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Jennifer was sick of paying high gas prices and bothered by the abandoned gas station that was an eyesore on the drive to her studio each day, so she decided to do something about it. With the help of professional and amateur artists from 15 countries and more than 2,500 grade-school students in 29 states, Marsh covered the 50-year-old former Citgo station — pumps, light stands, signs and all — with more than 3,000 fiber panels that are crocheted, knitted, quilted or stitched together.
Link -Thanks, Marlow Harris!
Wild honeybees in Nepal build ten-feet-long hives on the sides of high cliffs, but their honey is so rare that locals risk their lives climbing bamboo poles to harvest it. A film crew from the BBC watched the process in which the bottom of the hive is cut off by a bamboo pole. In this instance, one man got too close to the point of impact when the cutting was done!
Suddenly there was a loud shout from above, and I saw a door shaped yellow object hurtle towards the ground and crash square on to the head of a man stood directly below.
The impact was so colossal it completely floored him, and honey splattered all over the place, enveloping him like a big sugary, gloopy parcel.
Everyone jumped up. Our on-location doctor ran forward to help, seeing him lying on the floor absolutely up to his eyeballs in one of the most expensive honeys in the world. I actually thought he was dead.
Two men helped him to his feet, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. I have never seen a honey-glazed man before; but suddenly there was one staggering unsteadily towards me, his eyes bloodshot but smiling cheerfully, and licking himself all over.
Spiders are often solitary animals (some of them are even cannibals that eat their own species, so they tend to stay as far away as possible from each other).
But in the case of Anelosimus eximius spiders, the more, the merrier. Here’s why the social spiders prefer social networking by living in giant colonies:
The ability to work together and capture larger prey has allowed social spiders to stretch the laws of nature and reach enormous colony sizes, UBC zoologists have found. [...]
“The size of organisms tends to be constrained by a scaling principle scientists call ‘surface to volume ratio,’” says Leticia Avilés, lead author and associate professor in the UBC Dept. of Zoology. While organisms typically have energetic needs proportional to their volume, they must acquire nutrients through their surface.
“As the organism grows, this surface to volume ratio declines. In a way, this is how nature keeps the sizes of various species in check.”
The same principle may apply to social groups. The surface area of the three-dimensional webs social spiders use to capture prey does not grow as fast as the number of spiders contained in the nests; so number of incoming prey per spider declines with colony size. But Anelosimus eximius, a species of social spider notable for its enormous colony size – some total more than 20,000 individuals – have gained the ability to stretch that law by cooperating and thus capturing increasingly large insects as their colonies grow.
“The average size of the prey captured by the colony increased 20-fold as colony size increased from less than 100 to 10,000 spiders,” says Avilés, who studied the spiders in the wild in Amazonian Ecuador with undergraduate student Eric Yip and graduate student Kimberly Powers.
Previously on Neatorama: Arachnophobia City! Thousands and Thousands of Spiders | Giant Spider Web
COLOURlovers blog has neat photo gallery and interview with Johanna Lundberg, Jenna Sutela and Timo Koro of thisissand.com, a Flash website that lets you play with colorful digital sand (remember that toy now?).
Link | This is Sand Blog | Play This is Sand [Flash: click anywhere on the screen to start, or the small gray box on the upper lefthand corner for instruction]
Ooh … This. Is. Awesome. No, it’s SUPER AWESOME: Dan Kressin made a Donkey Kong diorama, complete with Kong throwing barrels and Mario jumping over them out of LEGO MINDSTORMS:
During a random discussion at the April NELUG meeting, Robyn (my wife and muse) off-handedly said, "You should make Donkey Kong!" As is her way, she followed this remark with a brief musical rendition, firmly planting the idea in my skull.
The Goal
Donkey Kong is a classic, so I wanted my MOC to do it justice. At a minimum it would need to have:* rolling barrels (using LEGO barrels if possible)
* Donkey Kong throwing the barrels
* a barrel-jumping minifig
* ladders and ramps that closely resembled the originals
The rest is an epic win: Link – via Brothers Brick | Gizmodo has a YouTube clip of the Donkey Kong LEGO in action: Link
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Something is not quite right with the pic above. Can you figure it out?
Here’s the story from Consumerist: Link
Poor Bugatti Veyron: it wasn’t enough that the $1.4 million car was dethroned as the fastest production car on the planet, it’s now not even the most expensive one …
Here’s the One-77, a $2.3 million hand-made coupe by Aston Martin:
Paying $2.3 million for anything that doesn’t have wings is beyond excessive, but then, those few who get a One-77 aren’t buying a car. They are, according to Aston Martin, buying An Experience. Autocar says buyers will be invited to the factory in Gaydon, where they’ll meet with designers and engineers to develop the car to their exact specifications.
"It’s a very special car for customers who want to take the bespoke experience to a higher level," company chairman David Richard told Autocar. "Every car will be entirely individual."
And bookies are taking bets on who would be the first to buy the car (so far David Beckham is the favorite!)
Our pal Marilyn Terrell of National Geographic Traveler’s Intelligent Travel blog told us about Flashback, a gem of a monthly photograph archive from NatGeo (some published before in the magazine, some never before seen).
