James Burke - Connections, ep.1 (clip)

See what your answers would be to these questions. I didn't like the answers I had.

The fires under Centralia, PA

In 1962, attempts to clean up a landfill by burning it set fire to the coal mine underneath Centralia, Pennsylvania. The fire has been going strong ever since. Most of Centralia is in ruins and its population has dropped from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to less than 10 in 2007. As the area is loaded with rich deposits of coal, the spreading underground fire is expected to threaten the neighboring town of Ashland in the near future. There are no immediate plans to extinguish the fire, which is consuming an eight-mile seam containing enough coal to fuel it for upwards of 250 years.

So you want to visit Centralia PA ...

Centralia Pennsylvania (many photos)
Centralia, Pennsylvania wiki

hat tip to wtf_nature

Allan McCollum. The Dog From Pompei, 1991.

Allan McCollum:

Cast glass-fiber- reinforced Hydrocal. Replicas made from a mold taken from the famous original "chained dog" plaster cast of a dog smothered in ash from the explosion of Mount Vesuvius, in ancient Pompeii, in 79 A.D. Produced in collaboration with the Museo Vesuviano and the Pompei Tourist Board, Pompei, Italy, and Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy.

via hyde or die

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Lawrence Lessig - In Defense of Piracy Digital technology has made it easy to create new works from existing art, but copyright law has yet to catch up.... Copyright law must be changed. Here are just five changes that would make a world of difference... (via)

3-D Printing on Demand Shapeways.com is beta testing a new service allowing people to print three dimensional models. Customers can upload designs or use a creation tool hosted at the Shapeways website then order a printed model of their designs for less than $3 per square centimeter. The printed items are shipped to the customer in ten days or less, bringing 3-D printing to consumers and not just companies large enough to afford their own printers. It will be very interesting to see what happens when affordable 3-D printing becomes commonplace. (via)

also:
Extreme IT: Hurricanes, high winds and heavy seas in the Gulf of Mexico
Dalkey Archive Press Author Interviews (via)
Mia_Farrow's photostream (via)

viddy:
Banjo used in brain surgery (don't miss it) Bluegrass musician Eddie Adcock underwent brain surgery to treat a career-threatening hand tremor. He played his banjo throughout to help doctors determine the success of the procedure. The squeamish can make it through in good shape. (via)
Expedition 18 / Soyuz Rocket Launch - October 12th, 2008
National Geographic Music
Hunter, Ralph and 3 bottles of whiskey
Reductive Waves, a meditation on the visualization of sound, via contrasting natural and human-crafted environments.

Toxic Spill

Pictures of the Week:

A fireman works at the scene of a chemical spill on China's Hangzhou-Ningbo highway.
He Jiangyong / Color China Photos / Zuma

This is all I am going to say about the financial crisis

Something a lot of people on all sides can agree upon.

Breaking news: Adding Sweeteners, Senate Passes Bailout Plan

Just so you know, it has always been my policy to avoid hot-button political and social issues. There is enough of that material out there. Occasionally, an irresistible item will pop up, but I'd like this weblog to be an oasis, a break from the troubles foisted upon us by the agenda-driven media and a blogosphere plagued with partisan outbursts, slurs, attacks and bickering.

I have opinions and convictions and I keep an eye on things, but to be honest, I'm so burned out on it all. Therefore, this is my recourse. A productive and edifying one that I hope many of all persuasions and backgrounds can enjoy. I know these issues are important and vital, but I hope you all can pick up the slack for me while I just do my thing.

The world has never been short on emergency.

Thanks, Dad

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Lift could take passengers straight into space Japanese scientists are attempting to build a lift (elevator for us Americans) that will take passengers 62,000 miles into space.

MI6 agent's cover slips during BBC interview In his dangerous job the MI6 spy's identity needs to remain a closely guarded secret. So you can imagine his surprise when, during an interview with the national broadcaster, his carefully chosen disguise of a fake moustache failed him spectacularly.

