The man who survived both atomic bombs

BBC - Man survived both atomic bombings:

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on 6 August 1945 when a US plane dropped the first atomic bomb.

He suffered serious burns and spent a night there before returning to his home city of Nagasaki just before it was bombed on 9 August.

Is this good luck or bad luck?

James Burke - Connections, ep.1 (clip)

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

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Pentagon plans ‘spaceplane’ to reach hotspots fast The American military is planning a “spaceplane” designed to fly a crack squad of heavily armed marines to trouble spots anywhere in the world within four hours.

The History of the India-China Border There is no territorial dispute which has been, and still is, more susceptible to a solution than India’s boundary dispute with China. Each side has its non-negotiable vital interest securely under its control. India has the McMahon Line; China has Aksai Chin. Only a political approach, climaxed by a decision at the highest level, can settle the matter. In a couple of months it will be half a century since the issues were joined. (via)

Debt Collection, Outsourced to India With her flowing, hot-pink Indian suit, jangly silver bangles and perky voice, Bhumika Chaturvedi, 24, doesn't fit the stereotype of a thuggish, heard-it-all-before debt collector. But lately, she has had no problem making American debtors cry. (via)

Biology in Science Fiction: Big Giant Heads Before transhumanism became all the fashion, science fictional depictions of far future often gave our human descendants fantastic mental powers along with giant brains. But there is a serious problem with that idea: human brain size at birth is limited by the size of the opening in the pelvis, and those far future women never seem to have extra-wide hips to go along with their giant heads. (excellent post)

also:
Stone Age man took drugs, say scientists
NASA sends probe to study edge of solar system
Books: Umberto Eco - Turning Back the Clock
Britain to get first glance at author Burroughs' paintings
Showcasing 'Hidden Treasures' from Afghanistan
Eight Reasons Why You Can't Pay Attention (via)
How to Stay Awake at Work (via)
In the computer age, handwriting is a lost art
20 Places Where Bookworms Go to Read and Socialize Online (via)
Idea Generation (visual arts) (via)
Complete Spy Cam Smaller Than an Eyeball
Open Yale Courses: Introduction to Ancient Greek History with Professor Donald Kagan (via)
Photo Gallery: Hackers delight - A history of MIT pranks (via)
List of common misconceptions (via)

viddy:
17 months and 14'000 km away from technology Swiss adventurer Sarah Marquis, who travels by foot around Europe, Australia and America, explains what happen when you reconnect with nature and try to be autonomous, finding water, getting some electrical energy, collecting food were some of the topics discussed during her presentation.
Ivo Niehe Meets Frank Zappa (’91) (narration in Dutch, interview in English)
Presenting the instrument of the moment (beautiful music on the kora)
Brainwave Synthesis With Percussa AudioCubes
D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln
Insane Train Stunt (completely nuts)
Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" (montage)
Order of the Knights of Malta
Boring Books
The Ruts - Babylon's Burning
Run DMC on Reading Rainbow (via)
Do the Hustle

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Top NSA Scribe Takes Us Inside The Shadow Factory No outsider has spent more time tracking the labyrinthine ways of the National Security Agency than James Bamford. But even he gets lost in the maze. Despite countless articles and three books on the U.S. government's super-secret, signals-intelligence service — the latest of which, The Shadow Factory, is out today — Bamford tells Danger Room that he was caught off guard by revelations that the NSA was eavesdropping on Americans. He remains confused about how the country's telecommunications firms were co-opted into the warrantless spying project. And he's still only guessing, he admits, at the breadth and depth of those domestic surveillance efforts. In this exclusive interview, Bamford talks about how hard it is, after all these years, to fit together the pieces at the NSA's "Puzzle Palace" headquarters.

The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White If I could take ten software development books to a desert island, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White would be one of them. (via)

Making A Living From Music For Picture Writing music for picture seems like the ideal career. You get to work in your studio for a living, you can earn good money, and there's so much potential work: action films, travel and nature documentaries, romantic comedies, cartoons, low-budget sci-fi, even breakfast cereal ads. But how do you break into this lucrative world? As we find out in the first part of this new series, the first thing you need is determination... (links to pts. 2-9) (via)

Talk to Elbot I did. For way too long. It was interesting, but I could tell it wasn't human, although I was probably biased because I already knew. It was a decent conversation and was quite funny at times. Elbot can be a bit of a wise-ass. (prev)

also:
New audio tapes of JFK released (via)
World Chess Championship 2008 (wiki) (more)
Searching for Robert Johnson (third photo?)
Project 10^100 is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible (Google is giving out 10 million for the best ideas, deadline Oct. 20)
Invention: Natural colour underwater photographs
Sleep-deprivation is a myth, expert claims
How to Survive a Grizzly Bear Attack
The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (via)

viddy:
Photojournalist on the frontline
Inside The Actor's Studio: Dennis Hopper (1994)
Fernando Botero Interview 1/2 2/2 (prev)
Márta Sebestyén and the Sebő Ensemble: Sándor Weöres poems (lovely)
Hairyman (animated interpretation of an African-American folk tale from the South)
Do you know the first ten elements of the periodic table?
Gijs Gieskes beautiful spinning photoelectronic acid machine (synthporn)
Zombie Robots!

