I recently watched this video titled NASA's New Spaceship: Video animation of how we'll get back to the Moon by 2018!
It was remarkably familiar. The video demonstrates the exact same method used in the first moon landing: pod atop a single phallic rocket, lunar lander, living pod, slingshot to earth, and capsule landing under three red and white parachutes.
In 1961 JFK surprised NASA and publicly told them to go to the moon within 10 years. And now, with all that we've learned about space travel and rapid advances in technology, it takes even longer to achieve? Using the same basic spacecraft design? I'll concede that I'm no rocket scientist, but still, it was baffling.
In related information... as you are probably aware, our beloved shuttles will be completely retired by 2010. What really irks me is that there will be a 5 year gap between when the shuttles are no longer flying and the when the new space vehicles will be in use. Call me old fashioned, but I would like to see an increase in space exploration, not a five year hiatus.
I've been out of touch lately; been travelling for work, prepping for interviews, getting slammed with workload volume at the office, catching yet another feverish cold, etc. I'm trying to get back into the swing of things and the news bored me today: more of the same drama from China/Tibet, Iran, Mugabe, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
So, enjoy a video of serenity instead! (I was having issues with this earlier, so if the embedded vid doesn't work, the link is in the next paragraph.)
Somewhere in NYC, a paper plane soars beautifully against a backdrop of city and Brooklyn Bridge before landing gently on the street.
I love truths, especially those that are obscured by popular myth. Naturally, I feel it is necessary to share the British Medical Journal's recently released list of common medical misconceptions.
-Turkey doesn't make you any more tired than beef would -Cell phones don't frack with medical devices and kill people in hospitals -Put down that 8th glass of water
While they are interesting, I'm not a fan of anything that has us trying to maintain our destructive way of life. Instead of coming up with all these crazy ideas, why don't we just make some relatively minor adjustments to our personal existences? These are all just cop outs and misdirection of responsibility...and I guess that point is actually made throughout - thank the gods.
That said, one of them, Vertical Farming (in the No. 10 spot), seems pretty responsible, effective, logical, and pretty to look at (see pic to right). Plus, the idea that traditional farm fields could be then returned to forest? Slam dunk.
While Google searching for something entirely unrelated to what I found, I came across CBC.ca Arts' The Top 100 of 2006 list.
There's a lot of stuff there, but skimming it I saw a few highlights that I thought rocked for one reason or another...they're old, but they're still true!
Check it:
"9. Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. When U.S. President George W. Bush sat down at this annual gathering of Washington reporters, he was no doubt expecting a light ribbing. What he got from Colbert, star of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, was a punch in the gut. This was satire at its ballsiest — ballsier even than Borat, for the simple reason that the leader of the free world was sitting only a few feet away. “I believe that the government that governs best is the government that governs least, and by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq,” Colbert quipped at one point. The room responded with a gasp. Comedy so devastating it took your breath away." <-true dat. I thought Bush was so freaking angry that he wasn't even going to wait for Colbert to leave the stage before having him disappeared.The full 24 min video here.
"11. Watching The Wire on a string. One of us waited until early December to see a single episode of David Simon’s Baltimore crime series — and then plowed through all four seasons in two weeks. Yes, it’s true, Omar (Michael K. Williams) is 21st-century TV’s most excellent antihero. The Wire’s main draw, though, is its unblinking view of the war on drugs, the struggles of the working class, political corruption and the collapse of public education. HBO’s grand gift to devil-in-its-details, dystopian storytelling." -I watched the first episode and immediately decided to wait and watch them all "on a string" too
"13. Robin Sparkles, Let's Go to the Mall. The writers of the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother created this genius, faux-1980s music video upon revealing that one of the show’s characters, Robin, is hiding a dirty secret from her past: the Canadian ex-pat was once a bubble-gum popstar. For those who lived through Alanis Morrisette: the Early Years, this hysterically funny video — which boasts the line, “I’m gonna rock your body till Canada Day” — is dead-on in the details: rubber bangles, cheesy white-girl rap, synthesizers, a toy robot, moonwalking and name checks of Brian Mulroney and Wayne Gretzky. It’s awesome, eh." <-um, yeah it is!
