• English Russia » Uniforms In The Red Army

  This is an interesting list of Russian military men and their uniforms from the 20s of the twentieth century till the end of the Second World War.

  tags: russia

• English Russia » The Cemetery Of Jet Fighters

  Alone, old and now not dangerous fighters located near Moscow. They are a little bit disassembled, but still beautiful

  tags: russia

• English Russia » Effective Means of Intelligence

  The Tupolev Tu-143 “Reys” (“Flight”) is a Soviet reconnaissance drone which was created in the 60s and successfully used till the 90s.

  tags: russia drone uav

• English Russia » LEGO-Jeeping

  Contrary to the established opinion, LEGO is not just a construction kit with bricks, houses and little men. There are many different branches of LEGO-modelling, and one of them is model-car construction. These photos were made at an interesting competition – LEGO Offroader Racing in Moscow.

  tags: lego

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• 40 years of the Morris Marina – Telegraph

  April 1971 – the Beatles’ last LP is just a memory, the money system had gone decimal and the mood in the cinema is defined by the urban bleakness of Get Carter. The 1960s were well and truly over and if one wanted further proof, the venerable Morris Minor and Oxford were to be replaced by a vehicle that was to become a by-word for automotive ghastliness – the Morris Marina.

  tags: cars

• The Business Rusch: Royalty Statements Update | Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  I posted last week’s post on inaccurate e-book royalty statements issued by the traditional publishers. Much as I hate the term “the Big Six,” I’m going to use it here, just to delineate those publishers from other publishers that have sprung up in the past fifteen years.

  For those of you who haven’t read last week’s post, I suggest you click here, particularly if you are a traditionally published author who has had books published (now or in the past) with the Big Six. If you aren’t a traditionally published author, please forward this blog and last week’s to your writer friends who have had books published from well-known publishing houses. You (and/or those friends) need to check your royalty statements, and you must do so now.

  tags: business publishing ebooks

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• The forgotten people’s car – Telegraph

  In 1935, France’s Société des Ingénieurs de l’Automobile (SIA) announced a competition to stimulate the country’s industry, calling for proposals for a small, practical and economical car to cost no more than 8,000 francs. Le Corbusier and his cousin and business partner Pierre Jeanneret answered the challenge, and in 1936 submitted drawings for the vehicle they called Voiture Minimum.

  tags: car lecorbusier

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• On Stones in Japan, Tsunami Warnings — Aneyoshi Journal – NYTimes.com

  ANEYOSHI, Japan — The stone tablet has stood on this forested hillside since before they were born, but the villagers have faithfully obeyed the stark warning carved on its weathered face: “Do not build your homes below this point!”

  Residents say this injunction from their ancestors kept their tiny village of 11 households safely out of reach of the deadly tsunami last month that wiped out hundreds of miles of Japanese coast and rose to record heights near here. The waves stopped just 300 feet below the stone.

  tags: tsunami japan

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• Bike Messengers Pedal Past Bandwidth in Data Race | Raw File | Wired.com

  Digital files, cloud computing and accelerating broadband have long put bike messengers on the endangered species list. No matter how fast a messenger is, even a triple rush can’t compete with instantaneous. For messengers, technology is more of a threat than wily cab drivers and potholes.

  But, oddly, technology is also what keeps them around. The evolution of software and mobile phones has allowed some messenger companies to work in autonomous cells, rather than as an overhead-heavy hierarchy. A central headquarters is now obsolete, and profit-sharing employees take turns dispatching and making runs.

  tags: bike

• Phenomenal Video Footage of Extreme Sports From RC Helicopters | Singularity Hub

  There are spies in the skies, and they’re trying to catch you doing something awesome. As remote controlled flying drones have become more sophisticated and stronger, they’ve opened up a new field of amateur cinematography – the recording of extreme sports. Whether it’s surfing, skiing, or paragliding, RC helicopters fixed with durable cameras allow you to get aerial footage that will blow the minds of your friends and enemies alike. Catch some of the phenomenal shots captured by these miniature aircraft in the videos below. These clips are a taste of the extreme forms of lifelogging we can expect in the future as cameras and RC drones continue to improve.

  tags: video drone

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• Alan Wolfson – Miniature Urban Sculptures

  “Wolfson’s small, sculptured environments are mini slices of life full of intriguing contradictions. Sculpted without being sculptural, painterly without being paintings, narrative without a story, they exude a photographic or cinematic sense of reality while rarely depicting actual scenes or places. Creating them over the last twenty years, Wolfson has forged a unique place for himself in contemporary art.”

  tags: miniature art urban

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• Sabot – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  A sabot (pronounced /ˈseɪboʊ/ SAY-boh or /ˈsæboʊ/ SAB-oh) is a device used in a firearm or cannon to fire a projectile, such as a bullet, that is smaller than the bore diameter, or which must be held in a precise position. The term is also applied to a battery stub case, a device used similarly to make a small electrical battery usable in a device designed to employ a larger battery; see list of battery sizes. The name “sabot” comes from a French word for wooden shoes traditionally worn in some European countries, also called clogs.

  tags: weapons

• Darpa’s hologram goggles will unleash drone hell (Wired UK)

  The Pentagon’s mad-science arm wants robotic death-from-above, on demand. And the key to getting it done just might be holograms.

  tags: hologram weapons

• Solar panels are contagious (Wired UK)

  People are more likely to install solar panels if their neighbours have them, according to a study by marketing and economics researchers at Stanford University.

