Posted on

The 50 Most Loathsome People In New York

I don’t know a lot of the people included in the New York Press’ list of The 50 Most Loathsome People In New York, but Bill O’Reilly’s entry alone made it worth the read:

Ah, yes, after two near misses, the sun-blotched king of swing finally makes the list. O’Reilly is the classic lace-curtain Irish boor: thin-skinned, wistful, bloated and delusional, and a whining Miss Nancy to boot. His personality would be a desperately pitiable object if he weren’t also the kind of behind-the-scenes suck-up demagogue who will one day be Commissariat of Information and Media Punishment in George Bush’s Emergency Third Term. This is a man whose only answer to challenge is girly tantrums, a man who screams down Al Franken when Franken busts him for lying about winning a Peabody Award, who cuts his guests’ mics when they disagree with him. He calls his fellow Americans ‘traitors,’ ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘dangerous’ when they simply refuse to agree with the president. When O’Reilly suggests that for Valentine’s Day we buy each other copies of his lousily written, poorly researched, mendacious tracts, we see a man looking for the love his drunken abusive daddy never provided to the one and only daughter in the family.

Posted on

The World’s Ugliest Car

1957 AuroraBritish mechanic Andy Saunders has restored the Aurora, purportedly the “world’s ugliest car.” Designed in 1957 by Father Alfred Juliano, the car incorporated many innovative (at the time) safety designs, the combination of which resulted in an extremely bizarre-looking automobile:

It had seatbelts, a roll cage, side-impact bars, a collapsible steering column, foam-filled bumpers and a padded instrument panel. Its windscreen was curved away from the driver so the possibility of impact with it was reduced. This design meant that windscreen wipers were not required, but it also distorted the view through it. The silver and black Aurora included a large “front-end air-scoop” instead of a conventional grill. This was to reduce frictional drag and to lessen injuries to pedestrians it hit. But its most peculiar safety feature was the seats that swivelled 180 degrees so before a crash those inside could turn round and take the impact backwards.

The site has some more information and a lot more pictures…

Posted on

Zeptograms

Just when I thought I had the SI unit prefixes down, they go and add two more. New Scientist and Azonano both have articles explaining how new measurement technologies are able to to measure masses as small as one zeptogram (10-21 grams), “roughly the mass of a single protein molecule.” Wow.

Posted on

NASA World Wind

NASA World Wind is an amazing piece of software available for free download:

World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.

Virtually visit any place in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps, or along the African Sahara.

Although the 178MB download took some time, it was worth it. I was amazed at all of the different options available, and the amount of geographic data included in the application was impressive as well. Definitely worth a look…