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US Hands Over Seized Antiquities to Iraq Home to what was once ancient Mesopotamia, Iraq has long been a target of looters and thieves intent on stealing the country's treasure trove of antiquities. But a large cache of priceless artifacts has been returned to Iraq's government, thanks to a multi-year initiative by U.S. customs authorities to intercept items being smuggled into the United States.

Crows may be smarter than apes Researchers found evidence that the birds are able to outsmart people's closest relatives when it comes to finding a way to access food without it falling into a trap.

New face of Canada's lumberjacks African immigrants make up the bulk of the region's forestry workers.

The future of photography Photography entered the digital age in the early 90s and the resulting wave of technical innovation has put cameras everywhere, from satellites to cellphones. But bigger changes in the technology are yet to come.

also:
Cray and Microsoft launch $25,000 'deskside supercomputer'
Top 13 Polar Super Vehicles from Antarctic (via)
A good breakdown of The Statute of Limitations
Marco Polo's Travels on Google Maps (via)

viddy:
The venomous Goliath Tarantula is the largest spider in the world. What should you do if one lands on you?
The Prisoner Video Exclusive - Jim Caviezel Says There's Sand in His Cranium
Leo Kottke - Vaseline Machine Gun (it kicks in around halfway through and it's smokin')
Raga Shivranjani on Bansuri (Indian Bamboo Flute) (beautiful)

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Click to translate It happens all the time: you're registering a free e-mail account or making a purchase online, when up pops a wavy, multicolored word. The system asks you to retype the word - and you roll your eyes, squint a little, and transcribe. This little test is one of the most successful techniques for making sure the person trying to log on is really a human, and not a digital "bot" prying into the site. But now, when you type that word, something else may be happening as well: You may be deciphering a word from a decaying old book, helping to transform a historic text into a new digital file.

also:
10 Plundering Politicians
WW I soldier found, still clutching his gun
How to Survive in the Jungle
Unwanted tattoos can be removed by cream injected into skin - without pain or scarring

viddy:
We Need Engineers (cute)
Hubble Operations Control Room (via)
An examination of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange A discussion with movie critic William Everson, writer Anthony Burgess and actor Malcolm McDowell... (via)
Marcel Duchamp and John Cage

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Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the Worlds Stephenson spends his mornings cloistered in the basement, writing longhand in fountain pen and reworking the pages on a Mac version of the Emacs text editor. This intensity cannot be sustained all day—"It's part of my personality that I have to mess with stuff," he says—so after the writing sessions, he likes to get his hands on something real or hack stuff on the computer. (He's particularly adept at Mathematica, the equation-crunching software of choice for mathematicians and engineers.) For six years, he was an adviser to Jeff Bezos' space-flight startup, Blue Origin. He left amicably in 2006. Last year, he went to work for another Northwest tech icon, Nathan Myhrvold, who heads Intellectual Ventures, an invention factory that churns out patents and prototypes of high-risk, high-reward ideas. Stephenson and two partners spend most afternoons across Lake Washington in the IV lab, a low-slung building with an exotic array of tools and machines to make physical manifestations of the fancies that flow from the big thinkers on call there.

Making an Arguement for Misspelling Most teachers expect to correct their students' spelling mistakes once in a while. But Ken Smith has had enough. The senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University in Buckinghamshire, England, sees so many misspellings in papers submitted by first-year students that he says we'd be better off letting the perpetrators off the hook and doing away with certain spelling rules altogether. Disagree. Lern too spel, dumas.

Music and memory: How the songs we heard growing up shape the story of our lives Matching our intuitions about music, researchers have found that music is an important influence on our memories. We associate songs with emotions, people, and places we've experienced in the past.

Tweaking with Sherlock Holmes I just found this fascinating aside on Sherlock Holmes in a 1973 paper on amphetamine psychosis, suggesting that the cocaine-using Holmes displayed the classic repetitive behaviour often seen in frequent users of dopamine-acting stimulants.

The couple who lived in a mall After Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto found their skyline blighted by a colossal mall, they protested it in an unusual way -- they moved in.

