The cathedral of Saint-Jean in the French town of Besançon, capital of the region Franche-Comté, has a magnificent astronomical clock with 70 dials:
… the clock features 70 dials, showing 122 indications; among them the local time of 17 places over the world, times and height (!) of the tides in 8 different French ports, perpetual calendar, leap year cycles, times of sunrise and sunset.
Travel the Grand Trunk Road between Lahore and Islamabad, and you come to the city of Gujrat. Awash in the smog and sewage produced by its million-odd inhabitants, it is an unlovely place best known for the manufacture of electrical fans. It is also the location of a shrine to a 17th-century Sufi Saint by the name of Shua Dulah. For at least 100 years, but perhaps for centuries, it has been, though is no longer, a depository for children with microcephaly.
Oops, NASA can’t find its tapes of the first moon walk:
But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk – beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Parkes’s famous "Dish" – have gone missing at NASA’s Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.
A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate to dust before they can be found.
The photo above is of John Sarkissian, a scientist who discovered that the tapes are missing. Link – via Fortean Times
Ruth Regina, an eight-generation wigmaker in Miami-Dade, is now designing hairpieces for dogs:
The "Yappy Hour," a cascade of curls, can be custom made with synthetic or human hair and dyed any color, including pastels. With openings for ears and an elastic band to hold it in place, it’s a good choice for hairless dogs, she explains.
The "Peek a Bow Wow" can fall down over part of a dog’s face, giving a glamorous look reminiscent of 1940s movie star Veronica Lake. It’s a good style for "any dog that has feeling, you know, a sexy dog," she explains. "There’s some dogs that have the come-hither look," she says.
There’s also the "Rover R-r-r-rug," straight hair that can be used as bangs, and "Buddy Braids," good for a dog with a little hair since they are held on with clips, Regina says.
Posted by Alex in Pictures on August 11, 2006 at 1:04 am
From the website:
Three different typhoons were spinning over the western Pacific Ocean on August 7, 2006, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image.
The folks at Skyacht have successfully performed a tethered test flight of their hot-air blimp:
In addition to recreational uses, the Personal Blimp can fly in ways that no other aircraft can match. For instance, no other aircraft can accomplish the seemingly straightforward task of picking off the top-most leaf from a particular tree (Helicopter downblast tosses the leaves wildly; Helium airships can’t hover; Previously built hot air airship and and hot air balloons are nearly impossible to steer precisely.) In contrast, the Personal Blimp flies "low, slow, and smooth." This enables one to accomplish tasks as simple as the above-mentioned picking of leaves off the tops of trees or as complex as carrying airborne gravimetric measurement equipment (used in diamond prospecting) with far greater sensitivity and spatial resolution. Other areas of application for the Personal Blimp’s unique abilities include forest canopy research, wetlands survey/management, eco-tourism and aerial photography.
When not in use, the Personal Blimp can be deflated and folded for storage (much like a hot air balloon.) The combination of ready buoyancy control and rapid deflation eliminates not only costly hangers but also the large ground crews typically required for helium airships.
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