blog. How close to volcanoes should tourists really be? That's a question with real-world applications. This year, New Zealand's White Island volcano has been ... rather grumbly. Even as tourist boats continued to ferry people over for a view of the crater.

There has always been a fragile relationship between volcanoes and tourism. Volcanic features are some of the most fascinating in the world – just look at the millions of people who visit Yellowstone or Crater Lake National Parks for but two examples of hundreds of volcanic tourist attractions around the world (and that doesn’t even consider all the extinct volcanoes or volcanic deposits that can create amazing landscapes as well). However, with the splendor of volcanic features comes the danger that you, as a tourist, are visiting an active volcano. Sometimes, that danger is low, where either the volcano has been dormant for thousands of years, but the signs of magma beneath are still visible. However, the danger can appear to be low in some places but in reality, you are literally putting your lives in the hands of tour operators when you make the visit.

Read the full story

Read Stanley Williams' account of surviving the Galeras volcano

Photo by Michael Rogers, via GFDL and CC

Gallivant, a minimalist travel site

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 13:17:04 +0000

Gallivant looks like a great way to cut through the noise and bloat of Yelp, Google, and plane-booking sites when headed to unfamiliar turf.

Five reasons to opt out of TSA pornoscanners this weekend

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 19:46:47 +0000

Marilyn sez, "Chris Elliott gives 5 good reasons to participate in the Opt Out protest against the TSA's full-body scanners over this Thanksgiving weekend and so far, 65 percent of the people reading his column on Huffington Post say they will take part (including me)."

1. They're not adequately tested and could be dangerous. Unfortunately, the scanners you'll be asked to walk through haven't been properly tested. The latest independent evaluations are actually based on data provided by the TSA. The government wants us to trust it, but it won't give us a reason. That's unacceptable.
2. They're easily foiled. It's not difficult to sneak a weapon through a full-body scanner, according to several reports. The career criminals who might want to do us harm have figured out how to get around the scanners already.
3. They're too expensive. At a quarter of a million bucks a pop, the scanners are a huge waste of taxpayer money. To use one, or to allow one to be used on you, is is an endorsement of an iffy technology. It also lines the pockets of undeserving security contractors, say critics...

5 Reasons I'm Opting Out Of The TSA's Scanners (And You Should Too) (Thanks, Marilyn!)

The best airlines

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 15:40:51 +0000

The best international airlines are Singapore, Emirates, Air New Zealand and Virgin Atlantic. The best domestic airlines are Virgin America, JetBlue, Hawaiian, Alaska and Southwest. CNTraveler has the full lists.

Zuca: rollaboard luggage with drawers doubles as a chair

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 22:44:46 +0000

Speaking of bags and luggage, Ben Hammersley swears by the Zuca Pro, an overhead-legal rollaboard bag that you can sit on, and that organizes its contents into drawers. It's been years since I've bothered with rollaboards (I hate gate-checking luggage), but this is pretty danged cool, and Ben is one of the few people I know who logs as much mileage as I do.

I imagine those drawers are seriously useful, especially if you pre-packed a bunch of them like travel cartridges ("beach," "business meeting," "in-room coffee stuff") and stacked them as the trip required.

• 41" Telescoping handle
• Aluminum alloy frame is light, super strong and rated to safely support 300 pounds
• The removable, hand washable, insert bag is made from premium water resistant 1680D ballistic nylon and coated with water resistant polyurethane
• 4" lightweight polyurethane wheels absorb shock and make for a seriously silent ride. And, because the wheels are recessed, the luggage meets FAA specifications for carry-on baggage
• A gear platform to carry additional loads
• Feet, made of nylon 6, go easy on scratchable surfaces
• Chrome plated, rust resistant screws

Zuca Pro (Thanks, Bill!)

The City Museum: St. Louis' Happy Mutant wonderland

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:38:07 +0000

At one point — I think it was about halfway through climbing the twisting warren of dark staircases and pipe organ parts that leads to the top of the 10-story slide — I turned to my husband and asked, incredulous, "Why the hell wasn't this place in American Gods?"

