Yearly Archives: 2009

Constellation Year in Review Video

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Marc's note: From NASA's Constellation program comes today's video: Constellation Year in Review 2009. It's the holidays and year end so why not a feel good video that showcases all of Constellations achievements with all the centers contributing.

After watching the video what do you think of Constellation's progress this past year? Video after the jump.

Marc's Update:

One of our readers was quick to point out that along with the video a new Constellation blog post was posted today stating that they have finalized the thrust oscillation issue fix.

Constellation Finalizes Thrust Oscillation Fix, NASA Constellation Blog

"When we discover an engineering risk, like thrust oscillation, we tackle it with full rigor," said Jeff Hanley, Constellation Program manager. "That's what this team has done with thrust oscillation. We assumed the worst when the problem was first discovered. The good news is there is no empirical evidence of problematic oscillations from our ground test of the first stage development motor or during the Ares I-X first test flight."

Teeth-Installed Hearing Aids Are Coming [Medical]

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A company called Sonitus Medical is currently working on a new type of hearing aid for people with single-sided deafness, one that uses vibrations in your teeth to allow you to hear again.

The small device would connect around the teeth and use bone conductivity to take sounds from a microphone in the deaf ear and turn them into vibrations that could be heard by the working ear. Pretty crazy! It's currently being tested, with plans for it to hit the FDA next year for approval and then official release. [New Scientist via io9]



AT&T’s Warped View of the Internet [At&t]

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Did you know? Unless you have a 3Mbps internet connection, you can't use Facebook. Without 12Mbps internet, you can't even email files! And just forget streaming video without at least 18Mbps internet. Welcome to the internet, according to AT&T.

This chart for AT&T U-Verse internet makes no sense whatsoever. For one, what's the difference between "watching TV/video clips" and "streaming video" and why does one need just 12 measly megabits, while the other needs 18? Also, the numbers just don't work. Even full HD 1080p streaming video through Zune on Xbox Live just requires 10Mbps-12Mbps of bandwidth.

If anything, it's the internet gaming that needs 12Mbps, as I was sadly reminded while trying to download the entirety Left 4 Dead 2 over the 6Mbps AT&T DSL I've got in GA—the fastest internet AT&T will give me. I'd console myself with Hulu, but you know, it might not work. [AT&T, Thanks Slacker!]



Is It the iPhone? Or the Network? [IPhone]

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It's a funny thing. Right after AT&T's CEO admits their network has problems and the iPhone's shitty reception becomes a late-night punchline, AT&T crushes our nationwide 3G test. It makes you wonder, again, is it the network, or the iPhone?

AT&T's network is generally reviled. Users of the iPhone, in particular, loathe it the kind of deep hatred reserved for people who steal from charities or beat up grandmothers. More specifically still, are people in New York and San Francisco, locations where even AT&T Mobility's CEO admits the network is "performing at levels below our standards." AT&T fares the worst in JD Power's call quality ratings overall.

It's no secret that the iPhone isn't merely the embodiment of AT&T's network woes, but it's also, at least in part, the cause. The 3 percent of people responsible for 40 percent of the traffic on AT&T's network de la Vega is so fond of pointing the finger at are most assuredly iPhone users. AT&T notoriously didn't roll out MMS for the iPhone until this fall, not only months behind international carriers, but behind their own schedule, because they needed "to make sure our network is ready to handle what we expect will be a record volume of MMS traffic." And iPhone tethering still isn't offered by AT&T, even though international carriers do, because it "could exponentially increase traffic on the network." Congestion is a very real problem on AT&T's network, even AT&T admits that.

Yet AT&T crushed our 3G tests all over the place, not just in their backyard of Atlanta. The major consideration is that we didn't use phones to test, but 3G sticks, and we only tested data. While coverage is inherently a part of the test—if we hadn't have gotten a signal in the places we tested, or the signal was shitty, it would've affected their placement in the test, obviously (just look at T-Mobile's results in some spots)—we were mainly testing for speed. The iPhone's problem is that it drops calls, frequently, or simply doesn't connect. It has crappy reception. Other phones we've used on AT&T fare noticeably better. So it's easy, and obvious, to blame the iPhone, and its chipset as some have. (We explain why cell reception isn't perfect across the board here.)

