|
News Feeds |
|
Boing Boing
|
|
|
|
-
Have fun in a capsized ship at Machine Project in Los Angeles, 9/5/2010
Mark Allen of Machine Project in Los Angeles says: For a period of five weeks Josh Beckman’s Sea Nymph will be host to a whole series of nautical-themed events, performances, lectures, and workshops, as well as an opera by and for dogs. Inside the capsized hull of the ship there will also be a crystal cave. Join us at Machine for the opening on September 5th from 5-10pm, where you can gaze upon the wreckage with accompanying performances by Clay Chaplin, Ambient Force 3000, Ecce, OK Music, Chris Kallmyer, and Colin Woodford. Josh Beckman’s Sea Nymph: A shipwrecked boat inside Machine...
 
-
Historic artifact for a holiday weekend
This is the world's first frozen margarita machine, invented and built by Mariano Martinez in 1971 from parts of a soft-serve ice cream maker. His inspiration: A 7-11 Slurpee. Today, it resides in the collection of the National Museum of American History, where a museum director once called it a, "classic example of the American entrepreneurial spirit." Smithsonian: Top 10 Inventions from the Collections of the National Museum of American History...
-
Sailing the Northwest Passage at night
Polar explorer Børge Ousland (How'd you like to have that as your job title?) is on a sailboat making its way through the Arctic Ocean. This has never been an easy place for boats, and this video gives you a good idea of why. The captain of Ousland's boat explains the hazards of this area a little more in-depth, while simultaneously making an important point—thanks to warming trends, traversing the Northwest Passage isn't has hard as it used to be. It is obvious that the conditions met by the early explorers such as Vitus Bering, Fridtjof Nansen, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and Roald Amundsen no longer exists. We passed through in a few weeks, while our predecessors were forced to overwinter once or even twice. Still, it is not an easy passage for any kind of boat or vessel. There is still ice, although not to the extent there used to be, but plenty to make conditions unpredictable for ships. In addition many of the seas you have to pass are very shallow. In the East Siberian Sea, the shipping lane is located 50 nautical miles off the coast, in order for there to be sufficient depth for bigger ships. Lights, buoys and nautical markings are scarce. You can follow Ousland's progress on his blog. Today, he reached American waters and changed his underpants, and we learn that changing your underpants on special occasions is a fine, old Norwegian tradition. To which I can only say, "Good." Via Climate Progress...
-
A glut of acorns, or a bad case of The Plague?
What would you make of medieval historical records that prominently note the occurrence of large crops of acorns? It's a bit of a weird departure from the kinds of things these records normally care about, i.e. battles and the deaths of famous people. In fact, the people keeping these records didn't even eat acorns, and other, more useful, crops aren't mentioned at all. But, sometimes, an acorn might be more than just an acorn, according to a 2003 paper by classicist David Woods. That's because the Latin word for "little nut" and the word sometimes used to describe the swollen lymph nodes caused by the Capital-P Plague are one and the same. The Latin term glandularius is the root of our word for gland; etymologically, glandula means 'little nuts' because this is what they felt like when palpated. There is at least one other example of a plague record using glandulara as a descriptor. In c. 660 the Burgundian 'Chronicle of Fredegar' describes the 599 plague of Marseilles as a cladis glanduaria. So "a spark of leprosy and an unheard of abundance of nuts", becomes the far more logical, "we've had some issues with leprosy and The Plague this year". Contagions: Plague among the nuts Image via Wikipedia user Twid, under CC...
-
The Venn Diagram of cardigans
The Venn diagram of cardigans. (via Information is Beautiful)...
|
|
News Feeds 