Archive for January, 2005

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The image on the left is not of Niagra Falls, it’s of Pasadena. Downtown Los Angeles has had more than 15 inches of rain since January 1– that’s the city’s usual annual rainfall. One oceanographer at the Jet Propultion Lab says that L.A. has not gotten this strong of a storm since the fall and winter of 1889-1890. The AP has posted video footage of an enormous landslide in La Conchita, Calif. where up to 27 people are missing.

Google has just integrated Usenet posts going back to 1981 into Google Groups. Nice nugets from the past include the first mentions of a Microsoft OS, MTV, and a “fascimile” machine.

Scientists are preparing for the largest collision on earth (or at least in the Ross Sea) when a 1,200-square-mile iceburg named B-15A will collide with the Drygalski Ice Tongue glacier on Antarctica’s Scott Coast sometime before January 15th. It’s a clash of the titans, a radical and uncommon event, says Robert Bindshadler, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The very first webpage on the world wide web looked like this. It’s true, according to Tim Berners-Lee.

In case you’re unsure about the end being nigh, parts of Los Angeles may get up to 24 INCHES of rain this weekend.

At 75, one of America’s most famous architects is drawing up plans for his dream house. Beginning next August on a half-acre lot in Venice, CA, Frank Gehry will be building what might be described less as a house than as a collection of structures. The residence will have two main structures: a main house and a “living pavilion,” and a series simpler structures for guest rooms, gym and garage. Each main structure is topped by a glass roof supported by crisscrossing beams. The beams support a big planter for a single tree that rises from the roof, providing a shady canopy for the loftlike interior, with the view overhead filtered through the branches.

When cassette tapes became popular in the early 80’s the record industry had a publicity campaign to try to prevent people from making copies and mixtapes for their friends. The slogan was “Home Taping is Killing Music - And it’s illegal”. Sounds kind of similiar to what they’ve been saying about filesharing, doesn’t it? So says www.downhillbattle.org, and they’ve a got a t-shirt for you, you file-sharing hooligan.

Men’s Health Magazine named Seattle America’s Fittest City. Their survey also says Seattle has one of the lowest TV-watching rates of any city. They named Houston America’s Fattest City.

Swedish engineering group Rotundus has created a robot that looks like a large, black bowling ball. The robotball can roll up 20mph and is airtight, so it can roll through snow, mud, and water. Nice video of the robot rolling through the snow. (Large file- 34mb)

Contrary to what the RIAA has lead us to believe, the rise of downloading music appears to help music sales, not hurt them. Despite more than 14 million albums legally downloaded in 2004, CD actually grew by 2.3% last year.

Indiana artist Kyle Van Horn has been doing a fun mail art project by sending cameras through the U.S. Postal Service. He tapes a disposible camera to a package with instructions for postal workers who handle it along the way to snap pics. Read more info on how far you can go with sending stuff in the mail.

Artfacts.Net has built a ranking system for artists by evaluating exhibitions held on an international level over the last five years.

With bows and arrows, tribesmen of the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands archipelago attacked a low-flying helicopter bringing food and supplies to the area thought to have been decimated by the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Officials had feared the entire population could have been wiped out, but apprently they haven’t.