Missing Mary Road

Almost thirty years ago, stuntman Dar Robinson leapt from the crown of the CN Tower with no parachute, no airbag, and only a thin wire looped around his torso to keep him from splattering on the sidewalk below. Today, we can relive that jump thanks to this excellent documentary video?uploaded by YouTube user Retrontario and posted at 1?T.O.?which, for no apparent reason, is narrated by Chuck Norris.

Robinson jumped from the CN Tower on two separate occasions. The first, in 1979, was for an action movie called Highpoint, in which Robinson was doubling for Christopher Plummer. Robinson wore a parachute for the original jump. It was, at the time, the highest such leap by any stuntman.

The second jump, in 1980, is the one shown in the video above. It was staged not for a movie, but for a documentary on Robinson, that eventually aired on ABC. According to Toronto Star articles from the time, Robinson received $250,000 to do it.

The video above is not from the 1980 documentary itself. It’s a segment on the MAKING OF the original documentary, from a second, completely separate documentary on Robinson, filmed in 1987. The occasion for the second documentary was Dar Robinson’s death, in 1986, after he (unintentionally) rode a motorcycle off a cliff during a routine stunt for another now-obscure eighties action movie.

Here, with more information on Dar Robinson’s untimely demise, is another YouTube clip?which, for no apparent reason, is hosted by Bill O’Reilly:

The revision thing: A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies

All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity.

Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil.

It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq. Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. You couldn’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror.

The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely.

Keep reading, it’s pretty awesome.

are you as cool as this guy?

when the internet was coming of age in the mid to late 90’s, the browser wars were kicking in.

technology has changed a whole lot since and so have the browsers, you can do more with the browser alone today than you were able to do with a fully loaded computer with all the shareware you could find hacked up from astalavista.

tom’s hardware has an awesome write up and comparison of the most popular browsers in the market available today.  aptly titled, the web browser grand prix, they set about an awesome methodology in comparing the big five, namely, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

my favourite being Opera did rather well which I was expecting completely. what it doesn’t measure is the usability and feature set of the browser, which in my opinion is far superior for Opera than any other browser.  the amount of customization one can do in Opera, along with mail and feeds integration, tab management, opera unite and link along with widgets makes it the most usable piece of software i have on my computer.

anyway, go and figure it out here, but do go through it carefully, it rocks.

the mariana’s trench all scaled up in a nice infopic.

Symbian OS developed by Nokia continues to rule the mobile smartphone world. The latest Gartner data for the 4th quarter of 2009 shows that Symbian leads with 46.9% market share with RIM in second at 19.9%. Unfortunately, Symbian saw a drop of 5.5% from the same quarter a year ago. RIM, iPhone, and Android platforms all saw large increases in market share and are definitely the ones to keep an eye on moving forward.

Looking at the manufacturer numbers we see that Nokia dominates the world with 36.4% (down from 38.6%) with Samsung in second at 19.5%. Nokia did outperform expecations in a down economy though and is still in a very strong leadership position.

Instead of sending people to the Moon, the US space program is sending robots to the Asteroid Belt. When these robots discover metals in the Belt, how will it affect the economy of Earth?

Discovery’s Robert Lamb reports on a lecture given by Vatican astronomer Guy J. Consolmagno, which was in part about the ethics of asteroid mining. Lamb writes:

Can you put a price tag on an asteroid? Sure you can. We know of roughly 750 S-class asteroids with a diameter of at least 1 kilometer. Many of these pass as near to the Earth as our own moon ? close enough to reach via spacecraft. As a typical asteroid is 10 percent metal, Brother Consolmango estimates that such an asteroid would contain 1 billion metric tons of iron. That’s as much as we mine out of the globe every year, a supply worth trillions and trillions of dollars. Subtract the tens of billions it would cost to exploit such a rock, and you still have a serious profit on your hands.

But is this ethical? Brother Consolmango asked us to ponder whether such an asteroid harvest would drastically disrupt the economies of resource-exporting nations. What would happen to most of Africa? What would it do to the cost of iron ore? And what about refining and manufacturing? If we spend the money to harvest iron in space, why not outsource the other related processes as well? Imagine a future in which solar-powered robots toil in lunar or orbital factories.

