Links

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

Wanted: One Apology from the Seattle PI

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Generally speaking, I tend to like the Seattle PI better than the Seattle Times. However, when a crane collapsed in Bellevue last November, I was disgusted by the PI’s response: an immediate front-page article digging up and detailing five-year-old accounts of the past drug use of the poor guy operating the crane that day. As if this guy’s day wasn’t bad enough — he goes to work, climbs to the top of a tower crane, and then rides the thing down as it collapses into nearby apartment buildings — he then has to endure the ingominy and public humiliation of having his past transgressions dug up, splashed across the front page of the newspaper, and implicitly blamed as the cause of the accident. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t had a drug conviction in five years, nor that his employer required drug tests that he had reliably passed, nor that there was no indication of drug use at the time of the accident. What mattered was that he was guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!

This morning, the PI reported on the official determination of the cause of the crane’s collapse:

A poorly designed foundation was the primary cause of the tower crane collapse in Bellevue, a deadly construction accident that spurred state lawmakers Friday to introduce crane-safety bills that would rank among the toughest in the nation.

A three-month investigation into the crash by the Department of Labor and Industries has found that the crane’s steel foundation failed, and that the 210-foot-high structure would not have toppled if it had been bolted into concrete like most other tower cranes, sources close to the investigation told the Seattle P-I.

I, along with more than a few other people, feel quite strongly that the PI owes the crane operator an apology. Easy as it may have been to do, their public vilification of the crane operator — based on nothing more than sensationalistic items in his past, not through any verifiable current information — was a slimy, sleazy way to grab eyeballs and sell papers at the expense of his reputation. Trial and conviction should be handled in the courts, not in the headlines.

PostSecret

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If you haven’t run across PostSecret yet, check it out. The concept is incredibly simple: people write their secrets on a postcard and send them in. Every Sunday, a new batch of secrets is posted on the site.

They’re funny, sad, uplifting, heartbreaking — and incredible.

TagMaps

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TagMaps is a really cool little toy from Yahoo’s research labs that I just stumbled across. It’s using heavy concentrations of tags on Flickr and overlaying them on a map, allowing you to zoom around the map and see how people have tagged their city. Here’s the official verbiage:

TagMaps is a toolkit to visualize text (well, tags) geographically on a map. Check out the sample applications, where we use Flickr tags on a map to build a world exploration tool.

The World Explorer engine analyzes the information tied to the photos (such as location and tags) to find the main “attractions” in each location and in every zoom level and compute their “importance”. We use the tags, on the map, in varying font sizes, to represent these attractions.

Here’s a sample of the World Explorer, centered on Seattle…

(via Flickr Central)

Weekly World News

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Best discovery of the past couple weeks: the Weekly World News (sorry, Seattle Weekly and Stranger, but this is my favorite weekly newspaper) has an RSS feed.

I mean, really — how could I survive without knowing about this kind of breaking news?

Dreaded Hot Tub Kraken Menaces Hotel Guests:

A squid infestation has forced the closure of Hollerheim Suites’ flagship hotel.

“The creature is viscid enough to dart through the hotel’s narrow plumbing,” said squid abatement expert Erik Pontoppidan. “It surfaces in guests’ bubble baths, coils hapless bathers in its tentacles, and vanishes again in a deadly but invigorating whirlpool.”

So far, no guests have been seriously hurt, though one bather did emerge, wet and dazed, from a bidet three rooms down the hall from his suite.

“In all of these cases the kraken was successfully repelled with a loofah,” Pontoppidan explained.

Five Injured When Ouija Planchette Leaps From Board in Search of Semicolon:

Five people were injured last week when a planchette–the device which points to letters and numbers on Ouija Boards–flew violently out of a house in search of a semicolon.

The planchette went rogue when Kelly Smerton, eleven, and her sister Karen, twelve, inadvertently channelled the spirit of a deceased English teacher.

“Apparently he was a pretty mean one,” said Deborah Smerton, the girls’ mother.

At the end of an independent clause condemning the Smerton house as a “den of ignoramuses,” the ghost suddenly flung the planchette out of the girl’s hands, shattering the bay window of their bedroom.