  According to the study, for every one percent increase in the number of installations in a particular postcode, the time it takes until the next adoption of solar panels decreases by one percent.

  tags: solar panels

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• Coilgun – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  A coilgun is a type of projectile accelerator that consists of one or more coils used as electromagnets in the configuration of a synchronous linear motor which accelerate a magnetic projectile to high velocity. The name Gauss gun is sometimes used for such devices in reference to Carl Friedrich Gauss, who formulated mathematical descriptions of the magnetic effect used by magnetic accelerators.

  tags: coilgun weapons

• Brazilian cops spot bad guys in a crowd with cyborg-style shades (Wired UK)

  The Brazilian police force is getting a little bit Terminator on its citizens. Well, on its criminals at least.

  No, they haven’t built a humanoid killer, they’ve just taken a cue from the augmented, analytical sight capabilities of cinema cyborgs. In the next few weeks, Brazilian police will begin testing pairs of ” RoboCop” glasses, which can identify a criminal’s face in a crowd of people.

  tags: police technology brazil

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• Two biographies of Ayn Rand. – By Johann Hari – Slate Magazine

  Ayn Rand is one of America’s great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that “the masses”—her readers—were “lice” and “parasites” who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is “evil” and selfishness is “the only virtue,” she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?

  tags: Ayn_Rand Objectivism politics

• Atlas Shrugged – and The Tea Party poured in to watch – Americas, World – The Independent

  Three hundred cinemas across America yesterday bore witness a curious social spectacle.

  In place of overweight men queuing for the latest Star Wars re-hash or spotty youths awaiting another Twilight installment was line after line of middle-age white people wearing tricorn hats, stars-and-stripes T-shirts and pin badges suggesting that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This is the Tea Party, on a big night out.

  The occasion was the launch of Atlas Shrugged, a film version of a novel written in 1957 by Ayn Rand.

  tags: atlasshrugged

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• OK Cafe Attacked by Police  —   MULE

  At about 1:00am last night a group of around eight police officers attempted to forcefully enter the OK Café on Liverpool Road, Castlefield. MULE reporter Tim Hunt witnessed the events.

  tags: okcafe police

• The Concrete Tomb of Hradzka – books to make my flist’s heads explode: John Ringo

  Once you get past GHOST’s initial spleen-venting, the PALADIN OF SHADOWS series falls into a much-maligned, much-loved genre which, for lack of a better name, I call “Man Builds Stuff and Gets Lots of Pussy.” This is, quite frankly, what got me reading the series: I am not much for stories of a guy just killing terrorists and getting laid a lot; but let him start building a small kingdom while killing terrorists and getting laid a lot, and I am there. I confess that have a soft spot for these kinds of stories. I suspect that *lots* of men do: even if we don’t build things ourselves, we like to *read about* guys building things: castles, weapons, companies, societies. It’s really very soothing; it combines the pleasures of fiction with a those of a do-it-yourself manual. The same impulses may explain why a lot of male writers aren’t content to have their hero just carrying, say, a 1911 as his sidearm; they have to tell you what make, model, whether it’s got an internal or external extractor, what aftermarket parts he’s tuned it up with, and who he bought them from, until you know all about his Kimber’s Ed Brown slide stop and Wolff springs.

  tags: books politics writing wtf

• The pedal car museum – Telegraph

  Four-hundred purchases and 25 years later, Collins has assembled the largest collection of pedal cars in Britain. Now he has put them on display in a specially converted Edwardian mill in East Sussex.

  tags: pedalcar museum

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• Five Chinese Crackers: I can see the Emperor’s winky

  A few weeks ago, I decided to read the Sun every day for a week with something similar in mind. I don’t know what I expected to find, but I had a vague idea that the Sun is like the Mail with a sense of humour, softer edges around its xenophobia and less prissiness about showing pictures of tits. Finding out whether this is true was supposed to do something or other. I forget what.

  But something happened while I was in the middle of both of these tasks. Although I was finding out some things that I was after, I started to hear a nagging at the back of my mind that grew steadily louder with each page I turned and each crappy article I trudged through until I couldn’t ignore it any longer. It made any enthusiasm I had drain from my body in thick, snotlike ropes. “Why are you even reading this?” it asked. “This is shit.”

  tags: TheSun Tabloids

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