But why isn't there an international outcry about the iPhone having garbage reception, then? It's possible, I suppose, that those networks have so much better coverage, even if the iPhone does have an inferior chipset with poor reception, it doesn't matter. It's just wrapped up in a blanket of coverage so comfy it still works fine. (And we have heard, though can't confirm, that the iPhone 3G at least used an inferior, cheaper Infineon chipset because AT&T wouldn't certify the one Apple actually wanted to use.)

So we have two contradictory piece of information. The iPhone does better internationally, and AT&T does better with other devices. So is it the network, or the phone? Probably a little of both. Help us out, engineers.



To Catch an Xbox Live Predator [Xbox Live]

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Halo fanboys aren't the only creeps on Xbox Live: 27-year-old Edward Stout was convicted of seducing a 15-year-old girl over Xbox Live and then driving 30 hours nonstop to meet and have sex with her.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but it's a pretty sobering reminder of why parents should pay attention to how their kids play games. The usual concern is violence in the games themselves and dumb kids blithely screaming "fag!" at each other, but there are obviously way worse things out there.

I know MySpace purges known sex offenders and many states require them to register all online identities, including Live gamertags, but I've never heard of any particular campaigns where Xbox Live went after them, so I'd be curious what kind of safeguards they have in place, if any. [SF Gate via Max Console]



Happy Solstice

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[an encore, from a long ago Solstice. but still true today]

If you had walked out into my backyard around 4:40 the last few afternoons you would have been greeted with the orange ball of the sun setting with a final low glare over the tops of the buildings that I can see low on the horizon out across the Los Angeles basin. At this time each late afternoon I like to get out the binoculars that I keep next to the back door, and I step outside to watch the last seconds of the sun setting and to find the spot where the last glimmer of light for the day appears. Every night that glimmer has moved a little further to the south. Just a few weeks ago the last glint vanished just behind the cupola of the Pasadena city hall. By just the next day, the cupola was clear, but the sun disappeared behind the building to the left of city hall. Last night it set 4 or 5 office buildings further to the left, still, behind an anonymous office tower that I can't recognize, but through the binoculars appears impressive with the sun directly framing it and the occasional stray bit of light going through a window on the far side, rattling around on the inside, and emerging as the last bit of bit of light before a long winter night. Tonight I watched again, and the sun set behind exactly the same anonymous tower. It hadn't moved at all. Today, therefore, must be the solstice. The solstice is many things: the first day of winter, the earliest sunset, the longest night of the year, the latest sunrise. Most people notice the sunset more than anything else. But solstice comes from the latin "solstitium": sol for sun, and stitium for a stoppage ("armistice" comes from the same root: a stoppage of arms). The stoppage of the southern progression of the sun -- the turnaround to come back to the north -- was considered a big enough phenomenon to give the event its name. The sun stoppage. As the darkness tries to ascend (quickly; these winter twilights don't last) the other part of the season becomes clear. While the nearby glare of Los Angeles means that we never truly have darkness in these parts, this time of year everyone is doing their best to cut the darkness even more. I can see Christmas lights on the houses throughout Pasadena, and, with the binoculars, I can see to downtown Los Angeles where the buildings have been strung with lights. And who can blame them? With the nights so long and the sun moving further and further south, who would not want to try to do their part to make up for the absence of the light and the heat? Who would not be at least a little afraid at this time every year that the sun would somehow not decide to stop and then come back?

At our house we celebrate the solstice with our best attempt to coax back the sun. When the night is as dark as it will get, we gather with friends around our Christmas tree, turn out all of the lights in the house, and slowly refill the house with the yellowy-orange glow as we one by one light the dozens of candles hanging in the branches of the tree. Lighting candles on Christmas trees is a well known Bad Thing to Do, but we find that with a tree cut down the day before (and a fire extinguisher on hand just in case), all goes smoothly. Like the sun, the candles slowly go out. Some catch a few warm drafts and burn more quickly, some get less air and burn more slowly, but one by one they all eventually go until, with just two or three left, the house is dark again and the shadows of branches shimmer sinisterly on the ceiling. Finally the last candle sputters and dies, sometimes with a long glow and sometimes with a sudden final pop, and the longest night of the year totally envelopes us.