Rainier and the Flood

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Looks like the scenery is going to be a little bit different next time Prairie and I are able to head down to Mt. Rainier for a weekend getaway. The heavy rains and flooding of the past weeks have hit Rainier National Park hard, including quite a few of the areas that we went through this summer.

All park roads and entrances remain closed. Crews continue repair work on Nisqually Road at Sunshine Point and on Longmire utilities.

Extensive damage to backcountry bridges and trails. Sections of the Wonderland Trail may be unusable next summer.

The suspension bridge and boardwalk damaged at the Grove of the Patriarchs. The Grove is covered in a thick layer of silt.

More than two miles of the [Carbon] road are severely damaged. There are washed out sections in at least four places.

The main channel of the Nisqually River is pushing closer to the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) building. Parking behind the building is gone.

The [Sunshine Point] campground, located directly on the bank of the Nisqually River, and the dike that protected it, is gone with the exception of a few campsites.

The [Longmire] main campground road is completely removed at the road fork immediately behind the Community Building.

About 200 yards of the [Nisqually] road is washed out and impassable at the former entrance to Sunshine Point Campground.

Both lanes [of SR123] are washed out at MP 11.5 to a depth of 60-80 feet.

And those are just some of the key, most recognizable areas (well, most recognizable to me after a whopping single visit to the park).

There’s a collection of images and videos surveying the damage on this page. Pretty impressive.

So Long, Space Needle

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Thank goodness we have the journalistic integrity of the Weekly World News to fill us in on what’s really going on in our city…

The Space Needle will once again become this city’s tallest building in April 2009, when NASA launches the tower into Earth orbit.

The unmanned mission will test the landmark’s suitability for carrying astronauts to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

“We hope this flight will point us in the direction of cheaper modes of space travel,” said Project Director Mike Dale.

Early next year, NASA engineers will remove the 72 bolts anchoring the Needle to her 6,000-ton concrete foundation. Construction cranes will lower the building onto its side, and a convoy of trucks will transport the structure to Cape Canaveral, using the straightest roads possible.

“There, the building will be thoroughly caulked against the vaccuum of space,” Mr. Dale said.

The Needle’s elevator shaft will be filled with rocket fuel, her antennas will be oriented toward Houston, and her manned explorations of the solar system will begin no later than 2014, according to Dale.

Despite the reduced costs to NASA, the Space Needle project represents a giant leap in astronaut amenities.

“The rotating restaurant will provide simulated Earth gravity, not to mention fresh salmon and Dungeness crab from Washington and Alaska waters,” Dale said.

“It was NASA spacecraft that originally inspired the tower’s architecture,” Dale reflected from his seat in the Needle’s whirling restaurant. “But now the tables are turning.”

(via seattle)

Teen Repellent

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I’d heard some time ago about the teen repellent noise — an ultrasonic tone that teens can hear, but adults can’t due to natural hearing loss as people age, that gets annoying enough to drive teens away.

It was named the ‘Mosquito’ because the sound resembles that of a buzzing insect. And it works by emitting a harmless ultra sonic tone that generally can only be heard by people aged 25 and under. In trials, it has proven that the longer someone is exposed to the sound, the more annoying it becomes.

Crime Reduction Officer Bob Walton elaborated further: “Effectively, it’s a transmitter which sends out a specialised frequency noise which according to the manufacture is particularly audible to young people under the age of 25.

He said: “I’m in my fifties and when it’s turned on all I can hear is a very faint buzz. But I understand from young people who have been exposed to the noise, it is very annoying.”

Amusingly, not long after this started being used, the concept was appropriated and adapted by teenagers for use as a cellphone ring tone that they could hear but that their parents or teachers could not. Clever kids!

Here’s a site that has a selection of a few different ring tones at various frequencies, from 8 kHz up to 22.4 kHz, so you can test your own hearing abilities and see if you’d be able to hear (or be annoyed by) the tones.

My results:

You are a dog
Or maybe you are a mosquito, you certainly can’t be human.
The highest pitched ultrasonic mosquito ringtone that I can hear is 21.1kHz
Find out which ringtones you can hear!

Need a Hand?

