November 15, 2010
City Hall station, also known as City Hall Loop, was the original southern terminal of the first line of the New York City Subway, built by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), named the ‘Manhattan Main Line,’ and now part of the IRT Lexington Avenue Line. Opened on October 27, 1904, this station underneath the public area in front of City Hall was designed to be the showpiece of the new subway. The station was designed by Spanish architect, Rafael Guastavino.
This station is unusually elegant in architectural style, and is unique among the original IRT stations, employing Romanesque Revival architecture. The platform and mezzanine feature Guastavino tile, skylights, colored glass tilework and brass chandeliers. Passenger service was discontinued on December 31, 1945, making it a ghost station, although the station is still used as a turning loop for 6 and <6> trains.
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November 15, 2010
A kytoon [kahy-toon] (kite + balloon) is a kite with a significant amount of aerostatic lift from a lighter than air gas carried within. The primary advantage of a kytoon is that it remains up and at a reasonably stable position above the tether point, irrespective of the wind. Kytoons have been used in peace and war, been employed for raising rescue signals, antennae, and turbines for generating electricity.
Kytoons may be flown in earth or other planetary atmospheres. Any gas may be used to inflate the bladder parts of a kytoon. Hydrogen, methane, air, helium, etc. may be used to inflate the balloon aspect of a kytoon.
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November 15, 2010
A paravane [par-uh-veyn], also called a water kite, is a towed winged (hydrofoiled) underwater object. Paravanes have applications in sport or commercial fishing, marine exploration, and defense. Navies equip paravanes with cable cutters to sever moored mines, and explosive paravanes are essentially towable mines. Commercial fishers use paravanes to tow bait and lead fish into trolling nets. Paravanes are also used for sampling water chemistry, taking seismic readings, and mapping marine geography.
Human-on-board paravanes are used to transport explorers, scuba divers, and spear-fishers. Foilboards used for recreation are also a type of water kite. Early work in coupling water kites was done by the late J.C. Hagedoorn, a geophysics professor at Delft University. His system coupled manned parafoils with water kites he named ‘hapas.’ Later experimenters also used the terminology ‘chien de mer’ (French for ‘sea dog’).
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November 15, 2010
A foilboard or hydrofoil board is a surfboard with a hydrofoil that extends below the board into the water. Laird Hamilton, a prominent figure in the invention of tow-in surfing (the use of a jet ski to tow the rider into a wave), is credited with popularizing the foilboard. Mango Carafino, a big wave tow surfing athlete and water sport instructor from the Hawaiian Island of Maui, is the leading developer of the hydrofoil board design for stand-up hydro foil boarding applications.
The stand-up design allows the rider to glide with the moving wave and eliminates the effects of choppy or rough conditions. Kite surfing with a foilboard allows the rider to angle higher into the wind than on traditional boards which ride on the surface of the water. As a result of reduced friction, hydrofoils can attain high speeds and lift at lower speeds compared to conventional designs. In addition to surfboards, hydrofoils have been employed on wakeboards, skis, seat towers, and windsurfers.
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November 15, 2010
Lee’s Sandwiches is an American fast food restaurant chain specializing in Vietnamese cuisine. While originally famous for selling French baguette bánh mì (Vietnamese sandwiches), the chain has expanded its offering to many other goods, including packaged spring rolls, desserts, and other food to go items.
The first Lee’s opened in San Jose, California in 1980. There are now over three dozen locations in California, Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma, as well as a new restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The company has plans to expand in the Pacific states of Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
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November 15, 2010
Bánh mì [ban-me] is a Vietnamese baguette made with both wheat and rice flour. The term also refers to what is sometimes called a ‘Vietnamese sandwich’ or a ‘Saigon sub,” which is made up of thinly sliced pickled carrots and daikon, cucumbers, cilantro, chili peppers, pâté, mayonnaise and various meat fillings or tofu. Popular fillings include roasted pork, steamed pork belly, Vietnamese sausage, chicken, head cheese and ham.
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November 15, 2010
The Voynich manuscript is a handwritten book thought to have been written between 1404 and 1438, composed of 240 vellum (mammal skin) pages, most with illustrations. Despite centuries of research, the author, script, and language remain unknown. Some think the manuscript is an elaborate hoax, others believe it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine.
Generally presumed to be some kind of ciphertext (an encrypted document), the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. Yet it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a historical cryptology cause célèbre. The book is named after the Polish-Lithuanian-American book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. Currently the Voynich manuscript is owned by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.