Blogging about blogging What do young people think about blogging? Let’s have a look; here’s what one 18 year old has to say. This one happens to be my son, but I don’t think that prevents him from representing his generation: ‘People no longer are just able to blog, but blogging is increasingly becoming accepted as a legitimate medium of information; albeit quite different to others. At the cost of the credibility associated with major news services and other more traditional ways of getting our information, a whole new world is opened up- of personal opinion, a perspective into the lives and experiences of others and original creativity. When subjective experience and opinion is sought over objective fact, blogging becomes a medium very difficult to beat.’ Blogging is passé? I suspect that many of the old-timers have become a bit tired and unimaginative-- it's just getting started. (Let's encourage young bloggers instead of greeting them with statements like "Blogging is dead")

Ike Really Tore Up Louisville You will find a collection of pictures I took after the storm here. Unfortunately, some streets still look like this a week later. Though we got electricity back about 12 hours after it went out, most houses and businesses around us are still dark. LG&E, our local utility, has been saying it may be another week before all power is restored.

Au revoir to cool hand Luc Besson Luc Besson is in denial. The 49-year-old French film potentate and master of pop cinema (see Nikita, Léon, The Big Blue) has made yet another peerless action classic in the Paris-set kidnap drama Taken. Written and produced by Besson, it stars Liam Neeson as a semi-retired CIA hatchet man who will stop at nothing to bring his missing daughter back home, and send her captors to hell. It is directed by Besson’s former Steadicam operator Pierre Morel, but with its luxurious mix of slick style, emotional melodrama and bone-crunching thrills, it’s got Besson’s fingerprints all over it.

Art and Science, Virtual and Real, Under One Big Roof On a hillside overlooking this college town on the banks of the Hudson, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has erected a technological pleasure dome for the mind and senses. Eight years and $200 million in the making, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, or Empac, resembles an enormous 1950s-era television set. But inside are not old-fashioned vacuum tubes but the stuff of 21st-century high-tech dreams dedicated to the marriage of art and science as it has never been done before, its creators say — 220,000 square feet of theaters, studios and work spaces hooked to supercomputers.

TinEye is an image search engine. Search the web for images using an image. Finally! It's still getting its legs-- a lot of images are still not indexed and it's difficult to find an original source, but this is certainly a start. (via)

A sheen of oil is seen...

Photograph: Reuters

24 hours in pictures:

High Island, US: A sheen of oil is seen around a pump jack surrounded by floodwater after the passing of hurricane Ike.

Nuclear Emergency Response

Livermore’s nuclear emergency response capabilities were tested in Operation Morning Light in 1978.

from: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories Science & Technology Review

Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST)
How Nuclear Detectives Work

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Tinker, tailor, soldier, defector — John le Carré: I nearly left the West John le Carré, the espionage writer, has revealed that he was tempted to defect to the Soviet Union during the cold war.... Le Carré’s remarks are particularly intriguing because his own career as a secret agent was in effect destroyed by the treachery of Kim Philby, the double agent.

Briton was safe-cracker for Osama Bin Laden and Idi Amin He described the Al-Q'aeda head as "friendly" and the Ugandan dictator as "fun". I heard a rumor that when Osama was training with the CIA in the U.S. during the Russia-Afghanistan War that he was known as Tim Osmond. When the first "Wanted" photos were released in the late 1990s, some CIA officers were reported to have said, "Hey, that's Tim!"

Stephen Hawking to unveil strange new way to tell the time Prof Stephen Hawking is to unveil a remarkable £1 million clock with no hands that pays tribute to the world's greatest clockmaker.

Hurricane Ike's Sprawl a Meteorological Mystery Considering the vastly different dangers posed by these storms, it's natural to wonder just why some storms get so big while others stay small, despite having the same hurricane-force winds. Why, in other words, is Ike such a titan? also: History's Worst Storm Surges

also:
Vladmaster - Handmade viewmaster reels (via)
How to Draw Anything in One Step
How To Master Photoshop In Just One Week (via)

viddy:
The Peanut Vendor - Len Lye 1933 (via)
Kunstbar (careful what you drink at the Artbar)
Richie Hawtin 2008 DJ Setup
Bebe Barron on Anaïs Nin
The Natural History of the Chicken part 1/6 (via)

