Mess Mess Mess
My burst of creativity last night resulted in this new design, which breaks in all browsers except IE6, but hey it's a step in the right direction! It will get fixed up eventually.
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January 25, 2005
January 24, 2005
Labyrinth
Photos of the Paris flood in 1910
Via the very interesting:
http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/
via the even more interesting:
http://labyrinth.georgetown.edu which is slightly out of date but still a great resource.
Chalk Art
A few nice chalk art pictures, a couple of which I haven't seen before:
http://gprime.net/images/sidewalkchalkguy/
The artist Julian Beever's website:
http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm
The record run of
The record run of the "Mallard" on July 3rd, 1938 was made with a six car streamline set plus a dynamometer car, with a total tare of 240 tons.
The Mallard pulled the train over Stoke Summit at 75 mph, then accelerated downgrade at a gradient of 1:178 to 1:200 over six miles distance to attain a speed of 114 mph. It eventually reached a speed of 125 mph, with a peak at 126 mph for a few seconds. After that it ran at a speed of at least 120 mph for another three miles.After that it ran at a speed of at least 120 mph for another three miles. By then the inside big end showed sign of overheating and the engine had to run light back to Doncaster for repair.
Can you imagine the rattling and shaking of that thing doing 126 mph, Fred Dibnah's documentary about it last night had audio of the driver:
"They knew if they smelled that aroma, they only had a few minutes until the whole big end would collapse. So at 124 miles per hour Joe Duddington smelled this aroma of violets, and instead of shutting down that engine like any normal common sense person would do. He actually opened the regulator just a little bit more, and said, "Come on girl, you can do it."
Duddington: "Go on old girl, I thought, 'we can do better than this' so I nursed her, and in the next 1 1/2 miles the needle crept up further--123 an hour, 124, 125 and for a quarter of a mile, while they tell me the folks in the car held their breaths--126 miles per hour; 126, that was the fastest steam locomotive that had ever been driven in the world."
January 21, 2005
Phone cash machines
Apparently there are a few of these popping up round Belfast, cash machine/phone box hybrids:
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=1329
Back to the Future
Nice car on ebay.
January 20, 2005
Soldiers on LSD
I love this footage, I remember seeing it years ago on a channel 4 documentary.
"but 1 hour and 10 mins after taking the drug and with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up"
January 19, 2005
AWS Blog
Useful blog for AWS developers:
http://aws.typepad.com/, where I found a link to this one page article titled The Zen of Jeff Bezos.
Also a peek inside an amazon distribution centre.
January 18, 2005
Rock Salt @ kilroot
BBC NI showed a documentary about Belfast Lough last night, where they visited a mine near Kilroot which produces all the Rock Salt for gritting our roads on days such as today and also export the salt by the ship load to the east coast of America aswell as the rest of the UK.
So where did the salt come from?
Explanation via the BBC living history website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/livingworld/naturalhistory/walk/walk1.shtml
The presence of gypsum and rock salt below the surface (the salt is commercially mined at nearby Kilroot) shows that, although the land was dry, the sea must have sometimes flooded what would have been a low-lying area.
It was very hot and any standing seawater evaporated very quickly leaving the salt deposits behind.
January 17, 2005
Pumpernickel
The Sunday Times have been a doing a GI diet supplement for a couple of weeks. They produce a booklet which lists common foods in red, amber or green based on their Glucose Index Value. In the green section on breads they have a bread called Pumpernickel, a dark rye bread.
Here follows the etymology of the word:
The true origin of "pumpernickel" is nearly as strange, if somewhat less savory. "Pumpern" was a New High German word similar in meaning to the English "fart" (so chosen because, like the word "achoo," it imitated the sound it described), and "Nickel" was a form of the name Nicholas, an appellation commonly associated with a goblin or devil (e.g., "Old Nick" is a familiar name for Satan). Hence, pumpernickel is the "devil's fart," allegedly a reference to the bread's indigestible qualities and hence the effect it produced on those who consumed it
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mpumpernickel.html
January 15, 2005
Dragon illusion
As good an excuse as any to start blogging again, I spent an hour making this dragon illusion this morning and it is fantastic. Pop it inside a vase and the illusion is even more spectacular.
http://www.grand-illusions.com/dragon.htm
It's based on the hollow face syndrom explained further here.
It's been a busy few months since I stopped blogging, now a married man. Had a great wedding and a lovely honeymoon in the Maldvies.
Christmas brought me a new toy, my Flexifoil Super 10. Still getting used to the power of the thing, and the science behind the wind window, but enjoying it immensely.