Opened in an abandoned shoe factory and warehouse in downtown St. Louis in 1997, The City Museum is not so much a museum as it is a massive, rambling fantasy playground. From the rooftop to the strange subterranean tunnels built beneath the lobby floor, sculptor Bob Cassilly and a team of 20 artisans have, bit by bit, created something truly wonderful. Imagine what might happen if somebody turned Maker Faire into a full-scale amusement park. That's The City Museum.

There's a 1940s ferris wheel creaking and groaning its way through a glorious, rooftop view of the city. There's a human gerbil trail that winds around the first floor ceiling, providing great spots to check out the intricate tile mosaic fish that swim across the floor. There are columns covered in gears, and columns covered in old printing press plates. There's a giant ball pit; two gutted airplanes suspended in midair; and so many chutes, and slides, and tunnels that, by the time you walk back to your car you will find yourself thoroughly conditioned into reflexively contorting yourself into every dark hole you happen to see. Also, there are bars. Also, there is almost entirely zero supervision.

And sure, okay, that alone is not really enough to justify including The City Museum on an imaginary map of important places of power. But here's the thing about the The City Museum: It is actually built out of the city. It is the city. And the city is ancient.

I'm not just talking about "ancient" in American terms. When European explorers showed up on the banks of the Mississippi in 1673, there was already a city at the site of St. Louis — a huge network of mounds and earthworks dating back to the 10th century. Much later, in the late 19th century, this was the location of the fourth largest city in the United States. People are drawn to St. Louis and they have always been drawn to St. Louis.

The last 100 years or so are an aberration in that pattern. But what's 100 years to a 1000-year-old city? Meanwhile, in that blip, The City Museum rises, literally built from the cast-off parts that other people left to rot. The welded metal and the glass mosaic; the ferris wheel and the airplanes; cement and rebar; an entire collection of beautiful, carved cornices and architectural details left over from the heyday of Euro-American St. Louis — it's all been salvaged from the dying city and pieced back together like a prayer.

Even the building itself is an altar to human development in this place. There were once Mississippian mounds scattered throughout the city of St. Louis. On the first floor of The City Museum, half inside the main building and half out, you can see what initially replaced them — a log cabin, a real one, dating to the early 1800s. It's a bar now. You can drink there. And on top of it all sits the symbol of the city's industrialization, power, and success in the form of the International Shoe Company factory and warehouse.

What's more, this temple seems to be accomplishing something, in the metaphorical cosmic sense. I know there are a lot of you who won't believe me, but St. Louis is no longer the wreck I, and many other Midwesterners, grew up thinking it was. Or, at least, it's not all a wreck. There is life here, and getting livelier. To get from the parking lot to The City Museum, we wandered through a part of downtown lit up with fancy lofts, unique stores, and people heading to parties, restaurants, and bars. In the South Grand and Tower Grove neighborhoods we found real, thriving city — brick homes rehabilitated, street parties underway, diverse crowds hanging out in a restaurant courtyard for an outdoor concert. There was block after block of cool stores, good food, and people who seem to really want to live in this place. Again. Because people come to St. Louis.

Bob Cassilly, the sculptor responsible for The City Museum, was a part of that revitalization. He started his career renovating and building townhouses in the city's decimated neighborhoods. The City Museum itself has been used as an anchor to develop the vibrant area we saw around it, and Cassilly apparently had a hand in or outright owned several residential and commercial projects nearby. When he died last year, he was in the process of turning an abandoned cement factory and construction dump on the city's still-impoverished north side into another whimsical attraction called Cementland.

The point to all of this: You need to go to The City Museum. Make it a Happy Mutant pilgrimage. It's one of the only tourist attractions I've ever been to that managed to live up to all the hype I'd heard before I got there. But, while you're at it, visit St. Louis, because the two things are one in the same, and even now she rises. (And, also, Neil Gaiman should really consider adding The City Museum into any planned American Gods sequels. I think I've made a pretty good case here.)