The night sky gets in on the act this time of year, too. Many people who claim to know no constellations in the sky can look up and identify Orion in the winter sky. With the three bright stars making the belt, the scabbard of stars hanging below, and the quartet making the shoulders and knees, Orion is truly simple to identify. But Orion is also composed of some of the brighter of the stars in the sky. In fact, look outside, and look around Orion. Bright stars are all around. The constellation of Taurus, Sirius, the brightest star around. The seasons of the sky are not created equally. Winter is a spectacular display of stars and constellations unlike any other, as if the stars, too, are trying to help us out on the longest winter nights by saving the best show for the very end of the year. None of this is true, of course. The spectacular winter skies are caused by the fact that we are looking straight in to the Milky Way galaxy, instead of out of it as we do in the spring and fall. But still, it is hard not to see the similarity between the lights strung in the town below trying to dispel the night and call back the sun, and the lights above, also seemingly strung for the same reason.

Tomorrow, if the weather holds, I'm going to go outside with my binoculars and see exactly where the sun sets again. Because I do this every year, and because I can look up the precise date and time of the solstice, and because I know that the earth will continue to go around the sun with the same tilt for my entire lifetime, I know what will happen: the sun will have moved away from the anonymous office building and finally started moving right again. The day will get imperceptibly longer. Really, there is not much suspense in what will happen, just a certain reassuring inevitability. But if I didn't know these things and didn't have confidence in the inevitable, I can imagine myself holding my breath as the last rays of the sun were shooting out and I was trying to see just where it was setting. I stopped yesterday, but is it really turning around today? Will the days really get longer again? Will my crops (well, ok, my vegetable garden) come back to life? And I'll then see the spot and it will be clearly north and I'll know. And at that point, I will say to anyone within sight: happy new year. For while the calendar claims I have another week to go, the Christmas lights and the candles and Orion and Taurus and Sirius will have done their jobs, and the sun will have started its new year already today and we should all be glad for the solstice.

Nation’s Children Tell President Obama They Want Tech, not Bikes [Christmas]

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President Obama visited a Boys and Girls Club and played the part of Santa, asking the kids what they want for Christmas—but instead of hearing traditional requests for bikes, the kids all wanted iPods, phones and other tech.

He asked the kids what they wanted for Christmas but seemed surprised by their expensive and high-tech tastes, including iPods, cell phones and video games.

"Whatever happened to, like, asking for a bike?" POTUS asked. "Everbody has a bike," one informed him and others agreed.

From the mouths of babes: Gadgetry beats lo-fi, analog "bi-cycles" any day. [Gawker, image source]



Apple Store Offering Free Next-Day Delivery, No Minimum Order [Dealzmodo]

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The Apple Store's got a nice present for last minute shoppers: Free next-day delivery with no minimum order. This means that you can shop as late as 1 pm ET on December 23 and still receive your order before Christmas.

Of course, you have to keep in mind that custom configurations take longer and wouldn't ship on time, but for everything else, this is a great offer. [9 to 5 Mac]



Human Wind Chime Would Be Perfect For the Back Porch of Your Rocket Ship [Geek School Project]

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This installation at NYU's ITP Winter Show responds is responsive to touch, and sounds as trippy as it looks. That's a very good thing.

Human Wind Chime is a light and sound sculpture by Mindy Tchieu, Patricia Adler and Saul Kessler that comprises 25 four-inch polypropylene balls, each of which is outfitted with an LED and arranged in a descending spiral. When touched, each ball lights up and emits a sound, with each ball's pitch corresponding to its height. The result, as you can see in the video above, is an ethereal blend of art, instrument, and toy. Now if only someone could figure out how to play "Chopsticks" on it. [ITP Winter Show]



Multiple Sclerosis and Irrational Exuberance

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Multiple sclerosis (MS) is fascinating illness that can range from mild annoyance to debilitating nightmare. The frightening nature and unclear cause of the disease makes it a magnet for questionable medical therapies (i.e. quackery). A piece published last week in (surprise!) the Huffington Post helps fuel the fires of suspicion and paranoia while failing to shed any light on the future of MS research.

