Links to cool places or things.
There are 1,530 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 111 of 153).
East Raleigh got pummelled by the tornado
My favorite hyper-local news source, the Raleigh Public Record, has a Google Map showing the damage in Raleigh from last week’s tornado. My initial conclusion that no area was hit harder in Raleigh than East Raleigh’s Lockwood neighborhood are confirmed here, with whole strings of homes completely destroyed by the storm.
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I was sad to hear that war photographer Chris Hondros died while covering the fighting in Libya. He took amazing photographs of some of the rawest human events imaginable. I admire journalists who are still willing to go where the action is and bring it back to us. Sometimes that means putting one’s life in danger. It looks like Chris’s luck simply ran out.
I was thinking earlier today that I would’ve probably liked Chris had I met him, but upon reading more about him I realized I might have actually had my chance. Chris was photo editor at the Technician around the time of my week as a Technician photographer. He obviously took his photography more seriously than I did!
I salute the late Mr. Breuing. What an amazing life he lived – all 114 years of it!
Walter Breuning, the world’s oldest man and second-oldest person, died Thursday. He was 114.
Breuning was born Sept. 21, 1896, in Melrose, Minn., and spent his early years in De Smet, S.D. That first decade of the 1900s was literally a dark age for his family. They had no electricity or running water. A bath for young Walter would require his mother to fetch water from the well outside and heat it on the coal-burning stove.
This guy deserves a real medal of some sort. I’m stunned that he ever pulled this off.
A Chinese national who said he was the “supreme commander” of a made-up Army unit orchestrated an elaborate scheme that attracted recruits and their money with the promise that it was a path to U.S. citizenship, authorities allege.
Yupeng Deng, who is accused of raking in hundreds of dollars from his recruits, is set to be arraigned Wednesday on more than a dozen charges.
Los Angeles County prosecutors said Deng, also known as David Deng, recruited 100 other Chinese nationals, primarily in Asian enclaves in the San Gabriel Valley, to join the “U.S. Army/Military Special Forces Reserve unit,” then gave them phony U.S. Army uniforms and military ID cards.
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Update 10:09 AM: Read the press release from the LA County DA’s office.
I oppose discrimination in any form, but the story of gay UNC student Quinn Matney getting branded by an unknown assailant sounds mighty fishy to me. There are just too many holes in it. I’m reminded of the 2008 Ashley Todd case, where the victim admitted making it all up.
Quinn Matney was having trouble sleeping.
As the freshman took a walk on South Campus at about 3 a.m. on April 4, he said he ran into an acquaintance on the Craige Residence Hall footbridge. As the two spoke, a man sitting at a nearby picnic table stood up and grabbed him by the wrist, he said.
“Here’s a taste of hell you f—-ing fag,” Matney remembered the man saying.
The man branded Matney, who is gay, on the left wrist with an unidentified object, causing third- and fourth-degree burns that damaged three nerves and a tendon, leaving the freshman with no feeling in his thumb and limited mobility in his index finger, he said.
Matney said he tried to pull away — but the man didn’t let go until he received a hard punch to the face.
Update 3:30 PM: Matney was interviewed by the Durham Herald-Sun 7 months ago on his first day at UNC-CH, when Chancellor Thorp visited him and other students moving in.
Update 9:19 PM: Officials now say Matney made the whole thing up.
Why is it whenever I think up something cool to create, Steve Wozniak’s already beaten me to it?
This is from his open letter to the FCC defending Net Neutrality. Like me, Woz knows the value of open networks.
In the earliest days of satellite TV to homes, you would buy a receiver and pay a fee to get all the common cable channels. I had a large family (two adults, six kids) and felt like making every room a lot easier to wire for TV. Rather than place a satellite receiver in each room, I’d provide all the common channels on a normal cable, like cable companies do. In my garage, I set up three racks of satellite receivers. I paid for one receiver to access CNN. I paid for another to access TNT. I paid for others to access HBO and other such networks. I had about 30 or 40 channels done this way. I had modulators to put each of these channels onto standard cable TV channels on one cable, which was distributed throughout my home. I could buy any TV I liked and plug it in anywhere in the home and it immediately watch everything without having to install another satellite receiver in that room. I literally had my own cable TV ‘company’ in the garage, which I called Woz TV, except that I even kept signals in stereo, a quality step that virtually every cable company skipped.
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Our political leaders like to brag about protecting us from terrorists, yet yesterday an actual terrorist walked away a free man yet again. Luis Posada Carriles, who carried out multiple bombings through his past work as a CIA agent, was acquitted of immigration fraud in court yesterday.
The feds have no trouble locking up people who pose no threat to anyone, like Bradley Manning, but can’t seem to keep the cuffs on actual terrorists like Carriles, a man who boasts about the blood on his hands.
I was sorry to hear that Google passed on North Carolina for its Google Fiber project. Kansas City, Kansas won out.
I hope it had nothing to do with the animosity our state’s current leadership has shown towards high-speed broadband, but you never know.
After a careful review, today we’re very happy to announce that we will build our ultra high-speed network in Kansas City, Kansas. We’ve signed a development agreement with the city, and we’ll be working closely with local organizations, businesses and universities to bring a next-generation web experience to the community.
via Official Google Blog.
Update 9:26 PM: All hope may not be lost for NC after all.
Here’s a nice guide to repairing CFL bulbs yourself!
I don’t know about you, but I’m so used to the paradigm established by old-style incandescent bulbs that when one of my CFL’s “blows out,” it doesn’t even occur to me that I might be able to repair it in the garage. Or at least, it didn’t until I saw this page from Pavel Ruzicka, which does a good job of explaining the general principles of operation of CFL lamps and gives great details about their most common failure modes. Apparently, replacing a single capacitor will often do the trick. [via Hack a Day]
via Make: Online | Circuitry, Anatomy, and Repair Tips for Common CFL Lamps.
Meet Jake Barnett, a 12-year-old math prodigy from Indiana who is already blazing new trails in science.
“We were in the crowd, just sitting, listening to this guy ask the crowd if anyone knew why the moons going around Mars were potato-shaped and not round,” she recalls. “Jacob raised his hand and said, ‘Excuse me, but what are the sizes of the moons around Mars?’ “
The lecturer answered, and “Jacob looked at him and said the gravity of the planet . . . is so large that (the moon’s) gravity would not be able to pull it into a round shape.”
Silence.
“That entire building . . . everyone was just looking at him, like, ‘Who is this 3-year-old?’ “
via Genius at work: 12-year-old is studying at IUPUI | The Indianapolis Star | indystar.com.