Sinkhole

image from stevekluge.com

via ***/*

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Gustav holdouts' tales give evacuees pause After curfew on Wednesday night, two National Guard soldiers traded their rifles for a guitar and some drumsticks....The night after Gustav came ashore, small squads of storm holdouts and National Guardsmen played an elaborate game of curfew cat-and-mouse. But they finally gave up as everyone ended up at the Maple Leaf lounge for a late-night gab session. (via)

The secret code of diaries A sampling of the more daunting diary codes, some taking many years to crack. (via) also: A high school teacher in Salinas, Donald G. Harden, and his wife cracked a code of a man threatening mass murder, a code which the Navy and FBI experts have failed to break in a week of effort. (read more and see the cracked message)

Elderly are more open-minded than young people People become confused more easily as they age because they succumb to distractions and not due to their brains slowing down, a new study shows.

Finding L.A.'s hidden homeless To most people, it's just trash: A scrap of dirty blanket visible under some stairs. A glimpse of blue tarp peeking out of a bush. A bag of recyclables parked discreetly behind a concrete column. But Courtney Kanagi, an outreach worker, has learned how to decode bits of urban detritus that most people ignore. She knows what these signs mean: the crawl space beneath the stairs was someone's home. When you're out there, you're acutely aware of many things that others miss completely, never noticing. (via)

Let's hear it for the autodidact Sean Connery's memoir is surprising, not least because the actor emerges from its thoughtful pages as self-taught.

also:
MIT-led Team Zooms in on Massive Black Hole at Center of Milky Way
Bare-breasted virgins compete for Swaziland king (photos!)
How to Create the Perfect Fake Identity
Archaeological Excavation Techniques
ClichéWatch: i.love.the.smell.of.*.in.the.morning (funny) (via)

viddy:
USCG Fly Over of New Orleans Post Gustav
Terry Gilliam on the Work of Roland Emmerich
Marshall McLuhan on the Today show (don't miss it)

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Strapped for cash, some in New Orleans stay and hope Several New Orleans residents say they can't afford to leave-- for various reasons.

Serial killer on the loose in California, police say Los Angeles, California, police detectives are looking for a serial killer who they believe killed at least 11 people, many of them prostitutes, over a 23-year period. Just one? I always thought that it was policy not to talk about serial killers with the press. There must be some specific reason why their breaking protocol in this case.

Roald Dahl's seductive work as a British spy Old Roald seems to be getting around quite a bit these days... just like he did when he was alive, it seems.

also:
The son of John le Carré on ninjas, mimes and his first novel
Extreme Macro Photography on a budget (via)
Photo Tampering Throughout History (via)
iPosture Just over one inch in diameter, the iPosture automatically senses when the body slouches, and it alerts the user with brief vibrations to correct it. They also have the 'extreme tase' setting for hardcore slouchers. (via)

viddy:
The first few minutes of The Conversation (via)
The Moog Foundation YouTube page (via)

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Update: Best Western refutes story claiming 8 million customer records were breached Hotel chain confirms intrusion, but says that only 13 records at a single hotel were exposed.

Giant Galaxy Cluster Seen in Early Universe The discovery of this far-off group, estimated to contain as much mass as a thousand large galaxies, offers further proof of the existence of the enigmatic force called dark energy.

Daphne Oram – Oramics (Drawing sound) A lesser known but important contributor in the field of ‘drawn’ electronic music is British composer Daphne Oram who worked at the legendary BBC Radiophonic workshop in the late 1950’s. Oram dreamed of making a machine that directly translated graphical notation into sound and this dream came to fruitful realisation with her technique of Oramics. (prev)

also:
Surviving the Biggest Wave Ever (via)
Volcanos in Our Times (photo essay)
Bigelow Aerospace Advances Work on Full-scale Space Habitat
How the Roaring Twenties Changed the World
10 Top Spectacular Festivals in the World
Greg Egan interview

viddy:
Luc de Heusch - Tracking the Pale Fox (mythology and rituals of the Dogon)
Experts' memory: Not as expert as they think (take the test)
Thomas Kuntz Incredible Decapitation Automaton (creepy)
Outrageous My Little Pony collection

Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person? — François de la Rochefoucauld (1613-80) (via)

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Study: Large Earthquake Could Strike New York City The new study revealed a significant previously unknown active seismic zone running at least 25 miles from Stamford, Conn., to the Hudson Valley town of Peekskill, N.Y., where it passes less than a mile north of the Indian Point nuclear power plant. Several small quakes are clustered along its length. It is "probably capable of producing at least a magnitude-6 quake," the researchers said in a statement.

