Well, it's not as big as the Firefox star, but this is still pretty cool: the Firefox bus, as taken by LiveJournal user Kalyan Varma around Mysore, India. http://kalyan.livejournal.com/204212.html
Alex Santoso's Blog Posts
Waaay before eHarmony, there was "Match" - the original computer matchmaking service:
Out of computers, faster than the eye can blink, fly letters stacked with names of college guys and girls—taped, scanned, checked and matched. Into the mails speed the compatible pairs, into P.O. boxes at schools across the land. Eager boys grab their phones… anxious coeds wait in dorms … a thousand burrrrrrrings jar the air . . . snow-job conversations start, and yeses are exchanged: A nationwild dating spree is on. Thousands of boys and girls who’ve never met plan weekends together, for now that punch-card dating’s here, can flings be far behind? And oh, it’s so right, baby. The Great God Computer has sent the word. Fate. Destiny. Go-go-go. Call it dating, call it mating, it flashed out of the minds of Jeff Tarr (left) and Vaughn Morrill, Harvard undergraduates who plotted Operation Match, the dig-it dating system that ties up college couples with magnetic tape. The match mystique is here: In just nine months, some 100,000 collegians paid more than $300,000 to Match (and to its MIT foe, Contact) for the names of at least five compatible dates. Does it work? Nikos Tsinikas, a Yale senior, spent a New Haven weekend with his computer-Matched date, Nancy Schreiber, an English major at Smith. Result, as long date’s journey brightened into night: a bull’s-eye for cupid’s computer.
“How come you’re still single? Don’t you know any nice computers?”
Here's an interesting article by Gene Shalit in the February 1966 issue of Look: Link
(And yes, today there is an unrelated dating site called Match.com)
Gaffe a Minute is my favorite new find on the Web. It's a website dedicated to stories about embarrassing mistakes, clumsy blunders and kid's innocent sayings.
Here're a couple of stories from the "Slips of the Young" category:
Kiss and Tell
My kindergartner was disgusted: a girl in his class liked him. She followed him everywhere and talked to him nonstop. Then one day he returned from school distraught. Kaitlyn had kissed him! “Where did she kiss you?” I asked, thinking, Forehead? Cheek? Lips? My son answered in a dramatic, horrified whisper: “In the library!”
—LizBurning Issue
Our local firefighters taught my six-year-old’s class what to do if they ever caught on fire. Several days later, while cooking dinner, I accidentally set off our smoke alarm. My son, who happened to be standing nearby, suddenly dove to the floor and started rolling across it while yelling, “Stop! Drop! And roll!”
—Katie
And yes, you can submit your own gaffes: Link - via Presurfer
Outer space seems vast and empty, but the space directly above Earth is quite crowded with satellites and ... space junk!
Between the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 and 1 January 2008, approximately 4600 launches have placed some 6000 satellites into orbit; about 400 are now travelling beyond Earth on interplanetary trajectories, but of the remaining 5600 only about 800 satellites are operational - roughly 45 percent of these are both in LEO and GEO. Space debris comprise the ever-increasing amount of inactive space hardware in orbit around the Earth as well as fragments of spacecraft that have broken up, exploded or otherwise become abandoned. About 50 percent of all trackable objects are due to in-orbit explosion events (about 200) or collision events (less than 10).
Officials from the space shuttle program have said the shuttle regularly takes hits from space debris, and over 80 windows had to be replaced over the years. The ISS occasionally has to take evasive maneuvers to avoid collisions with space junk. And of course, this debris is not just sitting stationary: in orbit, relative velocities can be quite large, ranging in the tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.
Parents normally fight to keep their children out of gangs, but not this one: the mother is a Crip, and the father is a Westside Baller. And they got into a fight over which gang their 4-year-old toddler should join!
On Saturday, Joseph Manzanares stormed into the Hollywood Video store where his girlfriend worked, threatened to kill her and knocked over several video displays and even a computer, Commerce City police Sgt. Joe Sandoval said. [...]
His girlfriend told police that they had been arguing about the upbringing of their son and which gang he should belong to. The teen mother, who is black, is a member of the Crips. Manzanares is Hispanic and belongs to the Westside Ballers gang, the woman said.
"They have different ideas on how the baby should be raised. Basically, she said they cannot agree on which gang the baby would 'claim,'"Sandoval said.
Link - Thanks Tiff!
Michael Alan Miller wrote an interesting post in his blog about ad blocking - and why he doesn't consider this "stealing":
Look, when I visit your website, I didn’t sign any contract that says I have to do anything in particular. I am in no way obligated to view your obnoxious ads. I understand completely that your website, like many others, depends on ads for revenue. I don’t care. I have no interest in being marketed to, cajoled into consumerism, insulted by unexpected sounds, and otherwise annoyed by asinine affixations found on your page.
If there were some way to fund deserving website by micropayments, I’d gladly sign up for that. For example, if I were charged $0.02 every time I visited Ars Technica (one of the worst whiners, link goes to a comment of one of the prime whiners), I’d sign up for this in a heartbeat. Why micropayments haven’t taken off yet, I have no idea, as ads are just not a good model for most of the Internet. Don’t get me wrong; I do want to support sites that I like. I learn much from them, and depend on them for many things in my life. However, I will not view ads, ever, if I can help it.
Do you think blocking ads is equivalent to thievery?
http://www.michaelalanmiller.com/?p=128 - via reddit (interesting sets of comments there as well)
American Airlines has so far canceled nearly 3,000 flights this week due to wiring inspections, stranding a quarter of a million passengers.
