OrignauxMoose

We are well into Hurricane season, and although I am glad we are not dealing with the brunt of it. I’m sure it will be exciting to see the tail end of Tropical Storm Hannah come through this weekend.

The Hurricane season continues through November First, so we may get some additional excitement out of this season as well.

In California, El Nino was often a treat, when you could find your self a safe seat on the cliffs or sometimes on the seawall of a sheltered beach and watch the 15+ foot waves consume buildings on the ocean fronts and wharfs. I am having a similar feeling looking at the New York Preparadness hurricane evecuation map. With a tropical storm on its way I’d like to find myself and Jules a nice comfortable apartment and have some friends over to watch the ‘FDR waterpark’ for an afternoon.

As a side bonus reading through the NYC Preparedness page has encouraged me to go out and buy enough water to fill the rest of the kitchen storage we have left.. and then some.

Tags: Extreeme Tourism, Hurricane, New York, NYC
Posted in New York, apartment, entertainment, news, weekend adventures | Comments (0)

It’s always a bit disappointing when something so inspirational turns out to be a fake. I mean, the idea is still a great one, but I’m still a little let down.

But after bloggers pointed out holes in Nordenankar’s claim, DHL confirmed to the Telegraph that the artwork was an “entirely fictional project”.
…
Many pointed out that DHL delivery planes would have been highly unlikely to make the tight loops in the North Atlantic that form the hair of the self-portrait.

Others noted that many of the package’s mid-route stops appear to be in the middle of the ocean.

“[He] could have at least centered the drawing over the land areas, so it would be more believable that DHL had made stops there, as opposed to a DHL plane making loop-the-loops out over the Atlantic,” a reader called Shinanigans posted on the Neatorama blog.
…
“A GPS signal cannot penetrate dense materials. That briefcase looks dense enough to block the signal and the roof of a car or thick walls of an airplane blocks the rest,” a blogger named Samppa79 wrote.

Via The Telegraph.co.uk

Tags: art, DHL, drawing, Erik Nordenankar, fake, hoax, largest, let down, world's
Posted in news | Comments (0)

Saturday is the 125th birthday of that great icon of our city, the Brooklyn Bridge! Man, with it being Fleet Week, Lisa being in town, Memorial Day, and now this, what an exciting weekend! I hope everyone has a blast!

It was so singular a marvel, so ambitious a feat, that its opening drew the U.S. president and a crowd of thousands. A leading national magazine said it stood poised to become “our most durable monument.”

Some 125 years later, the Brooklyn Bridge remains a powerful symbol of engineering might and imagination, and a revered fixture in the landscape of the nation’s largest city.

And it can still draw a crowd. Thousands of people are expected at the bridge’s 125th birthday blowout Thursday, with fireworks, a Navy flyover, a colorful new lighting scheme and the debut of a tribute song scheduled to honor the storied span. It opened on May 24, 1883.

“It’s an icon for not only New York, but for America,” said Brooklyn’s official historian, Ron Schweiger.

The 6,000-foot-long (1829-meter-long) landmark is one of the nation’s oldest suspension bridges and among its most treasured.

From the International Herald Tribune

Tags: birthday, brooklyn bridge, New York
Posted in New York, news | Comments (0)

This is fun, its about time they started in with the interesting creatures.. I mean who wants the genome of a fruit fly anyway(sic)!?!

I certainly would have raised one of these in space!

At first dismissed as a prank, and later cited as proof that God has a sense of humour, the duck-billed platypus has finally given up its evolutionary secrets.

…and talk about Kinky!

The fact that the animal has five X and five Y chromosomes is “the weirdest thing about a very weird animal,” said Ewan Birney, a co-author on the paper, based at the European Bioinformatics Institute, near Cambridge. “In theory it means there are 25 possible sexes, though in practice that doesn’t happen.”

Quoted from guardian.co.uk

Tags: 25 sexes, evolution, kinky, platypus genome, science
Posted in news, science / technology | Comments (2)

First Space Lawyer Graduates
A student at the University of Mississippi will leap into the final frontier of the legal system Saturday when he receives the first-ever space law certificate in the United States.