Macbeth (1040-57) King of Scotland Macbeth lived during brutal times. He defeated Duncan I in 1040 and reigned for seventeen years. His story differs from Shakespeare's play written nearly six centuries later.

also:
How can I survive a night in the Alaskan wilderness?
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene (via)
List of problems solved by MacGyver (via)
The Olympics with MST3k If I hadn't recorded it, I'd think I'm losing my mind. (don't miss it, MSTies) (via)
Cthuugle The complete HP Lovecraft Search Engine (via)
Musée Patamécanique (via)

viddy:
RIAA Lawsuit Victim Becomes Free Culture Activist
World's Largest Record Collection (it's for sale and quite a bargain at $3 million for 2.5 million records)
Jean-Luc Godard: YouTubed
Monty Python on Public TV in 1975

A Street Cart Named Survivor

Ing-Tse Chen's entry was one of 5 ex equo winners of designboom's Shelter in a Cart, a competition to create convenient and portable shelter, storage and in some cases, conveyance for the homeless. The frugal traveler and urban adventurer may also take note. Many would be great for junk collectors and street musicians, as well.

There are an abundance of workable designs mentioned, some more inviting than others. Browsing through, I felt as if I was house hunting.

via cut 'n' paste
hat tip: NOTCOT

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Beijing Taxis Are Rigged for Eavesdropping As with digital cameras used in cities such as London, Sydney or New York, the stated purpose of the microphones is to protect the driver. But whereas the devices in other countries can only record images, those devices in Beijing taxis can be remotely activated without the driver's knowledge to eavesdrop on passengers, according to drivers and Yaxon Networks Co., a Chinese company that makes some of the systems used in Beijing. The machines can even remotely shut off engines. The whole world is rigged for eavesdropping. (via)

They Will Survive UNLESS John D. McCann, the managing director of Survival Resources, based in Hyde Park, N.Y., is wearing a suit for some sort of business meeting, he always carries in his pants pocket an Altoids tin. There are no mints inside it. Instead, he painstakingly packs the tin — which he explains can double as a mini-frying pan if you’re ever marooned in the wilderness — with a remarkable assortment of worst-case scenario supplies. Survival is good. (via)

Credit card thieves ran a polite, professional help desk Organized criminals often seen to be a step or two ahead of the competition. Many of us would settle for a help desk that was helpful.

also:
The Most Important Generation in History is the One Now Alive
blog all dog-eared pages: understanding media (McLuhan)
Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time (like the list, not the order) (via)
Gear Porn: Chemical Brothers Daft Punk
Cleveland Museum of Art via Flickr
Bartleby, the Scrivener.pdf (via)
The temple of tame tigers (photo essay) (patient, maybe)
A PhD in Ufology (via)
Frankie Knuckles Interview
Michel Gondry writes a comic book (via)

viddy:
An Interview With Jim Coudal (via)
The Prisoner: Caviezel and McKellen's First Reading
Smart Birds use cars to open their food (via)
Silent Shadow of the Bat-Man
Lessig on i-9/11
Powers of Ten A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero.
Ladislas Starewicz - The Mascot, 1933 (creepy stop-motion animation) (more Starewicz)
Late Night TV in Japan: Spanking Class (this guy takes his spanking seriously)
MST3K 624: Samson Vs The Vampire Women (one of the best) (via)

Greetings San Martín De Sarroca!

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Planning smart for your food supply Why store? The world we live in today is fast moving, ever changing and full of surprises. On top of this, there has never been a time when the average family has had less food in their homes than now. A hundred years ago, people generally didn’t go to the store very often. As a rule, America was much more agrarian than it is today, with people growing the majority of the plants and animals they ate. Today, many of us would be at our rope’s end after just a couple of days of not being able to go to the grocery store. (via)

Balloons carried gun away in Red Lobster executive's 'CSI'-like suicide "This was apparently an elaborate attempt to make it look like he was murdered..." (via)

Man claims to know source of 'Phoenix Lights' UFO sighting Dr. James R. Bartzen said he has indisputable proof that the so-called "Phoenix Lights" were a product of secret man-made technology being shielded from the public. (via)

Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren't Allowed to See on Google Maps Most of these are understandable, but William Hurt's home in Paris? What's going on over there? Maybe he complained like the Borings. (via)

also:
Umberto Eco interview (via)
China Miéville interview (via)
Restoring Renaissance Frescoes (via)
Disturbing bound feet photos (via)

factoid: After studying it for 47 days, the New York Museum of Modern Art discovered that the Matisse painting Le Bateau was hanging upside down. (link) (via)

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A great article by Michael Lewis on baseball in Cuba and a sports agent jailed for smuggling athletes (via); Friends turn mental mountains into molehills; Save your own life (via); and how we read online (via).

