Abductedcow.com is a website written by Wade Treichler for no particular reason. Topics covered include politics, geekery, artsy-bits, hippy rage, zombie plans, bicycles and whatever else I feel like at the time. You can also follow me on twitter, or check out my web solutions company Spoke Creative Group. For the love of god, please report all spelling errors.
Courtesy of Mr. Pinero..
I can’t even begin to imagine how many takes this took.
Similar to my assertion that The Two Towers is a great holiday movie, I’ve always thought Empire Strikes Back is a fantastic Christmas flick. This guy has taken it a few steps further and combined another few of my favorite things, photography and legos, with my favorite holiday classic. He captures these scenes by submerging the whole scene in a water tank and sifting in plaster of Paris.
Amazing shots, Cool technique, and the hilarious captions are awesome.
“There’s a certain amount of intelligence work involved in kidnapping that Facebook makes easier,” said Roberto Briceno Leon, director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence. “Before, what did kidnappers do? They could spend months checking accounts, studying a person’s daily movements in order to be able to plan the kidnapping. That implies an investment. Now, Facebook makes that easier.”
Honestly, it’s surprising this hasn’t been happening more. Internet narcissism has it’s price. Not that it’s really holding anybody back, myself included.
Nov 10, 2009 | geek-ness 2 Comments
A boarding-school library in New England has completely eliminated the old stacks and gone digital.
“If I look outside my window,” Tracy says, “and I see my student reading Chaucer under a tree, it is utterly immaterial to me whether they’re doing so by way of a Kindle or by way of a paperback.”
This is interesting to me, not because it’s cutting edge – it actually seems well past due for libraries to make the jump to an electronic format – but because the of the backlash they seem to be getting. Who wouldn’t rather have a giant beautiful old book to carry around? But we’ve entered the century with 6 billion confederates riding around on this tiny rock of ours, and the only way were going to make it to the next century is by educating the hell out of everybody.
That means we need to be pushing out all our information to as many people, as possibly as quickly as possibly. The internet provides that, but libraries need to be the linchpin of the strategy – to promote the database if knowledge, the new methods of research – to teach the next generation the all important task of how to educate themselves. But the format, the easiest cheapest way to disseminate knowledge to the remotest poorest parts of the world is electrically. Monks used to hand-write books and the global knowledge-base was proportionately small. Then came Gutenberg. Now comes something else.
Just pure, geeky awesomeness.
In a major test of the concept, robotic machines powered by laser beams will try to climb a cable suspended from a helicopter hovering more than a half-mile (one kilometer) high.
I’m guessing jetpacks won’t be ready to go any time soon, but if I could ride on a laser-powered space elevator before I go, I’d be feeling pretty good about things.
I (believe it or not) own several copies of the AP Style Guide and regularly use it for light reading, so I feel like I can say with authority that this fake version, posted through twitter, has an extremely high awesomeness content. Catch it while you can, before the AP sues to have it shut down.
The guide is very current, too. For example, be sure that you “Refer to him as ‘President Obama’ when he first appears in an article, ‘Soul Brother Number 1‘ in subsequent mentions.”
In 1859, a solar flare so powerful that it allowed the telegraph operators of the day to draw power down from the atmosphere to power their machines, smacked into earth.
“We observed the influence upon the lines at the time of commencing business — 8 o’clock — and it continued so strong up to 9 1/2 as to prevent any business from being done, excepting by throwing off the batteries at each end of the line and working by the atmospheric current entirely!” the astonished telegraph operators of Boston wrote in a statement that appeared in The New York Times later that week.
The Boston operator told his Portland, Maine counterpart, “Mine is also disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?” Portland responded, “Better than with our batteries on,” before finally concluding with Yankee pluck, “Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?”
My guess is that if this were to happen today, we wouldn’t be able to just “go ahead with business” for quite some time. More from Wired