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November 15, 2010
The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing. The Codex is divided into eleven chapters, partitioned into two sections. The first section appears to describe the natural world, dealing with flora, fauna, and physics. The second deals with the humanities, the various aspects of human life: clothing, history, cuisine, architecture and so on. The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in our world: bleeding fruit; a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one; a lovemaking couple that metamorphoses into an alligator; etc.
The language of the codex has defied complete analysis by linguists for decades. The number system used for numbering the pages, however, has been discovered to be a variation of base 21. In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles held in 2009, Serafini stated that the script of the Codex is asemic, that his own experience in writing it was closely similar to automatic writing, and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey to the ‘reader’ is the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand, although they see that their writing does make sense for grown-ups.
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November 15, 2010
A bug-out bag is a portable kit that contains the items one would require to survive for seventy two hours when evacuating from a disaster. It is also known as a 72-hour kit, a grab bag, or a battle box. The focus is on evacuation, rather than long-term survival, distinguishing it from a survival kit, boating or aviation emergency kit, or a fixed-site disaster supplies kit. Bug-out bags are popular in the survivalist community. The term is related to, and possibly derived from, the ‘bail-out bag’ emergency kit many military aviators carry.
Typical contents include: 1 Gallon H2O per person, per day; Non-perishable food, Water purification supplies, Cooking supplies (camp stove, sterno, utensils), First aid kit, Fire starting tool (matches, ferrocerium rod, lighter), Disaster plan (location of emergency centers, rallying points, possible evacuation routes), Emergency reference literature,Maps, Clothing (rain poncho, hat, gloves), Bedding (bedroll, blankets), Medicine, Medical records, Radio, Lighting (flashlight, glow sticks), Firearm, Cash, Identification cards, Knife, Duct Tape, Rope, Plastic tarps, and Wire.
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November 11, 2010
The Lamborghini Countach was a mid-engined sports car produced by Italian automaker Lamborghini from 1974 to 1990. A total of 2,042 cars were built during the Countach’s sixteen year lifetime: Its design both pioneered and popularized the wedge-shaped, sharply angled look popular in many high performance sports cars. The ‘cabin-forward’ design concept, which pushes the passenger compartment forward in order to accommodate a larger engine, was also popularized by the Countach.
The word ‘countach’ is an exclamation of astonishment in the local Piedmontese language — generally used by men on seeing an extremely beautiful woman. The Countach name stuck when Nuccio Bertone first saw ‘Project 112’ in his studio. The prototype was introduced to the world at the 1971 Geneva Motor Show. Most previous and subsequent Lamborghini car names were associated with bulls and bullfighting.
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November 11, 2010
In finance, an option is a contract between two parties to buy (call) or sell (put) an asset (typically a stock or bond) at a strike price by a specified expiration date after which the option is worthless and the contact is void. The price of an option derives from the value of an underlying asset plus a premium based on the time remaining until the expiration of the option. Other types of options exist, and options can in principle be created for any type of valuable asset. You would buy the stock (go long) or a call option if you anticipated the price of the underlying security was going to rise before the option reached expiration.
You would buy a put option if thought the price was going to fall, or you can short the stock, selling shares borrowed from a third party with the intention of buying identical assets back at a later date to return to the lender. Options are quoted in per share prices, but only sold in 100 share lots. For example, a call option might be quoted at $2, but you would pay $200 because options are always sold in 100-share lots. Options are identified by the month they expire, and the strike price. For example, an ‘XYZ April25 Call’ would be a call option on XYZ stock with a strike price of 25 that expires in April. All options expire on the third Friday of the month unless that Friday is a holiday, then the options expire on Thursday.
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November 11, 2010
The Eames [eemz] Lounge Chair, officially titled Eames Lounge (670) and Ottoman (671), were released in 1956 after years of development by designers Charles and Ray Eames for the Herman Miller furniture company. It was the first chair the Eames designed for a high-end market. They are made of molded plywood and leather, and examples of these furnishings are part of the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. They are prized for comfort, aesthetics, and for the pioneering use of new materials and manufacturing methods.
There is a decent used market for these chairs. Some collectors are willing to pay high prices for earlier chairs made with Brazilian Rosewood veneer, which is no longer available due to a worldwide embargo since 1992. Prices for original rosewood chairs have recently reached as much as $7,000 in auction. A new Eames Lounge Chair and ottoman starts at $3,200 for a Herman Miller model. In 2006, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the chair, Herman Miller released models using a sustainable Palisander Rosewood veneer.
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