Missing Mary Road

okay so my bad, adukaka did send me a new and improved with typos etc fixed but i didn’t post it in time before i realized other people were catching on.

so here you go, updated karachipoly. any suggestions/improvements, please drop a line below.

courtesy adukaka. suggestions, modifications recommended.

Warner Bros. Animation is teaming with the Japanese animation house behind Batman: Gotham Knights and The Animatrix to dust off ol’ Lion-O and his refugee clan from Thundera for a new Cartoon Network series.

This new Thundercats will have a decidedly anime flair, given that it’s being coproduced by Japan’s Studio4ºC, the animation house behind Halo Legends and the Oscar-nominated feature, Tekkonkinkreet.

Here’s the official press release:

Warner Bros. Animation (WBA) has begun production on ThunderCats, an all-new animated series for Cartoon Network, based upon the iconic 1980s action classic. ThunderCats is the newest series from WBA, joining Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which was recently renewed for a third season, and the following forthcoming programs: The Looney Tunes Show, MAD, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated and Young Justice. The announcement was made today by Sam Register, Executive Vice President, Creative Affairs, Warner Bros. Animation.

“In addition to being Warner Bros. Animation’s first anime series, ThunderCats marks our most ambitious foray yet into fantasy,” said Register. “The realism and dynamic visual style we’ve achieved are sure to thrill viewers, and the cool weapons, vehicles and technology should help the show appeal to a diverse audience.”

The 21st century reimagining of the series marks a creative collaboration between WBA and Studio4°C, one of the most vibrant animation studios in Japan, with credits including The Animatrix, Gotham Knights and Halo Legends. WBA is working closely with Studio4°C, utilizing the latter’s expertise to give the ThunderCats characters a new cutting-edge look while remaining true to the compelling storylines and mythology of the original series.

“We at Studio4°C are excited to be in this creative partnership with Warner Bros. Animation to bring ThunderCats to life,” said Eiko Tanaka, President and CEO, Studio4°C. “This collaboration combines the strengths of our two companies — high production values and great storytelling — toward reintroducing this classic fan-favorite to a new audience.”

Roaring to life through WBA and Studio4°C’s use of the Japanese animated artistry of anime, ThunderCats characters Lion-O, Mumm-Ra, Panthro, Cheetara and others will spring off the screen with realistic cat-like characteristics inconceivable in previous incarnations.

The new ThunderCats will appeal to viewers who have loved the characters all their lives as well as young newcomers to the franchise. A sweeping tale combining swords and science and boasting ferocious battles with the highest of stakes, the grand origin story of Prince Lion-O’s ascension to the throne – and of those who would thwart his destiny at any cost — takes on epic dimensions in this sharp new telling. As the forces of good and evil battle each other in the quest for the fabled Stones of Power, Lion-O and his champions learn valuable lessons of loyalty, honor and mortality in every episode.

ThunderCats is executive produced by Sam Register (Teen Titans, Ben 10, Batman: The Brave and the Bold). Michael Jelenic (Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Wonder Woman) and Ethan Spaulding (Avatar: The Last Airbender) are the producers.

see my previous posts here and here.

so NASA answers how long you can live in space without any protection.

At NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (now renamed Johnson Space Center) we had a test subject accidentally exposed to a near vacuum (less than 1 psi) in an incident involving a leaking space suit in a vacuum chamber back in ‘65. He remained conscious for about 14 seconds, which is about the time it takes for O2 deprived blood to go from the lungs to the brain. The suit probably did not reach a hard vacuum, and we began repressurizing the chamber within 15 seconds. The subject regained consciousness at around 15,000 feet equivalent altitude. The subject later reported that he could feel and hear the air leaking out, and his last conscious memory was of the water on his tongue beginning to boil.

keep reading. its full of awesome explanations.

so you know back when google did their unconventional speed tests for the chrome browser (which i’m not personally a fan of, but still prefer it over firefox). opera did one better, and this is why opera will always remain to be the better browser across any platform. if you don’t get it, you really should click on the google speed test to see what the fuss is all about.

click to make bigger. scroll and enjoy.

hopefully this is true.

IT left Earth 33 years ago, now it’s claimed the Voyager 2 spacecraft may have been hijacked by aliens after sending back data messages NASA scientists can’t decode.

NASA installed a 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it.

But now the spacecraft is sending back what sounds like an answer: Signals in an unknown data format!

The best scientific minds have so far not been able to decipher the strange information – is it a secret message?

Geocities, once the charm of the internets, was shut down last october by yahoo. now in it’s memory, the spirit of geocities lives on. the Geocities-izer does you the enormous favor of transforming your favorite (or least) website into not just a Geocities page, but a really bad Geocities page. oh and good luck enjoying the lame midi files. it’s like a blast from the past.

For decades physicists have suspected that neutrinos hold some of the universe’s darkest secrets. Determining their behavior and where they came from could tell rich stories of the early universe and potentially illuminate the curious nature of dark matter. Untold trillions of these tiny subatomic particles—some born soon after the birth of the universe, others born in the hearts of stars—have traveled unimaginable distances to pass through your body every second. So what does this mean for you? Not much, really. The nearly massless particles pass through almost all matter unabated, without leaving a trace. It’s this elusive nature that also makes them so difficult to detect and therefore study. Very occasionally, however, a neutrino collides into an atom, producing from the wreckage another particle—known as a muon—that can be detected (using special light sensors). At the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a team of pioneering researchers has buried thousands of these sensors miles deep into the ice at the bottom of the Earth, all in an attempt to catch the rare neutrino that crashes into an atom of ice.