Could Robot Aliens Exist? The existence of a race of sentient alien robots might be not just possible, but inevitable. In fact, we might be living in a "postbiological universe" right now, in which intelligent extraterrestrials somewhere have exchanged organic brains for artificial ones.

What conductors are doing when they wave their hands around -- and what we get out of it Waving the hands, as conductors frequently do, seemed largely for show. The conductor appeared to me to be more dancing along with the music than actually leading the musicians in any meaningful way. It wasn't until I married an amateur musician that I actually learned that the conductor could have an important influence on the way an orchestra sounds.

also:
Interview: Brian Eno (via)
20 best: ambient records ever made (via)
Thought Control In Economics (via)
The Enigmatic Notebook Drawings of Nicolas Flamel (via)

viddy:
Buckminster Fuller on "Death"
Olivier Messiaen talks about birds
Robert Rauschenberg - Erased De Kooning
Tom Jones with Janis Joplin (via)
Jedi Knights - May the Funk Be With You

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A quarter of planet to be online by 2012, and able to understand each's other's language

New Chernobyl Video Report

When Spies Don’t Play Well With Their Allies As they complete their training at “The Farm,” the Central Intelligence Agency’s base in the Virginia tidewater, young agency recruits are taught a lesson they are expected never to forget during assignments overseas: there is no such thing as a friendly intelligence service.... But most C.I.A. veterans agree that no relationship between the spy agency and a foreign intelligence service is quite as byzantine, or as maddening, as that between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I. (via)

Britain on alert for deadly new knife with exploding tip that freezes victims' organs It's for real, and I'd wager that sales are exploding. (via)

Lost in Space There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going. (via)

5 Ways Travelers Can Avoid Being Caught With Drugs Many foreigners arrested on drug charges believe they were wrongly convicted. Learn how you can avoid being a victim.

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Did Bush really say this? I have my doubts. I'd wager whatever was said was probably blown out of proportion, though that's just my intuition speaking. More dumb than evil. This part is priceless, though: Mr Bush also faced criticism at the summit after Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, was described in the White House press pack given to journalists as one of the "most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for government corruption and vice". The White House apologised for what it called "sloppy work" and said an official had simply lifted the characterisation from the internet without reading it. Haw! (thx)

How your GPS can dob you in Years back, I remember reading that the FBI used OnStar to eavesdrop. The courts told them to stop, but I seriously doubt that they did. (Remember) I've heard through the law enforcement grapevine that they bug whether they can get a warrant or not. You just have to use your own gear. You get your info then back-engineer your case, clean up your evidence and make it look proper for the prosecutors and the courts. (via)

Maps out the hoo-haa Impressive. (via)

houseplantpicturestudio.com was fun. Click on the spines to see the pictures. I recommend A very pleasant afternoon at the home of Phyllis Diller.

Automatic GEOFON Global Seismic Monitor Map marking all the earthquakes on the planet over the last two weeks. The blinking one is the most recent, usually within hours. Lots of activity on this planet.

About all Jeff wanted to know actually pretty consistently - Jeff Bridges the beginning of the start of shooting of every scene - he’d walk up to one or the other of us and ask if we figured whether or not The Dude burned one of the way over…. This Distracted Globe - The Big Lebowski (1998) (via)

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Photo Essay: Revisiting the Most Controversial Olympics of All (1936); Are the Laws of Nature the Same Everywhere in the Universe? (via); Top 10 Most Disgusting Parasites (nasty); Brooklyn Record Riot (“Target is now selling turntables”); Hot Chicks With Douchebags (the blog) (via)

Lagniappe: Daniel Schorr: Why Are There so Many Natural Disasters?