Multiple sclerosis is a disease of the nervous system. Its victims develop symptoms based on what part of the nervous system is affected. For example, if MS attacks the optic nerve, a patient may experience blurry vision or blindness. If it affects the motor areas of the brain that controls the left leg, the patient will develop weakness in the left leg. Typically, the symptoms will last a certain period of time and then improve, but often not completely back to normal.

The exact initial cause of the disease isn’t known, but we do have a good understanding of of how the disease works. In MS, the immune system attacks the sheath surrounding certain types of nerve cells. This leads to “plaques” in nervous tissue such as the brain, and these plaques correspond to the symptoms of MS. The disease appears to result from a combination of a genetic predisposition and some sort of environmental insult, such as a viral infection. Many people have T-cells in their immune system that recognize myelin, the substance attacked in MS, but in MS these T-cells are more capable of attacking myelin. In order to do this effectively they must breach the “blood-brain barrier”, a system that keeps the circulation in the brain protected from toxins, infections, and the immune system. In MS, this barrier is breached, perhaps by infection, allowing T-cells into the brain to coordinate an attack on the nerve cells. Based on our still-incomplete knowledge of the disease, we have developed some pretty-effective treatments over the last decade or so. These treatments are based on drugs that affect the immune system. All of these drugs have significant side-effects and none is completely effective.  There are probably many different “kinds” of MS based on different genetics and different environmental triggers, so we have a long way to go in understanding the disease and developing treatments.Given the fear and debility associated with the disease, and our still-incomplete knowledge, it’s natural for people to look for (and see) patterns where none exist. Diseases like MS attract quackery (such as bee-sting therapy) and conspiracy theories, such as the one in the Huffington Post

It started with an article in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper.  This article detailed some new MS researcher by an Italian doctor named (I kid you not) Zamboni.  Dr. Zamboni hypothesizes that MS may be at least partly due to a problem with venous blood flow in the brain, and that a surgical procedure can correct this blood flow and improve MS symptoms.  He has done some small studies to evaluate these claims.  These studies have not yet been replicated by other researchers, and it isn’t clear (at least to me) how plausible his hypothesis is.  Still, it is interesting, and the Globe and Mail article was fairly well-written, providing a counter-balance to Zamboni’s exuberance:

“I am confident that this could be a revolution for the research and diagnosis of multiple sclerosis,” Dr. Zamboni said in an interview.

Not everyone is so bullish: Skeptics warn the evidence is too scant and speculative to start rewriting medical textbooks. Even those intrigued by the theory caution that MS sufferers should not rush off to get the surgery – nicknamed the “liberation procedure” – until more research is done.

The National MS Society (US) is also taking a cautious approach and is facilitating further research into this new theory.

“Cautious” is not a word that ever applies to medical reporting in the Huffington Post. Erika Milva vilifies the American press and the MS society blaming entrenched interests for failing to jump on Zamboni’s ideas.

Of the MS society’s statement, Dr. Lorne Brandes, an oncologist who blogs for CTV News’ Health Blog, wrote, “If their official response to Dr. Zamboni’s research was any cooler, icicles would form on their spokespersons’ lips. Why am I not surprised? These organizations are big money operations, run by risk-adverse professionals and fundraisers who are absolutely petrified of making a mistake and prematurely backing a losing horse. Their interests are also heavily intertwined with those of Big Pharma.”

This is absurd.  Advocate groups such as the NMMS are often supported by patients and their families and others who are strongly motivated to get results.  The MS society is actively seeking researchers to help investigate these new findings but is cautioning patients not to jump to quickly after unproven therapies.

It is important for researchers to think outside the box and we believe Dr. Zamboni has done this. His hypothesis is a path that must be more fully explored and Dr. Zamboni himself has stated that additional research is essential to evaluate it.

[...]

The National MS Society is pursuing follow-up research in how CCSVI might be involved in the MS process and we have invited investigators from around the world whose research is relevant to MS to submit proposals to apply for grants that would explore this lead. These applications will undergo an accelerated review process.