"87. Tyra Banks. With her eponymous talk show and evermore me-Me-ME, dammit! appearances on America’s Next Top Model, the poor person’s Oprah has become the ego that ate television. Girlfriend is the guiltiest of pleasures." -"the ego that ate television"!
"94. David Caruso versus acting. It’s not that we enjoy Caruso’s performance as Horatio Caine on CSI: Miami. Rather, we are comforted by its existence. Shatner’s Kirk impregnated fewer pauses; Al Pacino eats less ham; and what — what? — is with the sunglasses? Proof positive that you can be a spectacular failure, and millions of people might love you anyways. So inspiring."
"...On that note, does our solar system have an actual name like magnatar 38 or something equally cool?" -Brabe
I did a little searching and confirmed that no, our solar system does not have a name like Magnatar 38. According to NASA, the IAU (International Astronomical Union), etc., we just capitalise the words to make them personal pronouns. Our solar system is called the Solar System. The galaxy is commonly referred to as the Galaxy (rather than the Milky Way). Our moon is just the Moon. It seems this is because we live on Earth so they are just our system and galaxy. If we started to live on other planets or in other galaxies, we might either give those new places unique names or perhaps change the names of Earth's neighbourhood. Hard to say at this point! A nice little paragraph (or so) explains that all here.
From the University of Arizona's now incorrectly titled Nine Planets FAQ:
Q: Does our solar system have a name? Does our moon have a name? Does our sun have a name?
A: No. No. No. Sorry. They should. But they don't. At least not in English. There are, of course, many words used to refer to the Sun and the Moon in other languages. "Sol" and "Luna" are often thought of as proper names but they're really Latin, not English. So far there hasn't been a need for anything more. Maybe when we start living on other places besides the Earth....
I think I need another black hoodie. That's a bunny hug to you Saskatchewanians. This $100 hoodie is different from the rest, it's the Burton Sleeper Hoodie and it's nearly impossible to find in stock. This hoodie was designed for travelling by plane and will be a significant upgrade to my usual hoodie-on-the-plane uniform.
The Burton Sleeper Hoodie has a removable inflatable neck pillow, a light shield in the hood that covers your eyes, stash pockets for travel documents and portable music, pit zips, thumb hole cuffs, etc.
My cubicle-mate found one locally and put it on hold for me...I think I need to buy it!
You would be all invited to lounge in a "living room [that] is considered the most magnificent privately owned room in the world. This incredible space was the original ballroom at The Pierre Hotel, with 23 foot high curved ceiling and 20 foot French doors overlooking the park and the city. Four adjoining terraces add to its phenomenal dimensions." Or enjoying the "16 grand rooms - including five master bedrooms, 7 full baths and three half-baths, five working fireplaces, oak flooring with mahogany borders throughout, separate guest suites plus staff accommodations".
Oh, and this is not just any old mansion. It's the top three floors of a hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York motherfraking City.
Did I mention that those are five working wood burning fireplaces? I am unspeakable shades of envy.
This one is a mash up of Bert & Ernie / De Niro & Pesci in a not quite seamless version of a scene from Casino.
Then you've got an awesome vid of Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" dubbed over an old-phat hippie music video.
Of course, who doesn't want to see what has been dubbed "The best five second video on the internet"? See The Dramatic Chipmunk here. It is all in the turn.
Japanese ads - gotta love 'em, same as it ever was. This one is from the early 80's for the Honda City car.
Tell me men, does this battery hack apply to Canada?
It's no wonder that a recent survey of 1,011 American adults, conducted by advertising agency JWT showed, among other things;
While slightly more than half (55 per cent) of the respondents said they could go without connecting online "for a few days," only about a fifth (18 per cent) said they could abstain for a week, the survey found.