I particularly like these two, of a baboon trying to teach a kitty how to sit properly (like a baboon, that is) and a man mowing the lawn at Stonehenge:
Photography by Kurt Severin, National Geographic Image Collection
SITTING KITTY
A patient little cat endures lessons in baboonery. According to notes accompanying the photograph—which arrived at the Geographic in 1956 but was never published by the magazine—"Baboon mother tries to make Fluffy sit up like a good monkey baby. But the kitten always falls back on her four legs. It seems like such a hopeless case." The baboon, named Helen, was an attraction at Ross Allen’s Reptile Institute, a roadside zoo funded in 1929 in Silver Springs, Florida. She may have been a holdover from the days when Tarzan movies were filmed in the region and Allen provided animal actors for visiting Hollywood productions. —Margaret G. Zackowitz
Photograph by Barbara Maddrell, National Geographic Image Collection
CUTTING IT CLOSE
Mowing among the megaliths at Stonehenge must have been a mighty task. England’s Salisbury Plain—home to the famous standing stones as well as hundreds of other prehistoric sites—is one of the largest expanses of rare chalk grassland left in Europe. The man in this 1950s photograph (never previously published in the Geographic) was unavailable for comment on his labors. His name did not accompany the image, and his origins, much like Stonehenge’s, remain a mystery. – Margaret G. Zackowitz
Check out the 2008 archives here: Link – Thanks Marilyn!
The Boston Globe has been leading the coverage of this strange and incredible story and has assembled links to numerous timelines, photos and articles at this link. If what has been reported to date is true, this is a tale of lies, deceit, identity theft, love under false pretenses, lots of money, con jobs, interstate and international flight – and quite possibly murder.
Here’s a bit of an introduction first, before you click through to the Boston Globe:
Just before 5:00PM on July 27, 2008, an “AMBER Alert” was issued throughout Massachusetts. Seven year-old Reigh Storrow “Snooks” Mills Boss (Rockefeller) had been abducted in Boston near Boston Commons. Her captor was assumed to be her father, Clark Rockefeller, who was recently divorced from the girl’s mother, Sandra Boss, losing custody of “Snooks” as a result. Apparently supervised visits were allowed as part of the settlement and the abduction occurred during one of these supervised visits.
I was watching television that evening and noticed the AMBER ALERT banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen during the evening news. “A Rockefeller? Surely he’s got something up his sleeve!” – and sure enough, by the next morning there was talk of the possibility of the father captor and daughter abductee escaping by yacht to the Caribbean.
Fortunately, it didn’t take the police long to find the father and daughter. They had not escaped by yacht, but rather to a former industrial space in Baltimore that had been converted to luxury apartments. Acting on a tip, the authorities lured Rockefeller out of the apartment by having someone phone him from the marina where his boat was stored with a phony story about his boat taking on water and nearly sinking. Rockefeller was arrested on the spot, moments after he stepped out of his apartment.
At court proceedings in Baltimore he agreed to be extradited back to Massachusetts for trial.
Here’s where the story gets weird:
As a result of being “booked” in Baltimore, his finger print was taken. It was compared against a national database of both known and unknown fingerprint sources and there was a hit – his prints matched those found at the scene of a long since unsolved crime. Could Clarke Rockefeller really have kidnapped and killed a young couple in California nearly 15 years ago? He’s not saying – even after detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department flew in to interrogate him this week.
Even weirder:
A family in Connecticut has stepped forward and says that from the photos they have seen of Rockefeller he is almost certainly an exchange student from Germany that lived with this family for a semester or two in the late-1970s or early-1980s under a different name.
The story continues with more strange fun and surprises ahead. I could write for hours more and not cover everything about it, but you’re in good hands with the Boston Globe as far as this story goes.
Eugenio Recuendo recreates Greek friezes by posing and photographing human models. Pretty cool stuff. More tableaux at TrendHunter.
I did not know that airlines are flying planes without full fuel tanks. To save weight, they calculate the least amount of fuel needed to get a plane to its destination.
With fuel prices now their biggest cost, airlines are aggressively enforcing new policies designed to reduce consumption.
In March, for example, an airline pilot told NASA he landed his regional jet with less fuel than required by FAA regulations.
“Looking back,” he said, “I would have liked more gas yesterday.” He also complained that his airline was “ranking” captains according to who landed with the least amount.
A month earlier, a Boeing 747 captain reported running low on fuel after meeting strong headwinds crossing the Atlantic en route to John F. Kennedy International Airport. He said he wanted to stop to add fuel but continued on to Kennedy after consulting his airline’s operations manager, who told him there was adequate fuel aboard the jet.
When the plane arrived at Kennedy, the captain said it had so little fuel that had there been any delay in landing, “I would have had to declare a fuel emergency” – a term that tells air traffic controllers a plane needs immediate priority to land.
Link -via Waiter Rant, where the author had a brush with a similar occurrence.
(image credit: Drewski2112)
Modern day awesominers know there are actually 118 fundamental “awesoments” that compose all good things. The Periodic table of Awesoments can be a very useful tool. It’s designed to show the relationships between awesoments, and often one can even predict how awesoments interact simply by their positions on the table.
Link -via Gorilla Mask
This seems scary. Two researchers speaking at different hacker conferences revealed that they have learned how to turn off implanted pacemakers by remote control. Kevin Fu, director of the Medical Device Security Center, spoke at Black Hat while Daniel Halperin, a graduate student at the University of Washington, addressed attendees at Defcon.
Fu and Halperin said they used a cheap $1,000 system to mimic the control mechanism. It included a software radio, GNU radio software, and other electronics. They could use that to eavesdrop on private data such as the identity of the patient, the doctor, the diagnosis, and the pacemaker instructions. They figured out how to control the pacemaker with their device.
“You can induce the test mode, drain the device battery, and turn off therapies,” Halperin said.
Translation: you can kill the patient. Fu said that he didn’t try the attack on other brands of pacemakers because he just needed to prove the academic point. Halperin said, “This is something that academics can do now. We have to do something before the ability to mount attacks becomes easier.”
This is one of those cases where proving a point can give someone a heart attack. Link -Thanks, Kiltak!
