2013-05-18
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A London taxi and a micro-scale Battersea Power Station (complete with flying pig) made from Lego, from Warren Elsmore’s book Brick City (via buzzfeed).
2013-05-17
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Paper Bits: Tumblr Backup python script (GitHub)
Mainly reblogged for the benefit of iamdanw.
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Not to be confused with: a social gathering of invited guests, typically involving eating, drinking, and entertainment: an engagement party. ”
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Those dotted lines at the ends of the yellow, blue, and orange lines: how long have they been there? How long will they persist there? When does a hope turn into a lie?
I think they’ve been there since the map redesign around 2010. Given the label says “approved or planned”, there’s no commitment that they’ll ever be built.
That said, it turns out the Warm Springs extension is meant to be in revenue service in “Fall 2015” with a further extension to Berryessa under construction. Meanwhile, the East Contra Costa line (which will run diesels rather than electrics) is under construction, leaving only the AIRBart, Livermore, and San Jose extensions as unapproved
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Space Situational Awareness (SSA) (by AstriumTV, via stml)
A list of the text captions from the video:
- Debris must be monitored
- Complex systems needed
- Surveillance, Tracking & Analysis
- Conjunction Prediction
- Trajectories Prediction
- Imaging requires data policy
- Space Weather Surveillance
- Solar Eruption Impact
- Ariane Launch
- Adaptation: safe de-orbitation
- Active Debris Removal
- For a safer space.
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This is a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, then Mrs James Dougherty, June 26, 1945, working in the Radioplane Munitions Factory, a plant at the Van Nuys Airport in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
The factory was owned, and the radioplane invented, by Reginald Denny, movie actor (he appeared in Anna Karenina (1935) and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) among others) and Royal Flying Corps veteran.
This photograph of Monroe, one of a series by Army photographer David Conover, which led to her first screen test, shows her working at the Radioplane factory, assembling an OQ-2 Radioplane, “the first mass-produced UAV or drone in the United States.”
blink (see also)
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BBC News - Week in pictures: 11-17 May 2013:
The US Navy launched an unmanned drone from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier for the first time. The Navy hopes the experimental aircraft will pave the way for a new line of drones that could carry out bombing raids from a carrier, heralding a new era of unmanned naval aircraft.
2013-05-16
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This is a pretty good example of the flip-flop: the original image (“posted 10 months ago with 18,237 notes”) gets printed out, annotated (apparently by a twelve year old) and then gets a new lease of life on Tumblr. (via stml)
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At risk of becoming a MapBox fan blog:
Here’s a nice quote from the article:
The team uses some techniques to ensure that they’re capturing peak growth, which is May/June in the northern hemisphere and December/January in the southern. In addition, because the process favors darker pixels, the first output can seem very dim and underexposed, says Loyd.
“It’s a completely natural product,” says Loyd. “Every pixel is a real pixel captured by an camera in the sky. But it’s also completely synthetic.” The goal for the map is to capture roughly what the naked eye can see from space, but for an idealized cloudless planet trapped in eternal summer.
2013-05-15
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jomc:
i don’t want to pretend to be guillotined but Oculus for Google Street View would be nice
I think they just said they’re doing that in the lobby of the Google I/O conference tomorrow.
