January 3, 2011
The Young Shuffle is a style of running named for Australian potato farmer and athlete, Cliff Young (1922 — 2003). Young won the 544 mile Melbourne Ultramarathon at age 61, running in overalls and gumboots. He grew up on a 2000 acre farm in Beech Forest in south-western Victoria with approximately 2,000 sheep that he roundup on foot. He arrived at the 1983 Melbourne to Sydney ultramarathon as an unknown. He ran at a slow loping pace and trailed the leaders for most of the course, but by denying himself sleep and running while the others slept he slowly gained on them and eventually won by a large margin.
Before running the race he told the press that he had previously run for two to three days straight rounding up sheep. He claimed afterwards that during the race he imagined that he was running after sheep and trying to outrun a storm. The run took him five days, 15 hours and four minutes, trimming almost two days off the record for any previous run between Sydney and Melbourne. All of the six competitors who finished the race broke the previous record, but Young beat them by running while they were sleeping, and by using an ungainly looking, but very energy efficient running style that his since been dubbed the Young Shuffle.
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January 3, 2011
Personal rapid transit (PRT), also called personal automated transport (PAT) or podcar, is a public transportation mode featuring small automated vehicles operating on a network of specially-built guide ways. PRT is a type of automated guideway transit (AGT), which also includes systems with larger vehicles, all the way to small subway systems.
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January 3, 2011
Masdar (Arabic for ‘source’) is a project in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Its core is a planned city, designed by the British architectural firm Foster + Partners. Masdar City will rely entirely on solar energy and other renewable energy sources, with a sustainable, zero-carbon, zero-waste ecology, and is designated as a car-free zone.
It is being built by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, a subsidiary of Mubadala Development Company, with the majority of seed capital provided by the government of Abu Dhabi. Construction is underway 11 mi east-south-east of the city of Abu Dhabi, beside Abu Dhabi International Airport. Skeptics are concerned that the city will be only symbolic for Abu Dhabi, and that it may become just a luxury development for the wealthy, a city sized gated community.
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January 2, 2011
In photography, an omnidirectional camera is a camera with a 360-degree field of view in the horizontal plane, or with a visual field that covers (approximately) the entire sphere. Omnidirectional cameras are important in areas where large visual field coverage is needed, such as in panoramic photography and robotics.
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January 2, 2011
Fantastic Planet is a 1973 animated science fiction film directed by René Laloux, production designed by Roland Topor, written by both of them and animated at Jiří Trnka Studio. The film was an international production between France and Czechoslovakia and was distributed in the United States by Roger Corman. The story is based on the novel ‘Oms en série,’ by the French writer Stefan Wul. The film is chiefly noted for Topor’s surreal imagery.
The film depicts a future in which human beings, known as ‘Oms’ (a play on the French word ‘hommes,’ meaning ‘men’), have been brought by the giant Draags to the Draag home world, where they are kept as pets (with collars). Most Oms are domesticated as pets, but others run wild, and are periodically exterminated. The Draags’ treatment of the Oms is ironically contrasted with their high level of technological and spiritual development. The Draag practice of meditation, whereby they commune psychically with each other and with different species, is shown in transformations of their shape and color.
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January 2, 2011
Birdy Nam Nam is a French DJ crew, originally formed to compete in the DMC World DJ Championship. Their self-titled debut album was released in 2006 on Uncivilized World Records and was created entirely on turntables.
In 2009 they released ‘Manual for Successful Rioting,’ an album that found the four programming and playing synths along with their turntables. The group’s name is taken from the 1968 Peter Sellers film ‘The Party,’ directed by Blake Edwards.
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January 1, 2011
The Magpul FMG-9 is a prototype for a folding machine gun, designed by Magpul Industries in 2008. It is made out of a light-weight polymer material rather than metal, making it easy to carry and conceal. It is also small enough even to fit in the back pocket of most pants.
It was developed for use by personal protection details such as the United States Secret Service. It is still a prototype and may or may not be made in large numbers for law enforcement agencies. The prototype uses Glock pistol firing mechanisms, specifically the 9mm Glock 17 pistol and the Glock 18 machine pistol.
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January 1, 2011
Temple Grandin (b. 1947) is an American doctor of animal science and professor at Colorado State University, bestselling author, and consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior. As a person with high-functioning autism, Grandin is also widely noted for her work in autism advocacy and is the inventor of the ‘hug machine’ designed to calm hypersensitive persons.
Grandin became well known after being described by Oliver Sacks in the title narrative of his book ‘An Anthropologist on Mars’ (1995); the title is derived from Grandin’s description of how she feels around neurotypical people. She first spoke in public about autism in the mid-1980s at the request of Ruth C. Sullivan, one of the founders of the Autism Society of America.
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January 1, 2011
Blockhead (real name Tony Simon) is an American Hip hop producer based in Manhattan, New York. Aside from his solo efforts released on the Ninja Tune label, he is most associated with producing for Aesop Rock, a rapper for the Definitive Jux independent hip hop label. He is also a member of the hip hop/comedy group Party Fun Action Committee. His father, the late Sidney Simon, was a well known sculptor in New York City.
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December 24, 2010
In Jamaican popular culture, a sound system is a group of disc jockeys, engineers and MCs playing ska, rocksteady or reggae music. The sound system scene is generally regarded as an important part of Jamaican cultural history and as being responsible for the rise of several modern Jamaican musical genres.
The sound system concept first became popular in the 1950s, in the ghettos of Kingston. DJs would load up a truck with a generator, turntables, and huge speakers and set up street parties. In the beginning, the DJs played American rhythm and blues music, but as time progressed the sound migrated to a local flavor.
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December 23, 2010
Tadoma is a method of communication used by deafblind individuals, in which they place their thumb on the speaker’s lips and their fingers along the jawline. The middle three fingers often fall along the speaker’s cheeks with the little finger picking up the vibrations of the speaker’s throat. It is sometimes referred to as ‘tactile lipreading,’ as the deafblind person feels the movement of the lips, as well as vibrations of the vocal cords, puffing of the cheeks and the warm air produced by nasal sounds such as ‘N’ and ‘M.’
It is a difficult method to learn and use, and is rarely used nowadays. However, a small number of deafblind people successfully use Tadoma in everyday communication. Helen Keller also used a form of Tadoma.
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December 23, 2010
TV-B-Gone is a type of simple universal remote control device for turning off a large majority of the current available brands of television sets. It was created to allow people in a public place to turn off nearby television sets, presumably because the broadcast was distracting them from other activities. Its inventor has referred to it as ‘an environmental management device.’
The device is part of a key-chain, and, like other remote devices, is battery-powered. Although it can require up to 69 seconds for the device to find the proper code for a particular television receiver, the most popular televisions turn off in the first few seconds. During the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, some individuals from gadget blog, Gizmodo brought a TV-B-Gone remote control and shut off many display monitors at booths and during demos affecting several companies. These actions caused the individual from Gizmodo to be banned for life from future CES events.
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The Daily Omnivore 