Where is the tepid, icicle-laden response?


Diseases that inspire fear, as MS legitimately does, attract a great deal of emotional attention. This type of attention, when applied to real research, can drive progress in science. When this enthusiasm is decoupled from science, the door for quackery is open, and anyone can and will walk in.

References

Frohman EM, Racke MK, & Raine CS (2006). Multiple sclerosis–the plaque and its pathogenesis. The New England journal of medicine, 354 (9), 942-55 PMID: 16510748

Zamboni, P., Galeotti, R., Menegatti, E., Malagoni, A., Tacconi, G., Dall’Ara, S., Bartolomei, I., & Salvi, F. (2008). Chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency in patients with multiple sclerosis Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 80 (4), 392-399 DOI: 10.1136/jnnp.2008.157164

Zamboni, P., Galeotti, R., Menegatti, E., Malagoni, A., Gianesini, S., Bartolomei, I., Mascoli, F., & Salvi, F. (2009). A prospective open-label study of endovascular treatment of chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency Journal of Vascular Surgery, 50 (6), 1348-1358000 DOI: 10.1016/j.jvs.2009.07.096


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Samsung NX-10 Hybrid Camera: ‘Cause the World Needed Another Camera Format [Unconfirmed]

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Samsung is the new Sony: Constantly pumping out new formats the world doesn't need, like their Hybrid NX cameras seen at PMA, apparently finalized in the NX 10 here. Here's the problem with it:

The idea of the NX series is dandy—a DSLR-sized sensor (APS-C-sized, supposedly, so it's bigger than the ones in Micro Four Thirds cameras) in a smaller body than DSLRs, since it does away with the the whole single-lens reflex system that makes DSLRs so damn big. If that sounds familiar, that's because it's the same concept as Micro Four Thirds.

The issue is that the lens mount for Samsung's NX, at least for now, is exclusive to the NX camera, so lenses you buy will only work with it. Micro Four Thirds might be a young format, but at least your lenses will work on cameras from a couple of different manufacturers, ones that are camera vets. There's an ecosystem there. Samsung's an amateur. I admit, an alliance with Pentax like the NX20 could make the idea a lot more appealing, but until it happens—or until I see some mindblowing pictures produced by it—not so sure I can get behind this one. (It'd also be cool to see them get behind Micro Four Thirds, to make that format even stronger.)

Oh, and the NX10 is hideous. [DP Review Forums via engadget]



Fixing California | Cosmic Variance

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This past year has been a long, slow downward spiral for California into one of the worst financial crises in state history. Revised revenue projections in February led to huge slashes in funding for an array of programs from higher education to state parks, and a $25 billion budget shortfall looms next year. State employes and university (both Cal State and UC) employees have been furloughed, and UC tuition has gone up dramatically – 32% within a year. Protests at Berkeley, UCLA, and my own institution, UC Davis, led to dozens of arrests in November.

[I was amazed, the night of November 19, to see a helicopter with a powerful searchlight circling over the main administration building at UC Davis. The police, many from jurisdictions 20 miles away, had created a perimeter about 100 yards from the building, which was still occupied by students who were later arrested for trespass (and the campus police returned to find their tires slashed). The next week saw another protest, resulting in amnesty for those previously arrested...]

People are angry, and justifiably so. There are over 400,000 parents in the state who are getting a giant kick in the pants (myself among them – my daughter is at Berkeley). But who should we be angry at? Faculty? UC administration? The government in Sacramento? The global economy? What can we change that will truly fix the problems California faces?

One simple and direct idea has emerged, from a professor of linguistics at Berkeley, George Lakoff. He proposes the following 14-word amendment to the state constitution for the Nov. 2010 state ballot:

All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote.

With a million signatures, this proposition will be on the ballot next fall, and I am going to predict at this point that this will very likely be the case. If adopted, this would put an end to the 2/3 majority of the legislature required in California to enact any tax increase, and thereby end the present tyranny of the minority that hamstrings the state that I wrote about before.