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Apparently there’s enough to spare these days…

In South Plainfield, New Jersey: Severed hand found in nude dancer’s home.

A severed hand was found at the home of an exotic dancer who decorated her home with skulls, and she was charged with improper disposition of human remains, authorities said.

Friends said the hand had been given to the woman by a medical student.

[…]

Kay’s mother, Patricia Ann Kay, told the newspaper that her daughter bought the skulls from a mail order catalog. She said her daughter has always been fascinated with the macabre, and when she was a girl she collected animal skulls and snake skeletons.

“She has a flair for the dramatic,” Patricia Ann Kay said. “I have never tried to stop my children from doing whatever they want. As long as they are happy, aren’t hurting anyone, and it’s keeping them out of the poor house.”

In Springfield, Virginia: Customer at Market in Springfield Cuts Off His Hand

Igbal Asghar reached across the counter at Super Halal Meat market and passed two butchered chickens to the man with the familiar face. Then he ducked into the walk-in freezer to fetch the customer’s second order, goat meat.

When the butcher stepped out seconds later, the customer’s severed left hand lay on the floor by the meat saw, Asghar said. The customer ran down the Springfield store’s center aisle and into the front parking lot, leaving a trail of blood and yelling repeatedly that he was “not a terrorist.” Outside, another witness said, the man announced that he had used the meat saw to cut off his hand “for Allah.”

[…]

Asghar said the man’s son told him that evening that his father was on medication for mental problems. Dan Schmidt, a spokesman for the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, said authorities believe the man had mental health problems. Schmidt said he did not know whether doctors planned to try to re-attach the man’s hand.

Bizarre.

iTunes “Star Trek: The Next Generation – Main Theme From” by Erich Kunzel; Cincinnati Pops Orchestra from the album Symphonic Star Trek (1996, 1:43).

Stranger vs. Weekly in the Online World

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Seattle’s two alt-weeklys, The Stranger and the Seattle Weekly have been battling it out in this town for far longer than I’ve been around to witness it. In the time I’ve been here, though, I’ve pretty much settled on grabbing a copy of each when I’ve got time to read both; if I only have time to read or skim one, I’ll generally grab the Stranger (if for no other reason that it tends to be more entertainingly snarky).

Each paper has been re-vamping their respective websites over the past year or so. Last year sometime, the Stranger waded into the weblog world with Slog, which after a somewhat clumsy start has been running strong (and was doing the best reporting in town on the Capitol Hill shooting at the time). Not long afterwards came Line Out, focusing more on the local music scene.

The Seattle Weekly just stepped up to the plate today, going live with not just one but three blogs: The Daily Weekly (“News, Politics, Media”), Post Alley (“Seattle Arts & Culture”), and Mossblog (an online companion to Knute Berger’s ‘Mossback‘ column.

While things just went live, so it’s going to be a bit before they really settle in and get in the groove (they’re in the process of figuring out how to turn comments on), it’s a promising start.

One nice thing I noticed immediately, though, is going to end up making me more of a regular reader of the Weekly rather than the Stranger: easy to find, obvious RSS feeds for everything. Where the Stranger is only providing RSS feeds for their two blogs, the Weekly has RSS feeds embedded into every page (for easy auto-discovery by web browsers or feed readers), easy links on every page to specific RSS feeds for that section of the paper, and links on every page to their main RSS page, which lists all their available feeds — including one catchall feed for the entire current issue.

Admittedly, it’s not perfect — while the Daily Weekly gets a full-text feed (yay!), the main issue feed has only one-line summaries (boo!). While I can understand why they might not want to go for a full-text feed for their entire issue (after all, it is advertising dollars that fund the paper), I do wish they’d at least provide a better summary — a paragraph, whether hand-crafted or just one single opening paragraph lifted from the article. Single-sentence descriptions might catch my eye, but all too often, they just don’t give enough context or information to really grab my interest.

At the same time…even that single line description is a lot more information than the Stranger gives me when they get a new issue up. So kudos to the Weekly…and hey! Stranger! Step it up, will ya?

iTunes “Supernaut” by 1000 Homo DJs from the album Supernaut (1992, 6:42).