Similarly 48 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement: "If I cannot access the internet when I want to, I feel like something important is missing."
This is entertaining (I mean, important) shit! My friends don't spontaneously break into dance parody when a bouncing song is on the speakers. You don't want to go a whole week missing this stuff!
This is the side of Shaquille O'Neal's big pimpin' party bus. Yes, he is painted alongside characters from The Godfather, Scarface, and Goodfellas...and then there's the Superman symbol.
For interested parties, some background on where it was photographed.
Have you ever seen the very first picture taken from the surface of Mars? Here it is, taken July 20, 1976.
The World Conservation Union's 2007 Red List of Threatened Species released today informs us that the most common type of gorilla is now "critically endangered" and one step away from global extinction.
For the first census since 1871, unmarried people over 15 outnumber the marrieds. Plus, there are more couples without children than with.
Two weekends ago we discussed whether spiders would ever build large webs together instead of individual ones. We stoner concluded that this wasn't in their nature after transporting spiders from their webs onto others' and watching them scurry away as fast as they could. Okay, the exercise was also dubbed as USF: Ultimate Spider Fight. Well, turns out, under the right conditions, spiders do make giant scary webs together.
CBC.ca has this Google Map showing the locations (and if you click the markers, a picture and blurb as well) of all the UNESCO sites in Canada.
I am fortunate enough to have visited 10 of the 14 without realizing it and now have a burning desire to see the rest. What do you think of the list? Been to any? Glaring omissions? Questionable sites?
From Wired News I learned that Americans who watch The Daily Show as their primary news source (!) know more about current events than those who watch CNN, read the daily papers, or watch the evening news (!!).
Plus, see the chart showing how Americans know less about politics today than they did in 1989.
Strangely, before this week I had never done a Google Image search on my name. A couple of days ago I was looking for an image to accompany a post and typed 'ask spage' into the search and the first two results were pictures I took and sent to Mike Doughty that he posted on his blog. I found that I get the same search results only when I type in the letter 'a' itself before or after 'spage' or a short word starting with the letter 'a'. ('art spage' yields three pictures I took for Doughty as the 5th, 6th and 7th search results, while 'are spage' gets the number one and two spots.)
Curious, I tried just searching 'spage' and the pictures end up in the number 3 and 4 spot. The number one result? A picture of a naked guy with his penis through a plate of noodles. It's titled 'Food Fuck'.
I won't post that picture, but I will post the second result from 'spage', and that is Scott Page's homemade replica of Mad Max's Interceptor.
Man I love the Internet.
Note: Wookiee reminds me that these search results can change drastically and quickly so I can't vouch for the searches after today!
I found this linked over at WaiterRant and thought it would be good for Wookiee and Huggy's meal creations. The next time I'm the 5th wheel at your couples' dinner I'd like to be noshing on Pan-Seared Panda with a Secular Sauce and Sugared Bison with a Lima Bean Confit. Thank you.
A multimedia artist living in New York created an awesome project called lovehateNYC "that chronicles a personal love-hate relationship with New York City".
When you enter the site, you are presented with the artists' map of Manhattan where you can select an area of the island and read changing lines of incohesive text. Next pick a specific location in that area and are you are brought to a beautiful 360 degree view of that spot, which is not unusual I know, but what is cool is that when you stop the rotational view at any point the image begins to cycle through a sort of blended stop motion of activity. Slowly the people and cars fade through their movements.
The Bowery & 2nd one shows you the day before CBGB's closed blend into its final night before becoming a vacant space the next day. The 'key' in the map shows how the colours on the map correspond to the love/hate scale (Times Square lands on the hate end of things, of course) and each scene is introduced with a few words from the artist.
It's like being in a disconnected dream of New York - something I really enjoyed, so I hope you do too.
I recently watched this video titled NASA's New Spaceship: Video animation of how we'll get back to the Moon by 2018!
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