Some Tips for The City Museum:
• Go at night. Not just because there are fewer school groups to contend with and the bars are open. There's something about being in the dark here that makes the place even more awesome. It's open to 11 p.m. for a reason. Plus, they shut off the lights inside and give you a flashlight.
• Bring kneepads. You will look dumb. But I cannot stress enough how much of the experience you will spend on your hands and knees. And, while it may not seem this way most of the time, your 31-year-old knees are old. Really old. Really, really, really old. And prone to bruising.
• Leave anything you do not want to lose in the car. Do you have one of those little zippered bags on a lanyard that you're supposed to keep your passport in, under your clothes, when traveling in a foreign country? Bring that. Use it to hold some cash, your ID, and maaaaybe a cell phone. Maybe. You want your arms and hips unencumbered by purses, you want your butt free of oversized wallets, and you want anything that could fall out of your pockets already out of your pockets.
• Make a plan. You will end up separated from the people you came in with. You think you won't. But it's so easy. You go down the same hole, but you take a right turn and they think you took a left and the next thing you know you're both on different floors of the building. Or, say, your child crawls into something that you are pretty sure is too small for you to fit in and you have no idea where it leads, so you stand there freaking out while several childless adults nearby vacillate between wishing you would calm down and vicariously freaking out right along with you. I suggest synchronized watches and planned meeting points/times to regroup.
• Pay extra for the roof. Seriously, it's worth it. I can't speak to the aquarium, but it's supposed to have a walk-through shark tank and a stingray petting zoo. It's probably safe to assume that any upgrade is an upgrade worth paying extra for here.
• Don't learn too much about the place ahead of time. I am going to give you a link to the website, but you have to promise to use it wisely. And, by that, I mean, don't go to the "Attractions" tab and spoil the whole thing for yourself. Part of what makes this so awesome is the feeling of discovering something insanely wonderful and unexpected around every corner. Bonus: The sense that, even in three hours, you didn't see more than 1/3 of the place. If you go in with a plan of what you will find on which floor, where, I don't think it would be nearly as fun.
• Make friends with one of the people who live in the loft apartments on the 5th floor. And, when you have accomplished that, report back to me. I want to be friends with them, too.

Death on Mount Everest

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 16:32:48 +0000

Back in May, we linked you to the reporting of Outside's Grayson Schaffer, who was stationed in the base camps of Mount Everest, watching as the mountain's third deadliest spring in recorded history unfolded. Ten climbers died during April and May. But the question is, why?

From a technological standpoint, as Schaffer points out in a follow up piece, Everest ought to be safer these days. Since 1996 — the mountain's deadliest year, documented in John Krakauer's Into Thin Air — weather forecasts have improved (allowing climbers to avoid storms like the one responsible for many of the 1996 deaths), and new helicopters can reach stranded climbers at higher altitudes. But those things, Schaffer argues, are about reducing deaths related to disasters. This year, he writes, the deaths that happened on Everest weren't about freak occurrences of bad luck. It wasn't storms or avalanches that took those people down. It wasn't, in other words, about the random risks of nature.

This matters because it points to a new status quo on Everest: the routinization of high-altitude death. By and large, the people running the show these days on the south side of Everest—the professional guides, climbing Sherpas, and Nepali officials who control permits—do an excellent job of getting climbers to the top and down again. Indeed, a week after this year’s blowup, another hundred people summited on a single bluebird day, without a single death or serious injury.

But that doesn’t mean Everest is being run rationally. There are no prerequisites for how much experience would-be climbers must have and no rules to say who can be an outfitter. Many of the best alpinists in the world still show up in Base Camp every spring. But, increasingly, so do untrained, unfit people who’ve decided to try their hand at climbing and believe that Everest is the most exciting place to start. And while some of the more established outfitters might turn them away, novices are actively courted by cut-rate start-up companies that aren’t about to refuse the cash.

It’s a recipe that doesn’t require a storm to kill people. In this regard, things are much different now than in the past: they’re worse.

