A herd of bison in a valley in the northwestern region of Yellowstone National Park — via Boing Boing
Have you ever listened to a song and your mind’s eye is immediately filled with visuals?
David Bowie’s classic space epic is one such song for me. Every lyric paints such a vivid picture that I figured Oh hey, I guess I’ll make that into a children’s book!
Yes, I talk like this. — via Kolb is Neat
De Lackner DH-4 Heli-Vector
, 1956 — via x planes
This handy chart of defunct country names can help you determine the age of your globe
The price makes this out of reach for us mere mortals, but this 1930s Art Deco nine bedroom Marylebone Town House in Harley Street, London, W1, really is like walking back in history. Trust me, this is a stunning period interior, largely untouched in 80 or so years.
Not that the minor details of changing the layout should affect you or I. The asking price of £6,950,000 makes that only applicable to multi-millionaires or Lotto winners with a love of period architecture. If that’s you, the agent would to show you around — via WowHaus
An unmanned spaceship funded by Internet billionaire Jeff Bezos veered out of control and had to be destroyed during a recent test flight, highlighting the dramatic risks of private space ventures.
A vehicle used in an earlier test. An unmanned spaceship funded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos lost control 45,000 feet off the ground and was destroyed during a recent test. The failure of the craft is a blow to privately funded space ventures.
The spacecraft, developed by closely held Blue Origin LLC, was on a suborbital flight from the company’s West Texas spaceport last week when it started to go off course and ground personnel lost normal contact with the vehicle. Investigators are looking at remnants of the craft recovered on the ground to determine the cause — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Internet has given rise to thousands of online chat forums, where participants can sound off on the issues of the day often shielded by the cloak of anonymity. Anonymous speech can be empowering — whistleblowers depend upon it to safeguard their identity and political participants in some countries face severe repercussions if they speak out publicly — but it also carries the danger of posts that cross the line into defamation without appropriate accountability.
My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that striking the balance between protecting anonymous free speech on the one hand and applying defamation laws on the other sits at the heart of a new Ontario Superior Court decision released last week. The case involved postings about Phyllis Morris, the former mayor of Aurora — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium’s 2-month-old Clouded Leopard cubs born 14 June are growing up fast and struttin’ their stuff in pictures taken Friday. Point Defiance Zoo is one of only three zoos in the country breeding endangered Clouded Leopards, along with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and The Nashville Zoo — via ZooBorns
The owner of a defunct online clothing retail operation has been arrested and charged with wire fraud for allegedly overcharging customers by more than US$5 million.
New York-based Classic Closeouts and owner Daniel Greenberg allegedly used customer credit and debit card numbers on file to charge accounts multiple times for items customers did not order, the US Department of Justice said in a press release. Between June and December 2008, the operation charged customers for unordered items more than 70,000 times, the DOJ said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Australian judges have lashed out at Prime Minister Julia Gillard, saying it was irresponsible of her to criticise the High Court over the Malaysian asylum seeker decision.
The backlash comes one day after Ms Gillard was forced to dismiss speculation of a leadership plot against her in the wake of her scathing attack on the court’s ruling.
Ms Gillard told the ABC’s Madonna King yesterday: I’m not going anywhere
, after earlier blaming the court for missing an opportunity to combat people smuggling in the region.
I’m the best person to do this job. And I’ll continue to do it. And what this job is about is leading the nation to a better future,
she said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Tracy Widdess, from Brutal Knitting, made another amazing balaclava; this one looks like a boar’s head!
For, y’know, when your face is cold and you wanna look more like a boar — via CRAFT
I’m a fan of the Spanish tuner Radical Ducati: their bikes are invariably well engineered and good looking. And they seem to know what to change and what to leave alone. This latest bike is nicknamed Rad to Hell
, and it’s based on the Monster S2R 1000 — via Bike EXIF
Jenny The Bloggess posted a link on Twitter to pictures of a stunningly beautiful haunted dollhouse she’s been building for ten years. Rightfully, folks went nuts. The details are amazing. She’s included a spiral staircase, secret passageways, and lots of personal touches like a globe pencil sharpener from her childhood that’s been aged and dressed with a tiny raven. It’s been fun to hear back from her in comments on Flickr about how she created some of the tiny elements. She took a picture of an Ouija board, shrunk it down and painted it to look old. She spent eight hours cutting out the tiniest Tarot cards you could ever imagine. She scavenged props from toys and even filled the attic as a dumping ground for things that don’t fit in the house
— via CRAFT
A former Australia Post contractor has been sentenced for stealing almost 3,000 items of mail from the Castlemaine area in central Victoria.