No one wants their taxes to go up. But there are some real no-brainers out there, in my opinion:

  • Increase the state gasoline tax. In February the legislature failed to enact an increase of 12 cents per gallon on top of the present 18 cent tax that would have raised over $2 billion per year.
  • Tax energy extraction. Inexplicably, California is the only oil-producing state that does not tax oil extraction. The failed 2006 Proposition 87, with a 6% capped tax on extracted oil, would have generated over $1 billion in revenue per year. (By contrast, Sarah Palin raised the Alaska energy extraction tax to 25%!)
  • Decriminalize marijuana. There is in fact going to be a proposition on the 2010 ballot to do just that. A combination of legalization, taxation, and drug education, much as we treat alcohol (a far more dangerous drug) will be vastly superior to incarceration. Legal growers will drive the smugglers out of California. How much revenue could be generated by taxing one of California’s largest crops is hard to guess. It’s a lot.
  • Repeal corporate tax loopholes. There could be a ballot initiative on this next fall as well. It’s technical stuff: loss carry-backs, tax credit-sharing, and the single-sales factor. But it’s potentially $2.5 billion per year! And again, California is alone in some of this ridiculousness.

There are plenty more ideas out there, I am sure. In any case, it is the majority who should decide. The is how it is done in every other state in the union. California is far from being the most heavily taxed state in the nation – I believe there is plenty of room to solve the present crisis and create a state worthy of being one of the largest economies in the world.

Work of Carmelich on display in Trieste (Dec. 22)

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Giorgio Carmelich
Futuristicherie
Viaggi d’arte fra Trieste, Roma e Praga

December 23, 2009 – April 5, 2010
*vernissage, Tuesday December 22, 6pm
Civico Museo Revoltella – Galleria d’arte moderna

-1Martedì 22 dicembre 2009 alle 18.00 avrà luogo presso il Civico Museo Revoltella – Galleria d’arte moderna l’inaugurazione della mostra Giorgio Carmelich. Futuristicherie. Viaggi d’arte fra Trieste, Roma e Praga, che rimarrà aperta sino al 5 aprile 2010.

La celebrazione di Giorgio Carmelich (1907-1929), genio prematuramente scomparso all’età di ventidue anni, si situa a cavallo tra il 2009, anno del centenario del manifesto futurista di Marinetti, e il 2010, anno in cui, il 12 gennaio, si festeggerà il centenario dalla prima e memorabile serata futurista al Politeama Rossetti di Trieste.

L’avventura artistica di Carmelich parte, infatti, dall’iniziale infatuazione per il futurismo, per poi attraversare le suggestioni provenienti dall’avanguardia non solo italiana ma anche europea. Il giovane Carmelich si abbevera febbrilmente ad ogni fonte da cui possa trarre stimoli per la sua produzione artistico-editoriale: legge con avidità tutte le nuove pubblicazioni sull’arte contemporanea, interessandosi specialmente all’avanguardia e alla scenografia russa, frequenta assiduamente cinema e teatri e viaggia da una città all’altra, stringendo numerosi e importanti contatti, tra cui fondamentali, sul versante italiano, sono gli incontri con i futuristi italiani, in primis Enrico Prampolini e Fortunato Depero, che influenzano in maniera netta il suo fare artistico. Successivamente entra in contatto con il mondo dell’avanguardia ceca, attraverso Artus Cernik, direttore della rivista Pásmo di Brno, e Karel Teige, che conosce a Praga nel 1929.

La vita, l’opera e i gusti di Carmelich possono essere tracciati attraverso le sue fresche lettere, indirizzate all’amico e sodale Emilio Mario Dolfi e spesso ornate da spiritosi disegni, che costituiscono il Leitmotiv della mostra. Accanto a queste, più di 130 sono le opere presentate nella presente esposizione triestina, tra dipinti, collages, disegni, incisioni, periodici e monografie, tra cui le “edizioni” manoscritte o dattiloscritte de “La bottega di Epeo”, le creazioni più sorprendenti della coppia Carmelich-Dolfi. Da Il sindaco di Cork e il cane inglese, preziosa edizione manoscritta e decorata a mano del 1920, a due plaquettes del 1923 di Dolfi con illustrazioni di Carmelich: Ridolini e altri corridori, celebrante il mito inebriante della velocità futurista, e Il parco delle attrazioni.