26 of NASA’s legends, including Cernan, Armstrong, and Lovell have blasted Obama’s new space plan.

The United States entered into the challenge of space exploration under President Eisenhower’s first term, however, it was the Soviet Union who excelled in those early years.

Under the bold vision of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and with the overwhelming approval of the American people, we rapidly closed the gap in the final third; of the 20th century, and became the world leader in space exploration.
America’s space accomplishments earned the respect and admiration of the world. Science probes were unlocking the secrets of the cosmos; space technology was providing instantaneous worldwide communication; orbital sentinels were helping man understand the vagaries of nature.

Above all else, the people around the world were inspired by the human exploration of space and the expanding of man’s frontier. It suggested that what had been thought to be impossible was now within reach. Students were inspired to prepare themselves to be a part of this new age.

World leadership in space was not achieved easily. In the first half-century of the space age, our country made a significant financial investment, thousands of Americans dedicated themselves to the effort, and some gave their lives to achieve the dream of a nation.

In the latter part of the first half century of the space age, Americans and their international partners focused primarily on exploiting the near frontiers of space with the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.

As a result of the tragic loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, it was concluded that our space policy required a new strategic vision. Extensive studies and analysis led to this new mandate: meet our existing commitments, return to our exploration roots, return to the moon, and prepare to venture further outward to the asteroids and to Mars.
The program was named Constellation In the ensuing years, this plan was endorsed by two Presidents of different parties and approved by both Democratic and Republican congresses.

The Columbia Accident Board had given Nasa a number of recommendations fundamental to the Constellation architecture which were duly incorporated. The Ares rocket family was patterned after the Von Braun Modular concept so essential to the success of the Saturn 1B and the Saturn 5.

A number of components in the Ares 1 rocket would become the foundation of the very large heavy lift Ares V, thus reducing the total development costs substantially. After the Ares 1 becomes operational, the only major new components necessary for the Ares V would be the larger propellant tanks to support the heavy lift requirements.

The design and the production of the flight components and infrastructure to implement this vision was well underway. Detailed planning of all the major sectors of the program had begun. Enthusiasm within Nasa and throughout the country was very high.

When President Obama recently released his budget for Nasa, he proposed a slight increase in total funding, substantial research and technology development, an extension of the International Space Station operation until 2020, long range planning for a new but undefined heavy lift rocket and significant funding for the development of commercial access to low earth orbit

Although some of these proposals have merit, the accompanying decision to cancel the Constellation program, its Ares 1 and Ares V rockets, and the Orion spacecraft, is devastating.

America’s only path to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station will now be subject to an agreement with Russia to purchase space on their Soyuz – at a price of over 50 million dollars per seat with significant increases expected in the near future – until we have the capacity to provide transportation for ourselves.

The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.

It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus billion investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded.

For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.

While the President’s plan envisages humans traveling away from Earth and perhaps toward Mars at some time in the future, the lack of developed rockets and spacecraft will assure that ability will not be available for many years.

Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity. America must decide if it wishes to remain a leader in space. If it does, we should institute a program which will give us the very best chance of achieving that goal.

Neil Armstrong
Commander, Apollo 11

James Lovell
Commander, Apollo 13

Eugene Cernan
Commander, Apollo 17

Chris Kraft
Johnson Space Center Past Director

Jack Lousma
Skylab 3, STS 3

Vance Brand
Apollo-Soyuz, STS-5, STS-41B, STS-35

Bob Crippen
STS-1, STS-7, STS-41C, STS-41G, Kennedy Space Center Past Director

Michael D. Griffin
Past NASA Administrator

Ed Gibson
Skylab 4

Jim Kennedy
Kennedy Space Center Past Director

Alan Bean
Apollo 12, Skylab 3

Alfred M. Worden
Apollo 15

Scott Carpenter
Mercury Astronaut

Glynn Lunney
Gemini-Apollo Flight Director

Jim McDivitt Gemini 4
Apollo 9 Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager

Gene Kranz
Gemini-Apollo Flight Director, NASA Mission Ops. Past Director

Joe Kerwin
Skylab 2

Fred Haise
Apollo 13, Shuttle Landing Tests

Gerald Carr
Skylab 4

Jake Garn
STS-51D, U.S. Senator

Charlie Duke
Apollo 16

Bruce McCandless
STS-41B, STS-31

Frank Borman
Gemini 7, Apollo 8

Paul Weitz
Skylab 2, STS-6

George Mueller
Past Associate Administrator For Manned Space Flight

Harrison Schmitt
Apollo 17, U.S. Senator

Dick Gordon
Gemini 11, Apollo 12

During the climactic men’s hockey game at the end of this winter’s Olympics, Toronto was united by a lot more than enthusiasm for sports. As this graph of the city’s water usage during the game clearly shows, Torontonians were also remarkably synchronized that night in the timing of their trips to the washroom, with massive spikes in water consumption to coincide with each intermission in play and a huge dip in usage following Sidney Crosby’s winning goal. This was almost certainly due to toilets, citywide, flushing, and not flushing, in unison. Bladders were straining together all over Toronto.

Similar graphs showing water usage in Edmonton and Winnipeg have already made the news?but this graph, from Toronto Water, our city’s water-supply agency, is the first evidence specifically in Toronto.

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: