Archive for July, 2004

Two admission ticket sellers have been arrested for stealing over $800,000 from the Whitney Museum.

Designers at San Jose-based design firm Whipsaw have come up with a Digital Dirt Bike, a novel way to distribute vast amounts of medical, agricultural, and educational information to villages too remote to have a reliable access to the internet, or electricity for that matter. A local technician drives from village to village, delivering treatments for common plant, animal and human diseases; weather forecasts; supplemental school lessons; and vocational information for farming and industry. The unit contains a notebook computer, printer, camera, satellite phone, and a sunshade. The double lid has two solar panels, used to power and recharge the equipment.

So a guy walks into a bar in Alabama with a vibrator in one hand and a machine gun in the other… Here’s the punchline: Sex toys are still illegal in Alabama, while it is fully legal to have an AK-47. And yet alcohol is illegal in 38% of the state. And you thought California was crazy.

A story in the Capitol Hill Blue says the President’s on drugs. The article says the President’s physician, Col. Richard J. Tubb, is prescribing anti-depressants. Although even if this were true, he’d join Kennedy, Nixon and G.H.W. Bush as druggies.

Photographers Monique and Chris Fallows have been photographing huge sharks as they leap from the water to chomp their prey off Seal Island, South Africa. Along with great photos of flying sharks, they offer this advice to a swimmer pursued by sharks: the best way to change their behavior is to drop your legs so that you are in a vertical orientation, face them, and if need be, slowly swim towards them. No predator, terrestrial or marine, is used to having its prey swim or walk towards it. Yeah right, that’s what I’m gonna do. Check out their flying sharks gallery 1 and gallery 2.

For the third time in six weeks chunks of concrete are falling from the upper deck of Wrigley Field. It was a piece of concrete the size of my husband’s hand that could have killed us. I couldn’t really concentrate on the game. I kept looking up and thinking, ‘Is something else going to fall?,’ said Cubs fan Elvira Stano.

The 21st century belongs to a constellation of China and India and my deepest feeling is that Britain shows no sign of understanding this, says the departing director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philip Dodd, in an interesting article in the Financial Times. He argues that, in at least art and culture, China is like is like America in the 19th century - although the Chinese may not like that analogy. Mainland China is inventing a new middle class which is becoming encultured in a new kind of way. There is an extraordinary experiment on the level of education, architecture, museums and independent spaces.

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority is considering selling naming rights to New York transit stops.

If you filled an Olympic-size swimming pool with ink from HP or Lexmark inkjet cartridges, it would cost $5.9 billion, says Gerald Chamales, chairman of a recycled printer ink cartridge company. Apparently, refilling your ink cartridges is ramping up to be a big business.

New York street artist Swoon shows off her life-sized lino-cut prints she’s plastered all over the walls of New York City in a New York Times multimedia piece.

Toy Tent has a lot of great vintage rayguns and robots for sale. But they aren’t cheap. The Radar Robot on the left is $3,500.

Researchers at the University of Houston have developed smaller, more efficient thin film solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). A cell about the size of four sugar cubes would produce enough energy to power a laptop and one the size of 2 beer cans could power a house. One limitation still to be worked out before we start popping these SOFCs in our phones and laptops is that they have an operating temperature of 500 degrees Celsius.

Studded with stars, freaks and hipsters, the opening of a new Target store in Brooklyn, was the definition of they’d go to the opening of an envelope, reports Gawker.

It’s a very busy day, lots of people running around.

Making the most of discarded cardboard boxes. It’s the Box Doodle Project.

Duke freshmen will get free iPods this fall.

A mysterious animal is grazing the backyards of Baltimore. The neighbors call it a hyote, a combination of a hyena and a coyote.

Make speakers for your iPod with nothing but two Altoid tins, a couple of playing cards and some glue.

When the Olympics begin in Athens August 13th they’ll be 10,000 athletes in town with one thing on their minds… or maybe two things. The Olympics are a wonderland of hormones, glycogen and dance mixes, says an article in the Scotsman by Paul Hochman. It’s a two-week-long private party for thousands of hard-bodies, remembers one American swimmer who won gold twice in Barcelona. In Sydney the organisers