Read the rest at Outside

Image via Outside and photographer Rob Sobecki

JetBlue planning free in-flight Wi-Fi rollout in early 2013

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:22:49 +0000

The Verge reports that US-based airline JetBlue will "roll out high-speed wireless networking in the first quarter of 2013," and that the service will be free for passengers. Instead of GoGo, "which Jetblue derides as slow and unsatisfactory," the airline will use supplier ViaSat.

R2D2 rolling luggage

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 05:13:14 +0000

Salvador Bachiller's €95 R2D2 rolling baggage looks great. I know nothing about its materials, handling or build-quality (for all I know, it corners like a 30-year-old supermarket trolley, crumples the first time you fly with it, and scratches if you look at it crosseyed), but it sure is cool-looking.

AZ-2028 ROBOT TROLLEY 60 (via Cnet Crave)

Executive Inn in Belleville, IL: not a nice place to stay, evidently

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 17:11:55 +0000

The Belleville, IL Executive Inn sounds like one of the worst hotels in the world, judging from the TripAdvisor reviews. Incredibly, it's rated 8/10 for the city, which means that there are two worse hotels in town. Here's cpratt:

Oh sweet lord where do I begin :( first the room was filthy, they never cleaned in the two weeks I stayed there. The supposedly free wifi don't work, the tub, toilet and sinks were all clogged and backed up constantly. The water smelled like rotten fish, the ice machine was broke, there was a hooker that lived upstairs and did her job in front of her child! The management never cleaned the hotel, the residents do that! It smells and the pool don't work, and the management is rude. There are drug deals being done constantly, prostitution is ramped and there is black mold growing everywhere. I have the hospital papers to prove the black mold made me ill ! Heck I was in St. Elizabeth's for a week. If you value your health I would recommend you don't stay here. Hell the health department needs to shut the place down until the owners, who live and stay in California by the way, fix the hell hole up!

Some highlights from “Bring some bleach. And a weapon," by an anonymous reviewer:

The room, although massive, appeared to be the room that the hotel "forgot about". It didn't look like anyone had cleaned it in years. Honestly. The window was broken, the carpet was stained to the point that it almost looked like old flannel, the beds were broken and crooked... the bathroom would have been too gross for an uncensored HBO special, I think that the walls in the actual room were made from cardboard - I don't even know if the TV worked because we turned around immediately and asked for another room.
She understood, and gave us a key to a room upstairs. As we walked upstairs and through the hall, we were "greeted" by a man who burst out of his hotel room and looked a lot like a haggard BB King, fresh after a shot of "mace" directly to the eyes. After asking each one of us (there were 4 of us) if we had any cigarettes or anything to smoke, he let us go, but not before watching us take every last step into our 2nd room...
I would recommend visiting this place if you don't have any children to care for and want to shoot a documentary on the inner-workings of a drug ring.

Executive Inn (via Reddit)

Earth Illuminated: Dazzling ISS time-lapse photography, from NASA (video)

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 17:33:54 +0000

John Streeter, who is a television producer with NASA at Johnson Space Center in Houston, sends this cool video and tells Boing Boing:

It is all real, all shot from the International Space Station and all beautiful. It is time-lapse photography that showcases stars, cities at night, lightning storms and the aurora all from the vantage point of the space station. Also, there is a link at the end where you can visit, download and create your own videos if you wish.
The station is a remarkable engineering achievement and this is just a small side benefit of being in orbit. I hope you enjoy.

NASA.gov link, and here's the video on YouTube.

Google Street View goes to Kennedy Space Center

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 20:18:10 +0000

I don't know what the best words ever written in the English language are, but I'm willing to put "Top of Launch Pad 39A, Address is Approximate" up there on the short list.

Among the images you can now explore online with the click of your mouse are the space shuttle launch pad, Vehicle Assembly Building and Launch Firing Room #4. Gaze down from the top of the enormous launch pad, peer up at the towering ceiling of the Vehicle Assembly Building (taller than the Statue of Liberty) and get up close to one of the space shuttle’s main engines, which is powerful enough to generate 400,000 lbs of thrust. And even though they recently entered retirement, you can still get an up-close, immersive experience with two of the Space Shuttle Orbiters—the Atlantis and Endeavour.