“On the one hand, it’s great,” Brother Consolmango said. “You’ve now taken all of this dirty industry off the surface of the Earth. On the other hand, you’ve put a whole lot of people out of work. If you’ve got a robot doing the mining, why not another robot doing the manufacturing? And now you’ve just put all of China out of work. What are the ethical implications of this kind of major shift?”

The question is interesting. A number of authors, including Ken MacLeod and Paul McAuley, have suggested that Earth’s future economy may become rigidly environmentalist to preserve the planet’s habitability. Development planetside will grind to a halt, but old-fashioned dirty industry will thrive in space. So you could wind up with two human economies: A controlled, stable-state one on Earth, and a crazily free market one offworld.

A Swiss freediver held his breath underwater for 19 minutes and 21 seconds, according to news reports this week. The gasp-inducing feat beat the previous world record by 19 seconds, and blew away the record of 17 minutes and four seconds that magician David Blaine set on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in 2008.

For most ordinary humans, all that breath-holding can be hard to fathom. The feat might also bring up some basic questions about biology. For example: Is it really possible to survive without inhaling for that long? And is it healthy?

“It is, as a matter of fact, possible — with certain tricks,” explained Claes Lundgren, a physiologist at the University of Buffalo School of Medicine in New York.

It is probably not, however, good for you, and consequences can be deadly.

The first announcement by Nokia at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona is the introduction of MeeGo. In a significant development in the convergence of communications and computing, Intel Corporation and Nokia are merging their popular Moblin and Maemo software platforms. This will create a unified Linux-based platform that will run on multiple hardware platforms across a wide range of computing devices, including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, media phones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems. Called MeeGo, the open software platform will accelerate industry innovation and time-to-market for a wealth of new Internet-based applications and services and exciting user experiences. MeeGo-based devices from Nokia and other manufacturers are expected to be launched later this year. This announcement strengthens the Nokia and Intel relationship, and builds on the companies’ broad strategic collaboration announced in June 2009. Intel and Nokia now invite participation in MeeGo from existing Maemo and Moblin global communities and across the communications and computing industries. “Our vision for seamlessly communicating between computing devices from the home, auto, office or your pocket is taking a big step forward today with the introduction of MeeGo,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini. “This is a foundational step in our evolving relationship with Nokia. The merging of these two important assets into an open source platform is critical toward providing a terrific experience across a variety of devices and gaining cross industry support.”

apple (computers? devices?) these days reminds me more and more of fairy tales and other stories or rather the morals learnt (or lack thereof) from them. it’s funny how the company makes an announcement and the world of media just explodes all over the interwebs. anyway…so i suppose from my previous post you know what my stance on the new device is.

apple is a smart company. their UI’s are usually beautiful and they make sleek and elegant devices. usually in my experience, that’s all they are though, sleek and elegant, and not much else. also they’re flimsy, very, very flimsy. (if you’ve ever bought a first gen apple product, you know what i’m talking about). take the new tablet for example.

they’re aiming for a netbook alternative, but they’re not gonna be  getting much out of it to because to keep their price point low, they’ve had to skimp out on hardware. pretty much no usb ports or SD support. super cool idea for a device that’s being advertised as a media box, don’t you think? and in true apple fashion, they’ll just charge you an arm and two legs for getting those plastic pieces of apple USB and SD adapters. same thing with 3G support. you want 3g on that thing, you may hand over 60% more money for the same thing without, thank you very much. good stuff. oh another thing seriously lacking, a camera. my n900 has two! one for making video calls forward facing, and another for shooting video and taking photos.

now let’s see…what else, oh yeah, wanna see what the web looks like using the ipad. click here and find out. err…get used to the blue logos. you’ll be seeing it a lot if you’re on the ipad. and if you’re interested in reading why Mac OS doesn’t support flash altogether…not well anway…well you can read here more about it and why they won’t be supporting it anytime soon either.