Tra le numerose pubblicazioni periodiche futuriste spiccano in mostra Epeo, la rivista dattiloscritta e illustrata a mano, realizzata da Carmelich e Dolfi e uscita tra il 1922 e il 1923 in pochissimi esemplari, e L’Aurora (1923-1924), organo del futurismo giuliano, cui Carmelich partecipò con contributi critici e splendide incisioni.

Per quanto riguarda la produzione figurativa di Carmelich si va dai disegni a matite colorate o a china del 1923, ai collages del 1924, passando attraverso la parentesi costruttivista, culminata nella realizzazione, assieme a Avgust Cernigoj, Edvard Stepancic e Giuseppe Vlah, della Sala costruttivista, allestita nel 1927 all’interno della I Esposizione del sindacato delle belle arti di Trieste, sino all’ultima fase, quella magica e chagalliana dell’ultimo periodo praghese.

Per contestualizzare l’opera di Carmelich all’interno di un più vasto panorama artistico, saranno esposte inoltre 11 opere di Fortunato Depero e 5 di Enrico Prampolini, suoi maestri spirituali soprattutto per quanto riguarda la scenografia e l’arte del manifesto, e punti di riferimento principali nell’elaborazione di un suo linguaggio futurista, mentre una sezione speciale sarà dedicata ad altri futuristi giuliani, Sofronio Pocarini, Bruno Cossar e Luigi Spazzapan (che lo fu per un periodo brevissimo ma intenso) e ai seguaci del costruttivismo, Avgust Cernigoj ed Edvard Stepancic.

L’allestimento della mostra, corredato da diversi interventi multimediali. mira a creare un ambiente di forte impatto, che permetta al visitatore di immergersi completamente nel linguaggio delle avanguardie degli anni Venti, in cui Carmelich visse, in un lampo, la sua breve parabola esistenziale ed artistica.

Ufficio stampa: Studio ESSECI – Sergio Campagnolo. Tel. 049 663499; email info@studioesseci.net; sito: http://www.studioesseci.net

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The Food Pod Makes It Look Like You Are Boiling an Alien [Cooking]

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Fusionbrands has some crazy looking cooking utensils—like the Fusion Finger Tongs and this Food Pod. The latter is designed for boiling, blanching or steaming, but it looks like you are cooking up space plants or alien parts.

Appearances aside, the Food Pod looks like it would be very effective—plus, it's made of flexible silicone, which won't rust up on you like a cheap stainless steel collapsible steamer might. [Fusionbrands and Amazon via RGS]



Analog Joystick

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We recently purchased Joystick for crane which is analog type. Is it necessary to fill the oil inside the analog potentiometer?? Without filling oil can we use it...

Culprit Emerges in Botched Take-Off: a Typo | Discoblog

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Thanks to the winter devastation wrought by this weekend’s storm, my weekend holiday travel plans were put on hold until, well, now. So from 36,000 feet above the ground, courtesy of Delta’s free wifi (it’s the least they could do, seeing how they put me on hold all weekend with “Let it Snow” playing on a loop), I bring you a story of a flight canceled not by weather, but by a typo.

Back on March 20th at Melbourne Airport, a United Arab Emirates (UAE) aircraft’s tail made contact with the runway during take-off (known as a tail-strike), and the plane was having trouble taking off at all. In fact, the tail hit the ground three more times beyond the runway and the landing gear took out a strobe light and a localizer antennae. Through some slick piloting, the airplane’s captain was able to get off the ground, dump fuel, and return to the same airport.

The cause for the tail-strike? A number 3 where a number 2 was supposed to be, as reported by IEEE Spectrum:

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) confirmed its preliminary findings that determined that “the pre-flight take-off performance calculations were based on an incorrect take-off weight that was inadvertently entered into the take-off performance software on a laptop computer used by the flight crew.”

The aircraft’s first officer typed in the aircraft’s weight as being 262.9 tonnes, while the actual weight was 362.9 tonnes. So yeah, he was a little off, which caused the bumpy take-off. The flight crew members found responsible resigned shortly after the event.

Apparently my flight crew at LGA was paying closer attention.

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