When it comes to flying, safety is paramount, but it seems that the wiring problem isn't critical. So naturally, some people are asking why the mass grounding:
But were wiring concerns serious enough to warrant such massive cancellations? Should the airlines have inconvenienced so many people at once? Was the flying public's safety actually at risk? [...]
American is reinspecting its planes after securing the wire bundles a quarter of an inch too far apart. Delta found it had an issue with the protective sleeving it was supposed to have wrapped around a certain part of the wire bundles. [...]
John Eakin, aviation safety consultant and president of Air Data Research in Helotes, Texas, spent this week looking over the reports issued in the years before 2006 that prompted the FAA to issue the requirement in the first place.
The reports were not serious enough a problem to prompt this week's mass cancellations, Eakin said.
"What I see is just routine stuff," said Eakin, who has worked as a pilot and mechanic for 40 years. "I don't have any sense that there was any imminent danger of the airplane falling out of the sky, if you will. That's not to say that it couldn't. Obviously, someone along the way has determined that this has the potential to cause serious damage."
"I would think that if it was likely to cause a problem, they wouldn't have taken six or seven or eight years to do the paperwork," Eakin said.
If you're one of the passengers inconvenienced, I feel your pain. I used to travel by air a great deal (internationally and domestically), and I've never had much problem - until I traveled with American Airlines (why? I'll tell you in the comment).
Link (Photo: FlyGuy92586 [Flickr])
Postcard From Yo Momma is a neat website where you can send (anonymously) emails from your mom. Some are very Internet-literate, whereas others still use their AOL emails and send out little guilt traps like "I wish you'd call more often."
Reading the entries are like getting glimpses into the mothers that I know, including my own! (I love you mom!).
For example:
Things just change
I am sure it will happen again. The trick is not to kid yourself. Everyone is all in love in the beginning but as time wears on every relationship, even the ones you try hard to keep fresh and alive, get a bit stale. At first you wouldn’t even dare fart in front of him, 10 years later you’re talking to him while you’re sitting on the toilet. Things just change.In Bloom
Hi Again: Twice in one day, oh my! I just washed those white curtains from the condo. Please measure the bathroom windows and I’ll try to get them made up for your bathroom in NYC if you still want them. It is so beautiful with everything in bloom. I just feel God all around when it is like this. Off to my soaps. Love, Mother
And even this tech savvy mom:
my mother (aged 68) the tech head
I’ve just downloaded QuickTime Player 7 Pro (cracked bittorrent) so that I can record the music I get from the radio stations on iTunes. By the way I have two sets of computer speakers here which I use for the Sony fm/mw/sw which I bought in Singapore. I plug in the iPod and can listen to all the podcasts. I also use the speakers in the back bedroom, so I am also smiling.
The photo is, of course, Barbara Billingsley as June Cleaver, America's favorite mom in the TV series Leave It to Beaver.
Cartoon Brew blog has a clip of what the adaptation of Windsor McCay's comic strip Little Nemo could have been like...
Here's the test sequence, animated by the legend of anime Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Yoshifumi Kondo: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/anime/little-nemo-test-film [embedded YouTube] | Longer version at Google Video - Thanks John "Widgett" Robinson!
Andy Heatman from Liverpool, England, got banned from his local gym for ... sweating too much!
The 42-year-old psychiatric nurse, who teaches patients about cleanliness and hygiene, was confronted by staff at Cheshire Lines Health Club, in Maghull.
He said: “I was on the bike doing part of my usual routine when a member of staff walked over and sniffed me.
“I felt a bit paranoid but it was later in the week I was taken into the office to be told about the complaints. “I kept waiting for the punchline but there wasn’t one, and when I went back as usual later in the week I was stopped from going any further than the entrance.”
The news has a happy ending: he signed up at a gym even closer to home, where the managers said that "he was allowed to sweat as much as he liked."
Hina Aoyama has got hands as steady as those of the world's best surgeons. Except she uses hers to make intricate cut paper art, like these below:
Lettre de Voltaire by Hina Aoyama. Photo: Masajiart.gr.jp
Trois Papillon by Hina Aoyama [Flickr]
Links: Hina Aoyama's website (in Japanese) | Flickr photoset | YouTube - via mein inspiration
Previously on Neatorama: Origamic Architecture | Richard Sweeney's Paper Sculptures | Kako Ueda's Cut Paper Art | Peter Callesen's Artwork
Here's a YouTube clip of Marcel W. Helland playing one of the world's rarest musical instruments (only 25 or so exists): the contrabass saxophone. As you can see, it's quite large (about 6 foot 4 inches or 1.9 m tall) and heavy (45 lb. or 20 kg).
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks Christophe!
Carrying a little dog in your bag is so 2007. This year, the haute couture is combining the two directly!! Behold the Excessory Baggage, a wry commentary/art by Meryl Smith:
The Honey Space, a usually unattended "no-profit" gallery in a Chelsea warehouse, asked 5 curators to select artists to create works that meet the size and weight requirements of international carry-on luggage. Perhaps inspired by Vuitton's nineteenth-century origins as a maker of upscale traveling cases, Meryl Smith combined leather, papier-mache, gold paint, and a (fake?) LV zipper to create Excessory Baggage. Yes, models and actresses are still accessorizing with little dogs, but why try to smuggle your barking purse pup through security when you could settle for convenient faux taxidermy instead?
Pink Tentacle has a neat post about joge-e, or "two way pictures," produced for mass consumption in 19th century Japan:
This print by Kuniyoshi (c. 1852) depicts Hotei (Laughing Buddha) and Shoki (a character from the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms“). When viewed upside-down, Hotei becomes Asahina (a character from a popular novel of the time) and Shoki becomes Zhang Fei.
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