Missing Mary Road

before

after

The pictures above are self explanatory and are taken on August 13th 2001 and August 18th 2010 respectively. Large images are also available, before and after.

The Indus River at Sukkur was at exceptionally high levels on August 18, 2010, when the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured the top false-color image. The upper image shows the Sukkur region on August 13, 2001. Water ranges from dark blue to silvery blue, and plant-covered land is red in the false-color image.

Sukkur is the hub of a crucial irrigation network that brings water to farms throughout the Sindh province. The dark blue canals surround the white-gray city of Sukkur in both images. In the bottom image, the Indus River extends over its banks across many kilometers. Near the city, the river seems to be held in check by the canals and associated structures.

The floods started in late July when intense monsoon rains fell over northern Pakistan. By mid-August, about one-fifth of Pakistan was flooded, affecting more than 15 million people.

Please find it in your hearts to donate some money for relief efforts here.

http://www.chowrangi.com/donation-links-and-relief-resources-for-pakistan-flood-victims.html

if you combine all tv and film characters and generate a university run by them, you get the below. unknown source. i’ve tried to identify most from my own known knowledge. see if you can fill in the rest. what other departments can you think of? who would fill the roles. who are better suited for the roles below? are any of the ones i’ve written below incorrect?

Dean of Science

Professors of Science

Dean of Engineering

Professors of Engineering

Dean of Business

Professors of Business

Dean of Law

Professors of Law

Dean of Arts

Professors of Arts

Dean of Humanities

Professors of Humanities

Dean of Sports

Professors of Sports

dean of dept of science = dr who
comp sci – chuck bartowski, chuck
med sci – house
math – a beautiful mind – john somethin
theoretical physics – lost, daniel faraday
astronomy – dunno
chemistry – walter white, breaking bad
biology – psycho from human centipede
marine biology – steve zissou, the life aquatic
psychology – hannibal lecter, silence of the lambs
para psychology – fox and mulder, x files
paleontology – jurassic park dude
archeology – indy jones
lab maintenance – i forget

dean of engineering – Q, most bond films
mech eng. – tony stark, iron man
astronautical – scotty, star trek
automotive – i think you already know this bit.
nuclear – peter sellers in dr. strangelove or: how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb
civil – danny day lewis in there will be blood
biological – dude from district 9
practical – angus macgyver
pharmacological – jonathane crane aka scarecrow in batman begins
applied physics – mythbusters dudes
architecture – ?
actuarial – ?

dean of business – gordon gecko from wall street
capital restructuring – various similar roles
public speaking – the tv ad infomercial guy who just died
mergers and & – american psycho or bruce wayne, could be either
corporate raiding – ?
marketing – jon hamm playing don draper in mad men
economics – ?
hostile takeover – hans, die hard
business management – tony soprano
transitional bm – ?
practical bm – steve carrell in the office

dean of law – john saul, breaking bad
corporate law – arrested development lawyer
criminology – ?
criminal justice – robocop
forensics – dexter
ethics – kiefer sutherland playing jack bauer in 24
business ethics – arrested development psycho dad
tactical litigation – kirk or law and order, take your pick
maritime law – sean connery in hunt for red october
tort – ?
bird – ?
habeas corpus – john mclane, die hard

dean of arts – bob ross, the joy of painting
graphic – mad men- bryan batt playing romano
film – ?
theatre – arrested development
fashion – zoolander
photography – hitchcock, rear window
painting – ed harris doing jason pollock
culinary arts – gordon ramsey
literature – ?
music/band – john williams
choir – nph, dr. horrible’s sing along blog
dance – river tam, firefly

dean of humanities – i forget,
journalism – ?
diplomacy – bond
theology – ?
philosophy – the dude, the big lebowski
political science – lolita?
womens studies – hank moody, californication
world languages – hans landa, inglorious basterds
linguistics – philleas fogg?
american history – deadwood
ancient history – ?
medieval history – mad max?
african american history – ?

dean of sports – gene hackman in hoosiers
golf – adam sandler, happy gilmore
hockey – the mighty ducks, emilio esteves
track and field – forrest gump
boxing – sly stallone, rocky
football – oj simpson
baseball – field of dreams
weightlifting – 300?
soccer – bend it like beckham

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:

a friend of mine writes very smart words and puts them down on paper and websites to share with all of us. this time he’s written a very good article.

do go and read it and leave him a comment.

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.

Israel has asked an Indian geneticist to study the link between the Indian Pathans tribe and certain tribes of Israel, the Times of India reported this week.

Geneticist Shahnaz Ali has been asked to study the link between the Afridi Pathans, based in the Lucknow region of India, and certain tribes of Israel who migrated across Asia thousands of years ago.

