Links

Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.

Links for June 18th through June 19th

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Sometime between June 18th and June 19th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Links for June 18th from 12:39 to 13:07

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(Note: Normally, these will show up sometime after or around midnight-ish each day. I just wanted to make sure the system was working correctly, so this one’s a bit early. The joys of bug testing!)

Sometime between 12:39 and 13:07, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Wall.E : Pixar animation: [Sound designer Ben] Burtt has spent much of the past two years holed up on his own in a concrete bunker at Pixar's studios, recording the sounds made by toothbrushes, household appliances, miniature jet planes, army tanks and his own voice.
  • Exits: Stewart Butterfield’s bizarre resignation letter to Yahoo: I'm also told that this email is classic Butterfield, and that his employees at Flickr would stage dramatic readings of some of his better missives at Flickr's San Francisco headquarters…
  • in vestimentis ursum: Surely the robot hiding in the bear's clothing, vestimentis ursum, is impressive. So: armed with my childish curiousity and the spurious excuse of 'product design research,' I set out to discover what, exactly, these creatures are hiding.
  • Requiem For A Day Off: Absolutely incredible re-cut trailer, setting Ferris Bueller's Day Off to music from Requiem For a Dream.
  • Takei Marriage License Big News [UPDATED]: George Takei (Star Trek's Sulu) and his partner Brad Altman get California's first same-sex marriage license. Congratulations!

Fire Tornadoes

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While I’ve never been around one (something I’m not at all disappointed about), I’ve certainly heard of tornadoes, waterspouts, and I’ve seen many of their smaller cousin, the dust devil.

However, I’d never thought about what the wind patterns around a wildfire might do.

From Wikipedia:

A fire whirl, colloquially fire devil or fire tornado, is a phenomenon in which a fire, under certain conditions (depending on air temperature and currents), acquires a vertical vorticity and forms a whirl, or a tornado-like effect of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. Fire whirls may be whirlwinds separated from the flames, either within the burn area or outside it, or a vortex of flame, itself.

A fire whirl can make fires more dangerous. An extreme example is the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake in Japan which ignited a large city-sized firestorm and produced a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in fifteen minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo. Another example is the numerous large fire whirls (some tornadic) that developed after lightning struck an oil storage facility near San Luis Obispo, California on April 7, 1926, several of which produced significant structural damage well away from the fire, killing two. Thousands of whirlwinds were produced by the four-day-long firestorm coincident with conditions that produced severe thunderstorms, in which the larger fire whirls carried debris 5 kilometers (3 mi) away.

Most of the largest fire whirls are spawned from wildfires. They form when a warm updraft and convergence from the wildfire are present. They are usually 10-50 meters (30-200 ft) tall, a few meters (~10 ft) wide, and last only a few minutes. However, some can be more than a kilometer (0.6 mile) tall, contain winds over 160 km/h (100 mph), and persist for more than 20 minutes.

Just…wow. Cool, beautiful, and frightening, all at the same time.

In other tornado goodness, a bank security camera in Iowa was running when the bank was hit by a huge tornado a few weeks ago.

Freaky cool.

Deficit Attention Disorder

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From the Christian Science Monitor, a funny editorial advertising Restraint®, a cure for Deficit Attention Disorder (DAD)!

Have you ever wondered how the federal government can bail out banks and mortgage-holders, cut your taxes, try to protect Social Security, expand your Medicare benefits, and send you a stimulus check – all at the same time? These may be symptoms of an embarrassing condition afflicting political parties, banks, and households across America: Deficit Attention Disorder (DAD).

Unchecked, normal individuals (as well as politicians and bank CEOs) afflicted by DAD start to believe in money that doesn’t exist. This silent assassin of fiscal sanity overheats your credit card, sells you a make-believe mortgage, makes your pension go “poof,” and drops a whopping entitlement tab on your kids.

Fortunately, there’s a new way to get DAD under control – without any of the cosmetic remedies prescribed by spin doctors. By combining an ancient Zen secret with a cure-all from your grandmother, our researchers are proud to introduce: Restraint®.

Britannica Webshare

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Here’s a fascinating program: the Encyclopedia Britannica is introducing Britannica Webshare:

Britannica WebShare is a program that makes it easy for Web publishers to use the information in the Encyclopaedia Britannica for their own research and to share it by providing their readers easy access to individual articles.

Anyone who publishes regularly on the Internet—bloggers, webmaster, and writers who publish on the Web—is eligible for a free subscription to Britannica Online, which includes the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica as well as other encyclopedias, an atlas, a dictionary, thesaurus, links to valuable Web sites selected by our editors, and more.

What’s more, anyone with a Web site can link to a Britannica article—or multiple articles—and readers who click on the links will see the articles in their entirety, even if the article is normally available only to paying subscribers.

Sounds nice, and a welcome companion/competitor to Wikipedia. I’ve applied, now it’s just a question of whether I’ve been regular enough as of late to get accepted. ;)

Lunchtime

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Flickr has video now! This is a silly little meme that’s going around called Fridgets: short little videos with the camera inside the fridge.

Everything New is Old Again

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A short quote from the end of an article about the Seattle Monorail: “Like so many inventions, lack of financial backing prevented further development.” What’s interesting about this (at least to Seattleites…er, well, at least to me…) is that it’s talking not about the recent monorail debacle, nor the existing monorail built for the 1962 Worlds Fair, but the 1911 William H. Boyes Monorail.

Boyes MonorailThis test track was built and demonstrated in 1911 in the tideflats of Seattle, Washington. The rails were made of wood and track cost was estimated to be around $3,000 per mile. A bargain! The Seattle Times commented at the time that “the time may come when these wooden monorail lines, like high fences, will go straggling across country, carrying their burden of cars that will develop a speed of about 20 miles per hour.” Like so many inventions, lack of financial backing prevented further development.

Neat!

(via Paleo-Future, quoted paragraph from Monorails in History)