Happy Birthday!]]>
Life imitates The Onion, part 23: Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer. (via Daring Fireball.)
In skyscraper news, Tokyo Sky Tree (what a perfectly Japanese name!) will be the second-tallest building in the world. (via Giz.)
The New York Times has the story of an amazing NYC apartment that sounds like something out of Myst: Mystery on Fifth Avenue.
Edith Macefield, Rest in Peace. Edith refused to sell her little house in Ballard to developers, so they built around her. (via Every Seattle web site under the sun.)
Severed foot number five washed ashore up in BC earlier in the week. Number six turned out to be a hoax. Seattlest has the latest theories.
Another cool building in Dubai: Zaha Hadid's Dubai Opera House. (via Giz.)
In Vestimentis Ursum. There's a robot beneath the fluff.
No longer content with a tiny little rover, NASA is building a lunar truck named Chariot and an RV called ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer). They're being tested out in Eastern Washington. (via Telstar Logistics.)
How To Nap. Thanks Boston Glob!
Woo Hoo! The Eames Stamps are here. Too bad there's no "Powers of Ten" stamp. (via Kottke.)
Airlines are charging for the wrong bags. "Charging to check bags, then, is foolish because it is an attempt to get passengers to pay for something that they don't want to do anyway—and will seek to avoid by trying to bring more of their baggage on board." I couldn't agree more. (via Slog.)
First the General Manager, then the manager. The Mariners have fired John McLaren. Bench coach Jim Riggleman will replace him for the remainder of the year.
National Geographic: "Amazing" Dinosaur Trove Discovered in Utah. "In just three weeks of work on federal land near Hanksville, Utah, paleontologists say they unearthed at least two meat-eating dinosaurs, a probable Stegosaurus, and four sauropods..."
You know how restaurants all sing their own lame song instead of "Happy Birthday to You" when a customer celebrates a birthday? It's because the original is still under copyright. Well, maybe not so much.
]]>Apparently, the booing did some good! Or maybe it was the teams position at 20 games under .500. Either way, the Mariners announced today that they have fired incompetent General Manager Bill Bavasi. Mariners' VP/Associate General Manager Lee Pelekoudas will take his place during the search for a permanent replacement. Pelekoudas has been with the M's for almost 30 years. Of course, real change will take time and we still don't know if Bavasi's replacement will be any better, but it's a good first step. Go M's!
Clips of former President Bill Clinton and former candidate John Edwards are also used. "Rhetoric is not enough. High flatulent language is not enough," says Edwards from a debate appearance.
I wonder whether Max Supernova ever uses high flatulent language.
]]>When I read about the Bungalow in a box, I expected something like the old Sears catalog homes. (via Coudal Partners.)
The Friday night bike racing season has already begun over at the Marymoor Velodrome. We'll have to make sure to go on a Kiddie Kilo night so Henry (and Charlie?) can race. (via Citizen Rain.)
Rail Runner - a human-powered rail vehicle and recipe for disaster. (via Make.)
About ten years ago, I remember reading that the modern banana, the Cavendish, is living on borrowed time. The Scientists reports that time might almost be almost up. (via Slashdot.)
Soda Pop! - A set of pictures of old soda cans, bottles and signs. Remember the old look of Mountain Dew? And whatever happened to Pepsi Free? (via A Whole Lotta Nothing.)
The Mystery of the Carolina Bays (at Google Sightseeing).
According to the Brookings Institution, Seattle has the 6th smallest carbon footprint in the US. Not too surprising, I suppose. Louisville is 6th, too. 6th highest carbon footprint! What's wrong with those people? And what's LA doing up at number two? (via Seattle Metblogs.)
Why did the chicken cross the road?
]]>It seems the folks at Taylor Publishing let loose the power of their fully armed and operational spell-checker on the poor defenseless Middletown Area High School yearbook. Names were Cupertinoized on four pages of the 176 page yearbook. Alessandra Ippolito became Alexandria Impolite, Cameron Bendgen became Cameron Bandage, and Max Zupanovic became Max Supernova. I think Max was the winner in this mixup. He certainly came out ahead of Kathy Airbag (Carbaugh).
]]>So I did a little googling and discovered that the same comments are showing up on weblogs all over the place, often posted under different names. For some examples, check out these posts at BoingBoing, soulperblog, my heart's in accra, peterme, Silverspring Studio, Dandelion Salad, Creativity and Action, Discovering Your Inner Samurai, Backstage Unscripted, MWGblog, and The Mike Matas Blog (there are many many more).
One common thread is that the first comment—the one I deleted as spam (it starts "I've been recommending a book by Jill Bolte Taylor called 'My Stroke of Insight' to everyone I know.")—is often authored by "Ellen." Hmm. Are all the comments by "Ellen?" Was she just so moved by Ms. Taylor's book that she took it on herself to spread the word far and wide? Or is this some organized effort to push sales of the book? Or is it something else entirely? Some sort of vulnerability probe by a spambot? Who knows?