the other reason apple can afford to keep down their hardware costs is by making up most of the money in software, especially since they make huge cuts in the app store, itunes and  ibook sales. so what it boils down to, with apple, no such thing as a free lunch. it will be interesting to see how apple reacts to it’s software content distribution systems and the percentage it takes off it, as it sees the apps move from the stores to the web itself (case in point, google voice).

now giving credit where it’s due. both the ipod and iphone reinvented the future and brought it to us and handed it to us on a silver platter. it changed the way we consumed the technology and  we loved every minute of it. the ipad just took a step back unfortunately. it was designed to consume media. a sort of re-invented television, yet it’s being marketed as a computer which it hardly isn’t. a computer is something that is customizable both in terms of hardware and software, the ipad is neither. a user of a computer has a very intimate relationship with the computer itself. the very design of apple devices these days deny you that privilege. the whole reason why computers are in the shape and form that they are in today is because thirty years ago there were hackers and geeks tinkering away and messing with parts to improve upon and adding on devices and other electronics and fun toys to make their computers better, faster and using them in ways that the original manufacturing neither intended nor imagined. with the whole lock down of software (and now hardware, especially with proprietary hardware), the future is fast looking like a bleak place where there can be no innovation as far as the end users are concerned.

unfortunately without the lack of multiple apps running simultaneously, all the ipad is is something similar to changing channels on tv, good luck trying to watch two things at the same time, or for that matter, even choosing what playing, because the app store really doesn’t give you that choice, Apple does, and they control what gets to play. so you’ve got hundreds of channels, and nothings on. they got away with this business on a phone, i’m not sure how successful it would be on something thats meant to overlap with a computer. yes you can writeup quick emails and browse the app store and text in real fancy manners to other ipad users, but thats not the same thing as reconfiguring an entire computer to do something entirely different.

have a good day ladies and gents.

A physicist carefully examined the way R2D2 flies in Attack of the Clones, and has come to a startling discovery. Examining the thrust of R2’s flight, then adding in gravity and resistance, he discerned that R2 is lighter than styrofoam.

Rhett Alain, a physicist at Southeastern Louisiana University, first turns R2’s flight into a free body diagram, pictured here. Then he solves for F-thrust, assuming Earth gravity and some atmospheric resistance (you can see all his equations here). Then he reaches the fun part, which is figuring out R2’s mass.

Writes Allain, as he solves his equation for mass:
* rho = 1.2 kg/m3
* Area: Wookieepedia says that R2 is 0.96 meters tall. Using tracker video on an image of R2, I am going to approximate it as a rectangle that is 0.42 meters by 0.62 meters for an area of 0.26 m2
* Wikipedia lists the drag coefficient for a smooth sphere as 0.1. It has a smooth brick with a coefficient of 2.1. A skier has a coefficient of 1.0. Wikipedia does not list the drag coefficient for R2, but a value of around 1.0 seems reasonable.
* For the velocity, I took it a little far. I was just going to ballpark guess at his speed, but I didn’t. I used Tracker to look at R2’s motion in Clone Wars where he flies to rescue Padme. From this, I get a speed of 2.3 m/s.
* I already said I would assume Earth-like gravity. So, g will be 9.8 N/kg
* Theta is about 35 degrees (although it could be as high as 45 degrees).
Using these values, the mass of R2 is 0.1 kg. Yes, 100 grams. How do I know I am correct? I know because Wookieepedia doesn’t list R2’s mass or weight. They know it is silly, so they left it off.
If this mass is so low, I think R2 doesn’t even need thrusters. He would just float (which would actually change my calculations above – I left off the buoyancy force). By my estimations, R2 is about .42 meters in diameter. This would put its volume at about 0.1 m3 and R2’s density would be this:

I was originally thinking that maybe R2 was made of styrofoam – but that has a density of about 40 kg/m3. So there.

So basically R2 doesn’t need thrusters, and is made of spiderwebs. Makes perfect sense!

E-mail, IM, Facebook, phones—what if all of these ways to reach you over a network could be condensed into a single, unique number? The ENUM proposal aims to do just that, by giving everyone a single phone number that maps to all of their identifiers. Here’s how it works, and why it isn’t already widely used.