The Shark Girl sent me a heads-up a couple days ago – she and D are in the Bahamas (Dean’s Blue Hole, Long Island to be exact) videoing the Vertical Blue 2010 freediving event. The footage is amazing – you can find all of it here and write-ups of the days events here. Below, William Trubridge does a world record unassisted (no fins, no nothin’) dive to 92 meters. My back of the envelope calc puts that at approximately 30 stories – yowza.
Internet serendipity
This [Boing Boing]:
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Rick Prelinger sez, “My spouse Megan Prelinger is about to take to the road with her show of paleofuturistic ads from the early, go-go years of the space race. While the images are fascinating in print, they’re even more provocative when projected, revealing the gap (and sometimes uncanny resemblance) between the fanciful and actual futures of space exploration. I can’t wait to see them on the big screen at DC’s National Air & Space Museum, LA’s Griffith Observatory and a host of other venues in Portland, Seattle and NYC. Her tour kicks off at San Francisco’s Booksmith this coming Tuesday, May 4 with a slide show, reading and release party for her new book Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962.“
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Leads to this [Amazon]:
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Leads to this [Amazon again]:
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Which causes me to google “apollo guidance computer simulator”:
I figured I’d get a good hit, but this is beyond good- the Virtual AGC Home Page.
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Big fun! And as a side benny, this [Amazon again again]:
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The old man worked on Convair B-58 Hustlers (radar system for Raytheon) – he tells the story of coming home for lunch one day and returning to work to find that the aircraft he’d been working on had caught fire and killed some of his coworkers. Time and place suggest the B-58 involved was unit 58-1012.
Pininfarina X
Via the Most Viewed Classifieds window on the Hemming’s blog, a concept car that I’d never run across before – the Pininfarina X. One front wheel steering, two side wheels, and one wheel in back supplying power. That power comes from an 1,100 cc Fiat engine, churning out 43 monster horses. * Here’s the punch line – the asking price is $1,350,000 – you read that right – over a million bucks.
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Another web site asserts “the X also possessed twitchy and unpredictable handling”* – a claim I have no trouble believing. A single steering wheel up front equals big entertainment, as the Robin Reliant racing rollover clip below demonstrates. I have no idea whether popping the power wheel off the pavement during hard cornering would help or not, and given the coolness of the body work, I have no interest in finding out.
Dem dry bones
Lotte and I went in search of cottontails yesterday, after work. We didn’t find any but she got more experience working heavy cover and a bunch of exercise (didn’t stop her from carrying on with the shorthairs when we got home, though).
I did find a huge patch of trout lilies.
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And a couple leg bones. I’m assuming they’re from a whitetail – I need to do a little more nosing around to figure out which bones. Regardless, they’re a matched set; one shows evidence of healed trauma. Infection? Bullet wound? Break (I don’t think so, but what do I know)?
Mirror images.
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The uninjured bone.
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Ouch.
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I’m thinking about making a flute from the uninjured bone. I’ll stick with a pennywhistle when I attempt to form up the Innsmouth Drum and Whistle Corps for the Halloween parade, but the bone flute would be fun to fool with.