For now, I've closed the original post to further comments. You're welcome to comment on this post, Ellen...
]]>Now, I've been taking pictures for a long time, but I never expected I'd be the sort to rave about a lens, but wow. I love this lens! It's incredibly sharp, which is certainly nice, but what I really love is that extra speed. Combined with the image stabilization, I can take handheld existing-light shots that I would have thought impossible a few years ago. It doesn't hurt that I can crank my 20D up to 800 ISO without virtually no change in image quality.
The faster lens also gives me a brighter viewfinder and better focusing performance. Nice. Of course, in switching from the 28-135 to the 17-55, I gave up a whole lot of telephoto range. I figured I'd get a better telephoto zoom someday, but for the time being I could just switch back as needed. Well, last week "someday" arrived.
Canon has four (!) 70-200mm zoom lenses comprising each combination of f/2.8 or f/4, with or without image stabilization. They are all very highly regarded by people in the know. I settled on the f/4 IS version. It's smaller and lighter than the f/2.8 version, and a whole lot cheaper, too. Canon claims a remarkable 4-stops of image stabilization, which most reviews have said is accurate. The old rule of thumb is that you shouldn't try to shoot handheld at less than one over the focal length. So at 200mm, that would be 1/200 second. Four stops gets it down to 1/25, which is pretty darn slow. Of course, image stabilization doesn't help if it's the subject that's moving, but still. How does it work? Well...
This picture was taken from the very back of a rather dimly lit school auditorium. Handheld, no flash, 1/25 second. Amazing. So that's new Camera Toy #1.
With all this new gear, I finally realized that my old camera bag was more than a little inadequate. It's a small top-loader that really can't handle more than the camera and one extra lens. With the 70-200 on the camera, it had room for nothing else. So I did some more research and settled on the Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home:
It's got plenty of room for all my stuff, it's built like a tank, and best of all, it doesn't look like a camera bag. When Kathy first saw it, she said it looks like a diaper bag and that's fine with me. The less my significant investment in photo equipment looks like a significant investment in photo equipment the better. So that's new Camera Toy #2.
Despite being the smallest and cheapest of the three, Camera Toy #3 is by far the geekiest gadget of the three. It's a tiny GPS data logger. The AMOD AGL3080 is smaller than a cell phone and does just one thing: log GPS location and time data.
When you're ready to use the data, plug the device in via USB and it mounts like a thumb drive so you can copy the data to your computer. Assuming your camera's clock is set to the correct time, you can then use an application like GPS Photo Linker, myTracks, or my personal favorite HoudaGeo to match photos to GPS data and write the location information directly into the photo files. Flickr automatically recognizes this location data when you upload and can helpfully put your pictures on a map. I've been doing this by hand ever since flickr rolled out geotagging back in 2006, but having an automated process will make it much easier. Someday, I'm sure my camera-of-the-future will geotag my photos for me as they're taken (some cameras already do and more are on the way), but this gadget will tide me over until that day arrives.
I expect to see some revolutionary applications that take advantage of geocoded photos in the near future. Microsoft has a research project called Photosynth that is already pretty cool. And I'm embarrassed to say how much time I've wasted watching flickrvision.
]]>California seems to me like a great place to kick start high speed rail in the US (discounting the sort-of-high-speed Acela trains in the Northeast). LA to San Francisco is about 600 km, right in the sweet spot for high speed rail: long enough to be much faster than driving; short enough to be as fast—or faster—than flying. I've driven that route through the central valley many times. It's hot, crowded, smelly and sometimes very dangerous. I suspect a great many people would be very happy never to drive that route again.
]]>The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit.
Miraculin! Chew on a single berry and let the pulp coat your tongue and you're set for an hour or so. The result? "Limes were candied, vinegar resembled apple juice, goat cheese tasted like cheesecake on the tongue and goat cheese on the throat." I'm intrigued. It's available from Miracle Fruit Man.
As always, Wikipedia has more.
Beijing's new airport—now the biggest in the world—is open for business. (via Gizmodo.)
I've been thinking about getting some sort of drive dock so I can read bare hard drives. I have an old WiebeTech DriveDock, but it only does ATA and all my newer drives are SATA. Looks like this one might be a winner. (via engadget.)
Google is now hosting a bunch of popular AJAX Libraries. Cool (for geeks like me that care about such things).
NY Times: Placebo pills for kids.
NY Times: Breaching a dam, slowly.
Following on the HOPE and PROGRESS posters by Shepard Fairey, there's a new Obama print from Scott Hansen of ISO50.
Up in BC, there now up to four severed human feet that have washed ashore in the last 10 months. Is David Lynch filming up there? (via Seattlest.)
Awesome stacking bento box by Plastica. Mmmm.... Melamine. (via Babygadget.)
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