Michael Dodge of Long Beach, Miss., earned the special distinction along with his law degree through the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law at the university’s law school.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: first, First Space Lawyer, Remote Sensing, space, space law, Xenobiology
Posted in news, science / technology | Comments (0)

I’m going to participate! At first I was concerned it was going to be on a work day, in which case, I would only be able to at the risk of losing my job. But on a Saturday? No problem! I’ll make a great outdoor adventure out of that day!

It is obvious that without computers we would find our life extremely difficult, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?

Be part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the Internet. The idea behind Shutdown Day is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!

Find out more at ShutdownDay.org

Tags: computer, day, experiment, may 3, shutdown
Posted in news, science / technology, vision | Comments (1)

France got 3 outs, Are we going to let them beat us like that?

Its exciting that the world is rallying behind the first international Interactive Torch Relay.

I am rooting for Team America on this one, I certainly think that we can extinguish the torch more than three times. I will be watching news all day wednesday, And as a bonus round I would absolutley love to see the Olympic torch given to protestors, hopefully some group that supports human rights and freedom, someone who deserves the torch and will mount it properly in their barefoot bohemian bungalow.

Image fromBBC

I particularly liked the details image above.
1. GOOAAAAAAAALLLLL! 1 point France!
2. Celebrity Lookalikes: Dane Cook always looks a little confused, but did France thank President Vladimir Putin for the Cameo?
3. The French sure do have some cool body armor, which probably comes from government supporting their peoples activism.

Below is the list of all of the torch bearers as it makes its way through the San Fransisco on Wednesday, I tracked it down hoping on the off chance I may know someone here who could help make my bonus round come true, Sadly I do not.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: China, dane cook, extinguished, olympic relay, protest, rally, san francisco, vladimir putin
Posted in humor, news | Comments (0)

Even though, in this day and age, coins may seem, sort of, obsolete, these are so stunning I’m thinking about buying one of the display collections.

The new designs have been chosen via an open competition which was widely publicised in the national media in August 2005 and attracted 4,000 entries. The winning designer is 26-year-old Matthew Dent, originally from Bangor who now lives and works in London as a graphic designer.

After exploring a number of different options, Matthew Dent finally developed the heraldic theme, taking the greatest heraldic device ever used on coinage – the Royal Arms.

…the Shield of the Royal Arms has been given a contemporary treatment and its whole has been cleverly split among all six denominations from the 1p to the 50p, with the £1 coin displaying the heraldic element in its entirety. This is the first time that a single design has been used across a range of United Kingdom coins.

Quoted from The Royal Mint

Damn, that’s quite a resume builder for a 26-year-old! *Small jabs of jealousy*

Tags: coins, design, money, United Kingdom
Posted in damn creative!, news | Comments (0)

Attention New York tourists: Canal Street is closed. Or a least part of it is. For the moment.

After the police conducted a $1m raid Tuesday morning, Mayor Mike Bloomberg posed with a ‘CLOSED’” sign among the trays of fake watches and piles of counterfeit handbags. The bust involved 32 separate storefronts, all owned by the same estate and located in a triangular city block newly dubbed the ‘Counterfeit Triangle,’ bounded by Canal, Walker, and Centre Streets. The counterfeit trade, according to the press release, is ’standing in the way of the revitalization of Chinatown,” and the mayor intends to make renting to counterfeit retailers “a losing business proposition.’

Via Counterfeit Chic

*EDIT*
There are some jems in the comments section under the New York Times Article

For those wondering how these astronomical losses are calculated, it involves the math and logic of a 5-year-old:
1) Estimate how many people bought the fake Vuitton bag for $50;
2) Assume that every single person who bought a fake bag for $50 would have bought a $1500 bag if the fake bags weren’t available;
3) Ignore the howls of laughter at the absurd logic and multiply (number of sales) x $1500;
4) Hold press conference.
— Posted by Peter

In almost everything to do with New York City, I try to follow the money. And my guess is if you follow the money in this case, you’ll end up in the office of a property developer…probably one of the handful of aristocratic families that rule New York City, and who are desperate to gain land in lower Manhattan that is still eligible for Liberty bonds.
— Posted by David L.

Tags: china town, counterfeit, fashion, New York
Posted in New York, fashion, news | Comments (0)

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

Full article at WIRED, Found via Swiss Miss

Tags: business, economics, free, internet, Wired magazine
Posted in buiness, news | Comments (0)