I'm not sure when this went live, but it's seriously phenomenal. And it's part of a larger series of special Street View galleries with geeky appeal. There are sets for Antarctica (see Shackleton's shack!), historic Italy (wander around the Colosseum!), and UNESCO World Heritage Sites (includes Pompeii!). In general, discovering this could be a major time-suck for me, if I'm not careful.

See the NASA collection

Check out the other Street View Galleries

MIT models which airports are most likely to spread disease

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 17:59:45 +0000

Researchers at MIT used network theory to put together a model of how an infectious disease might spread around the world with the help of American airports. The model shows which features—geography, connectivity, levels of use—most impact the spread of disease and use that to predict which airports would be at the heart of an outbreak.

Some are not a shock. ("Oh, you say JFK and LAX could serve as worldwide hubs for disease?") But the model also reveals some surprising spark points. Like, say, Anchorage. It's also interesting to see the order that the model ranks airports in. Would you believe that Honolulu has more disease-spreading power than Atlanta?

Read the full journal article at PLOS One, an open-access scientific journal.

Read a short summary at the Nature Medicine blog

My stupidest moment as a customer, ever

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 09:43:30 +0000

Reading this Reddit thread on stupid customer stories reminded me of the stupidest thing I've ever done as a customer. I had flown all night and gotten into my hotel near San Francisco International very late. Blearily, I unpacked my toilet case and brushed my teeth, had a pee, flushed and climbed into bed. The toilet's plumbing made a moderate amount of noise as the cistern refilled, but just as it got to the point where the stopcock kicked it, it began to make a horrible, loud, nerve-jangling BRRRRRRRRRRRR noise.

I waited a couple of minutes for it to stop, but it wouldn't stop. I got out bed and looked under the toilet. I jiggled the handle. I flushed. BRRRRRRRRRRRR

I called the front desk. "Hi. There's something really wrong with my toilet. I flushed it and now it's going BRRRRRRRRRRRR. Can you find a maintenance person, please?"

It was about 1AM. There weren't a lot of maintenance people around. Ten minutes went by. BRRRRRRRRRRRR. Fifteen minutes. BRRRRRRRRRRRR.

I called the front desk again. "Hi, I don't mean to be impatient, but I've got a meeting early tomorrow morning and I really need to get some sleep. If you can't get a maintenance staffer in the next couple minutes, I think I'll need another room, OK?"

The maintenance guy came. I told him what had happened. We stood in the bathroom together, blearily, confronting the incredible, loud, nonstop BRRRRRRRRRRRR that seemed to come from all around us as the pipes shivered in the very walls. "I've never heard a toilet make that noise before," the maintenance guy said. "Me neither. I'll just wait in the room."

I went and sat on the bed, half-fuming, half-dozing. Suddenly, the BRRRRRRRRRRRR noise became much quieter: brrrrrrrrrrrr. Then, quieter still: brrrrrrrrrrrr.

The maintenance guy came out, holding my toothbrush. It was one of those battery-powered ones, but the battery had died three cities back, so it was just a toothbrush now. I had left it switched on, in the water glass by the sink, on the marble countertop -- a perfect sounding-board for the anxious little motor in that fucker, which had somehow sprung back to life after several days of being dead.

And that was the stupidest thing I've ever done as a customer. I practically prostrated myself in apology before the maintenance guy, called the front desk and told them "Never mind, I'm a huge idiot," and managed to get to sleep at last.

(Image: Hotel View: Bathroom (004), a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from jdsmith1021's photostream)

How to: Use a squat toilet

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 21:43:04 +0000

In 2007, my husband and I were privileged enough to take a month off and travel around Europe. Given that we spent most of our time in Western Europe, there really wasn't a whole lot of cultural confusion, with a few notable exceptions*. Chief among them, the squat toilets we stumbled across at a very inconvenient moment in Italy. "Inconvenient moment" here defined as "actually having to use the bathroom."