Ali is based in Haifa where she is working in collaboration with Israel’s prestigious university the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

The former New York City mayor who has sometimes been mocked for using “a noun, a verb and 9/11″ in stump speeches appears to have forgotten — or has mentally reclassified — the worst terrorist attack on American soil. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” Rudy Giuliani told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Friday.

Even if Giuliani doesn’t consider the attacks on 9/11 a “domestic” attack then surely he forgot about the anthrax attacks of 2001.

While ABC’s George Stephanopolous let Giuliani get away with his misstatement both during the interview and on his blog, ABC’s Jake Tapper called the former mayor out. “Giuliani’s comments that there were zero terrorist attacks under Bush, 1 under Obama, is false no matter how you slice it,” tweeted Tapper.

The former mayor criticized Obama for opting to handle the alleged bomber’s case in civilian court, essentially saying that the problem with civilian courts is that suspects are given lawyers.
“If you put someone in a civilian court, within a short period of time a lawyer is appointed and the person shuts up,” he remarked. “If you have a person in the military system, you can question him endlessly for as long as you have to to make sure you’ve got the full scope of information.”

Giuliani then praised Obama for using the phrase “war on terror.”

“I’m very hopeful that President Obama turned a corner yesterday,” he said. “He first used the words, thank goodness, ‘War on Terror.’”

so Avatar was a great piece of filmmaking and everything with super awesome special effects and all that but it was possibly a mediocre storyline at best and the plot has been done before in sci-fi over and over. but apparently, the Americans need psychotherapy after watching a damn movie. it’s unreal how this has become a news story, so i’ll post it here and file it under, “those yankees are nuts”.

James Cameron’s completely immersive spectacle “Avatar” may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.

New Jersey police detained 68-year old American music star Bob Dylan recently, after a young officer failed to recognize him. A disheveled Dylan was wearing a hoodie, wandering around in the rain looking at a house for sale. The 24-year-old female officer was responding to a phone call from the occupants of a home that had a “For Sale” sign on it. The residents were called in with a report of an “eccentric-looking old man” in their yard

“We got a call for a suspicious person,” Buble said. “It was pouring rain outside, and I was right around the corner so I responded. By that time he was walking down the street. I asked him what he was doing in the neighborhood and he said he was looking at a house for sale.”

“I asked him what his name was and he said, ‘Bob Dylan,’ Buble said. “Now, I’veseen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head.

“So I said, ‘OK Bob, what are you doing in Long Branch?’ He said he was touring the country with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. So now I’m really a little fishy about his story. I did not know what to believe or where he was coming from, or even who he was. We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something,” Buble said.

The August issue of Details magazine profiles Daniel Suelo, a college graduate (University of Colorado, Anthropology) who lives in a cave near Moab, UT.

On his website, Living Without Money, Suelo writes, “I’ve been living without a cent to my name since the autumn of 2000 (with a month’s exception during my first year). I don’t use or accept money or conscious barter, and I don’t take food stamps or other government dole.”

The 48-year-old Suelo has no credit cards, no mortgage, no bills whatsoever. He survives mainly by scavenging the streets and dumpsters for food and clothing. He also forages for wild edible plants and “ants, grubs, termites, lizards, and roadkill,” which he fries on a stove made from a cookie tin.

After graduating from college, Suelo worked for the Peace Corps in Ecuador and a women’s shelter in Moab. He lived in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand and joined the ascetic sadhus in India. Eventually, he became “enchanted” with the idea of living as “a vagabond in America, a bum, and make an art of it” and moved back to the United States. Shortly after that, he stopped using money.

His FAQ is especially interesting (“What happens if you get sick or injured?” “What do you do if you find money?” “What about relationships? Don’t you get lonely?”). You can also read Suelo’s blog, which he updates whenever he hikes an hour to the public library to use the Internet-connected computer there. Here’s a short documentary about Suelo here.

from left to right – Han, Vader, Chewie, Leia, Luke, and Artoo.

We may not all have pointy ears and sharp teeth, but Spanish scientists are convinced that inside every human lurks the best bat-power: echolocation, or navigating by sound. And they’re determined to show us all how to unlock it!

Juan Antonio Martínez and a team of researchers at the University of Alcalá de Henares taught a group of volunteers (and themselves) to make palate clicks similar to those used by dolphins — although at a much slower rate. The series of protocols they developed then called for subjects to learn to aim their own sounds, and then to recognize their echos to identify objects around them.

The scientists promise, though, that you don’t need to be blind (like famous echolocaters Daniel Kish and Ben Underwood) to awaken your latent echolocation skills. Martínez tells SINC:

Two hours per day for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you, and ithin another two weeks you can tell the difference between trees and a pavement.

In fact, the scientists who taught themselves echolocation can now detect far more than just the terrain ahead of them: they can identify bones and even objects hidden in a bag.
They hope that their techniques can be put to use in the future by firefighters, rescue workers, people lost in fog or those lost in bat-filled caves in West Virginia.