Peter Jackson, 53, has been sentenced to 10 months’ jail for stealing the articles between 2005 and March this year when they were seized by police at his Chewton home.
Police estimate the items to be worth more than $60,000 and include clothing, books, jewellery, pornographic material, wedding photos, a funeral DVD, war medals and cancer medication — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A group of sand lizards — one of Britain’s rarest reptiles — are being released back into the wild.
Once commonly found on dunes and heathland, the reptiles became endangered after the gradual destruction of their habitats.
But 46 lizards, reared at Chester Zoo, will soon be returned to their native habitats in Ynyslas, near Aberystwyth.
The zoo said they had become extinct in Wales 60 years ago — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It’s interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.
The High Court rejection of the Malaysia Solution
is almost certainly the beginning of the end of the Labor Government. Even more likely, the end of Julia Gillard’s ignominious Prime Ministership.
This, folks, is what you get when the order of the day is trimming, compromising, placating and general brown-nosing. It is not a sustainable model of government.
You can’t win over the racists who don’t want any brown and yellow people coming here, no matter how they come, which is the core constituency chanting stop the boats
.
Everyone else has long since worked out that any offshore processing solution is both ridiculously expensive and inhumanly cruel.
Labor needs to turn this around with a frank acknowledgement that refugees, however they get here, are Australia’s problem and need to be dealt with by the Australian Government on Australian soil.
Without a truly bold stroke that cuts through all the crap, they’re gone, and Tony Abbott is our new PM.
The ludicrous expense of offshoring probably provides the way to do it. If you can’t sell the notion of processing people onshore, in or near our capital cities, where help and support is readily available to assimilate the influx, on the basis of simple humanity – and that is how low we have sunk – you can at least make a decent fist of selling it on economic grounds. Protect the budget surplus!
Onshore management of refugees is faster and cheaper, and delivers less-damaged people sooner. Provided with language teaching, social integration services, legal support and surrounded by members of their own ethnic community, refugees integrate into Australian society far sooner and better, and become a net economic benefit to the country, rather than a drain.
As it is, we are spending millions of dollars on something which, if truth be told, is nothing more than a vast bribe for the votes of racist rednecks — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A series of fought-for conversions [Castanes Architects], happy accidents and perfect timings led to this amazing two-story apartment that occupies the pyramidal pinnacle of Seattle’s Smith Tower, once the tallest building on the West Coast of the United States (yet one encircled with much misinformation about who lives at its top and why).
And on top of this mysterious dwelling? A great glass globe with unparalleled 360-degree views of Puget Sound, Mount Rainier and essentially every other sight the city has to offer, urban or otherwise — via Dornob
While financial contributions are certainly a great help to health care practitioners in developing nations, one of the things that they really need is rugged, portable, low-cost medical equipment that is compatible with an often-limited local infrastructure. Several such devices are currently under development, such as a battery-powered surgical lamp, a salad-spinner-based centrifuge, and a baby-warmer that utilizes wax. UCLA is now working on another appropriate technology in the form of a small, inexpensive microscope that uses holograms instead of lenses to image what can’t be seen by the human eye.
Currently in the prototype stage, the microscope fits in the palm of the hand, and reportedly weighs as much as a medium-sized banana
. It is made entirely from off-the-shelf electronics, resulting in a total materials cost of just US$50 to $100 per unit. Although the microscope itself collects raw data, an external laptop, smartphone, or cloud-based system performs all the processing. Power is supplied by two stock AA batteries — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A painting by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens which was stolen a decade ago in Belgium has been recovered in Greece, police say.
Police said the artwork dated from 1618, but did not give the name of the work or provide further details.
Two people, both Greek, have been arrested — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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