Lagniappe: Daniel Schorr on Ressurection City, 40 years later; Prison Weapon Improvisation; Take the time to watch this video and read this weblog. In our era of cynicism, irony, rejection, marginalization and isolation, we all need to stop, now and again, and ask, "Who are we and what the hell are we doing?"

Freefall from 30,000 feet

The Free Fall Research Page:

If you want to know what you would see if you fell from 30,000 feet then have a look at the film 'G' by filmmaker Rolf Gibbs. He intentionally dropped a camera from an airplane. It was weighted to fall lens down and protected so that the video would survive the inevitable collision with the earth.

There are a number of fascinating and scary stories on that page and what could be useful information, such as: Unplanned Freefall? Some Survival Tips.

What the above video brought home to me was just how long you would have to think about it while you were falling, assuming you remained conscious. I was also struck by how fast the last bit seemed to happen compared to the rest. That last thousand feet or so appears to close rather quickly.

It brings to mind what this guy did the other day, which was since ruled a suicide. Now, it seems he had a good long while, (at least a minute or so, his fall was from 10,000 feet) to realize that maybe it wasn't such a good idea.

via TYWKIWDBI

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There are five top tourist spots Americans can't visit; but if you're going to visit a big city, don't forget your Subway Emergency Kit; (via) there's a new virus that extorts by encrypting your files; (via) and VoIP is the new medium for steganography. (via)

Lagniappe: a Story with no Words; scrap paper fiction; The Surrealist Compliment Generator (via)

Secret underground warehouse in Tokyo

From Pink Tentacle:

In this video, a camera crew follows a city official to a trapdoor hidden in a Tokyo sidewalk, which opens to a narrow stairway leading to a giant underground warehouse stocked with emergency supplies.

Located 20 meters (65 ft) underground, the 1,480 square meter (16,000 sq ft) space contains emergency supplies to be distributed to the public in the event of a major earthquake. Items include 5,000 blankets, 8,000 rugs, 4,000 candles, 300 cooking pots, 200 t-shirts, and emergency medical supplies. A conveyor belt system is installed to help transport the supplies up to street level.

Do you think we have something like this in the U.S.? Somehow, I doubt it. (read: Katrina)

At least, we have lots of Wal-Marts to loot.

Food Riot!

AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

From MSNBC/AP:

If you’re seeing your grocery bill go up, you’re not alone.

From subsistence farmers eating rice in Ecuador to gourmets feasting on escargot in France, consumers worldwide face rising food prices in what analysts call a perfect storm of conditions. Freak weather is a factor. But so are dramatic changes in the global economy, including higher oil prices, lower food reserves and growing consumer demand in China and India.

The world’s poorest nations still harbor the greatest hunger risk. Clashes over bread in Egypt killed at least two people last week, and similar food riots broke out in Burkina Faso and Cameroon this month.

Great. What's next, Soylent Green?

I'm really trying to be optimistic. I need to go watch a few TED videos to cheer me up.

Call me an eye-bright moonbat, but shouldn't we have the 'feeding humanity' thing down by now? We eradicated smallpox, what's the hold-up?

Another thing, anyone ever notice that when prices go up, they rarely come back down?

Foreign Policy chimes in.

'Lunar Ark' Proposed

via Lifeboat Foundation Blog:

IF civilisation is wiped out on Earth, salvation may come from space. Plans are being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon containing the essentials of life and civilisation, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war.

Construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.

A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. If no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built.

full articles in Times Online and National Geographic

Not a bad idea, overall, but why not put a few right here on Earth? Finding one of the proposed 4,000 receivers could be just as problematic as finding an 'ark' in the event of some global catastrophe.

As a form of back-up to an Earth-based system, this would be feasible, even desirable, but to put one of these facilities only on the moon seems a bit inexpedient.

If the expense of building 4,000 'arks' is an issue, why not put one on each continent and on the moon? Then you would have enough redundancy to hedge your bets. Hardened data repositories shouldn't be too expensive.

It seems that after an asteroid strike or global nuclear war, receipt of this information via radio would be difficult, if not impossible for some time. Having some 'hard copy' directions to these facilities might also be desirable.

If we're going to do this, then we have to go all the way. Relying solely on one moon-based transmitter is too risky. If one of many possible things were to go wrong, it'll be a waste of time and money, as well as being a major disadvantage for the survivors.

The idea of preserving the knowledge of our civilization is vital and important. It is also one that requires careful consideration. We need to think it through.