My friend Frank Bures is a travel writer and he understands the squat toilet problem all too well. Frank is, after all, somebody who has traveled extensively in places where squat is all you got. In a piece from 2006, he shares some hard-earned advice on squat toilets. How I wish I had read this before my venturing into small towns in coastal Italy.

Dr. Jane Wilson-Howarth is probably the world’s foremost expert on excretion, a real Buddha of Bowel Movements, and she’s not afraid to get into the details. “My technique when I’m teaching volunteers about to go abroad,” said the author of How to Shit Around the World from her UK office, “is that when you’re learning, you need to take everything off below your waist: socks, shoes, pants, underwear. Then squat over the toilet. Pour water over your bum, and with your left hand, just whittle away with your fingers and try to dislodge any lumpy bits while pouring water. And that’s actually not too unaesthetic, because any mess that goes onto your fingers comes off in the water.”

What to do: Most important: Cultivate the right mindset. Relax, pretend like you’ve been doing this for years. Remember, using your hand is (according Wilson-Howarth) actually more hygienic, not less, than using toilet paper. “You get good bacteriological cleaning with just rubbing your hands together with soap under running water four times,” she says, and cites a study which says you don’t even need soap. “It can be ash or mud, just rubbing your hands together under water with some kind of washing agent. Even dirt from the river bank will give you good bacteriological cleaning.”

Read the rest at WorldHum

*Another notable exception: Andouillette sausage is not the same thing as andouille. You've been warned.

Image: Squat toilet, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from jiahungli's photostream

Crappy, expensive Internet and insufficient laptop plugs top business travellers' hotel annoyance list

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 23:05:45 +0000

The annual FlyerTalk survey of frequent business travellers' greatest hotel annoyances found that the top three peeves are all related to network access: expensive Internet, inaccessible/inadequate electrical outlets and slow Internet topped the list in positions one, two and three. As one traveller put it, "If I can get free wifi at Starbucks where I’m buying a $4 cup of coffee, why can’t I get free wifi at a hotel where I’m paying $250 a night?" Preach, sister!

Hotel Pet Peeves – What Bugs You the Most in 2012 (via Interesting People)

How the world's travel guides describe America

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 02:55:48 +0000

The Atlantic's Max Fisher does a survey of foreign tour guides to the USA and finds in them a frank view into how America is viewed outside the USA. Travellers are advised that the real price for restaurant food is 20% higher than advertised ("You have to calculate 20%, write it under the subtotal, and sum to arrive at the real price. Taxis work the same way."), to avoid small towns if they are gay, to be punctual, and to let Americans lead when it comes to hugging and cheek-kissing.

You might say that global food cultures tend to fall into one of two categories: utensil cultures and finger cultures. The U.S., somewhat unusually, has both: the appropriate delivery method can vary between cuisines, and even between dishes, and it's far from obvious which is which. Baked chicken is a fork food, but fried chicken a finger food, depending on how it's fried. If you get fried pieces of potato, it's a finger food, unless the potato retains some circular shape, in which case use your fork. And so on. Confused yet?
The books emphasize that the U.S. is safe, with one big exception they all note: "inner cities," which are described with a terror that can feel a little outdated. "When driving, under no circumstances you should stop in any unlit or seemingly deserted urban area," Rough Guide warns, going on to describe dangerous scams - a strange man waving you down for "auto trouble," another car hitting yours out of nowhere so that you'll get out - in a way that makes them sound commonplace.

Welcome to America, Please Be On Time: What Guide Books Tell Foreign Visitors to the U.S. (via Kottke)

New Yorkers: Spend Memorial Day with Maggie and Dean!

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 23 May 2012 22:30:07 +0000

Neither I nor Dean Putney—BoingBoing's intrepid web developer—live in New York City. But we realized recently that we're both going to be visiting at the same time. So we're planning on meeting up for a little, informal Memorial Day picnic in Prospect Park, and we'd like you to join us. We'll be meeting up on Monday, May 28th, at 3:00 pm in front of the Brooklyn Museum. Bring whatever you want to eat and, if you so choose, a nifty object or DIY project for show-and-tell. Hope to see you there!