Earthquake-damaged cars hit China's streets

Telegraph.co.uk:

On the principle that anything that can be salvaged from the rubble is better than nothing, residents of the earthquake zone have taken to trying to restart cars and vans apparently damaged beyond repair.

Hey, life goes on.

via Nothing To Do With Arbroath

Readings 5-29-08

I've been a bit lax on the readings lately. The weather has been unseasonably cool here in Savannah and it's just too beautiful to miss. It is going to be hot as hell real soon, so I'll have plenty of time and inclination to stay in and blog.

Nonetheless, some worthy items culled over the last few days:

A native Burmese account of the cyclone aftermath

I'm going to put it plainly, redneck stylee: The Burmese government are a bunch of pricks.

hat tip
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92.3% of all email in first quarter 2008 was spam

Great googly-moogly, that's a lot of spam!

I think there's something wrong with these people. Not just that they're greedy knuckleheads, but something deeper, more psychological. Perhaps a similar compulsion that motivates bloggers to spend endless hours on the internet seeking the holy grail of post material grips these enigmatic and insanely driven people; their muscles atrophying in a stew of caffeine and nicotine while the sun rises and sets repeatedly beyond brick walls they rarely pass. They need to be located, isolated, quarantined and probed. After that, they need to be taken out in public so that everyone that owns a computer can line up and punch them in the stomach.

via Advertising Is Good For You
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Forget the naysayers - America remains an inspiration to us all

Rumors of the demise of the U.S. have been greatly exaggerated.

The US economy is certainly in transition, made vastly more difficult by the spreading impact of the credit crunch. But the underlying story is much stronger. The country is developing the prototypical knowledge economy of the 21st century, an economy in which the division between manufacturing and services becomes less clear cut, in a world where the deployment of knowledge, brain power and problem-solving are the sources of wealth generation.

What counts is the strength of a country's universities, research base, commitment to information and communications technology and new technologies along with a network of institutions that supports new enterprise. Here, the US is so far ahead of the rest of the world it is painful.

The figures make your head spin. Of the world's top 100 universities, 37 are American. The country spends more proportionately on research and design, universities and software than any other, including Sweden and Japan. Of the world's top 50 companies ranked by R&D, 20 are American. Fifty-two of the world's top 100 brands are American. Half the world's new patents are registered by American companies.

As I've said before, it's about time the rest of the world caught up.

Even from a more pessimistic view, Bruce Sterling put it plainly:

There's a swarm of guys in there insisting that America is toast. Listen, fellas, be reasonable -- the USA might collapse as abjectly as the USSR did, but the continent and the population would still be there. I mean, Russia exists, right? It's not like North America is going to vaporize just because the world's gone "post-American."

Personally, I'd be happy to see the world get over whatever preoccupations with the USA and find their own identity in this new future of ours. Besides, nationalism is a zombie only kept going because it's more convenient than dismantling it. De facto or contrived, it's a wide open global playing field we find ourselves on. Time to act accordingly.

Europe found a way to end three thousand plus years of perpetual warfare and disruption. Asia found a way to bootstrap vital and vibrant economies, in the process lifting a billion plus people out of poverty. Maybe we could learn something from them, just as they might learn that the USA is not doomed to go the way of the Romans because of a few defaulted mortgages and expensive oil.
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How To Be A Renaissance Man

Good, solid, manly advice, but you gals out there can benefit, too. We need Renaissance women.
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Underground gallery

The city’s most intriguing art gallery lives under Las Vegas Boulevard. It’s dark and it’s dirty. There are no formal openings. No curator. No reviews. No selling of the works.

The artists slip in and out. They do their work, then disappear from the underground concrete corridors. Runoff water pours from pipes into these toxic storm drains. Debris is everywhere. You’re glad you have thick shoes as you walk through water and muck. Sun shines through a few of the grates, lighting some areas, but most of what you see is what your flashlight catches.

Out of options in the above-ground world, these graffiti artists do their thing in the underground tunnels of Las Vegas.

Spray paint graffiti art is not an easy thing to pull off. I guarantee that if any of us with no experience or talent tried, it would look like crap.

Excellent article with video and images.

via crazymonk.org
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ends