Daily archives: January 11, 2006

Celluloid Skyline

This entry was posted in King Kong New York on by

A gorgeous interactive site about New York, both its real and cinematic. A companion to the book of the same name. I had to drag myself away from it because I want to get things done this afternoon.

The first is a real city, an urban agglomeration of millions. The second is a mythic city, so rich in memory and association and sense of place that to people everywhere it has come to seem real: the New York of such films such as 42nd Street, Rear Window, King Kong, Dead End, The Naked City, Ghostbusters, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver, and Do the Right Thing. A dream city of the imagination, born of that most pervasive of dream media, the movies.

Technorati tag: , ,

Flight of the Bumble Bee

This entry was posted in Creationism on by

Using high speed digital photography and a robotic wing scientists have been able to explain how bees fly, slapping down another of the shoddy arguments used by the Intelligent Design brigade.

Turns out bee flight mechanisms are more exotic than thought.

“The honeybees have a rapid wing beat,” Altshuler told LiveScience. “In contrast to the fruit fly that has one eightieth the body size and flaps its wings 200 times each second, the much larger honeybee flaps its wings 230 times every second.”

This was a surprise because as insects get smaller, their aerodynamic performance decreases and to compensate, they tend to flap their wings faster.

Technorati tag: , ,

Daily Mail Watch- violent video games cause epilepsy?

This entry was posted in Daily Mail on by

It’s almost refreshing to see the Daily Mail is just as moronic and reactionary as ever. An 11 year old suffered a fit that showed all the signs of photo sensitive epilepsy whilst playing Resident Evil 4. The story contains all the facts necessary to contradict it’s premise- that violent video games are bad for you and, somehow, now make people epileptic- there’s a big warning in the instructions about flickering effects in the animation, the parents were shocked by the game’s content but didn’t seem to have paused for thought when seeing it was a 15 certificate.

The most stupid line is probably-

[Jack’s father] added that the fit could have had much more serious consequences if Jack had been alone and banged his head.

Give the man a stating-the-obvious award.

Technorati tag: , ,

If you're looking for my birthday present……..

This entry was posted in amazon nude Wants on by

Taschen produce loads of great books, thick volumes loaded with pictures and multilingual commentary. If you’d like to buy me a birthday present you could do worse than one of the volumes from their History of Men’s Magazines series. The Amazon link to the left is for volume 6: The Seventies under the counter. From Taschen’s bumpf about the series-

Open your notebooks, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for a history lesson like none you’ve ever experienced. You’re about to learn everything you could ever want to know about the world history of men’s magazines- not magazines about sports, not fashion, not hunting or fishing or how to build a birdhouse in ten easy steps, but those titillating periodicals embracing the subject dearest to all heterosexual men’s hearts and other body parts: the undraped female form. Former men’s magazine editor Dian Hanson traces its development from 1900 to 1980 in six massive and informative volumes.

via BoingBoing

Technorati tag: ,

Directory of Open Access Journals

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on by

I just found this in my links and, just in case I’ve never posted it before, I thought I’d post it here.

This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 1996 journals in the directory. Currently 492 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 83385 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

Technorati tag: ,