Tom McMahon

Some praise for this wonderful new book by world-famous travel photographer David Sanger and writer John Hart:

"This impressive collaboration between an environmental historian and a nature photographer is a celebration of the San Francisco Bay's natural beauty and environmental value. As a life-long San Franciscan who has a deep admiration for the Bay, I believe residents and visitors alike will enjoy this wonderful introduction to the Bay and will be moved to cherish and protect this California treasure."

– Senator Dianne Feinstein

"The bay is brought beautifully to life through Sanger’s eye for the spectacular vista and the unusual angle, as well as his passionate understanding of the details that make up the whole.”

– George Olson, Director of Photography, Sunset magazine

"John Hart and David Sanger bring us a deft blend of very readable history, accessible science, and alluring photography. More importantly, they remind us that an engaged citizenry truly can make a difference in preserving the Earth's ecological bounty."

– Steven J. McCormick, President and CEO of The Nature Conservancy

"For those of us born and raised along the California coast, this book confirms again, through the beauty of its photographs, the great natural treasure we have here in San Francisco Bay.”

—Leon E. Panetta, Director of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy

 

Authors is a popular card game that has been around for well over 130 years and is still a favorite for players both young and old. The game is very similar to “Go Fish” in where the players must request a specific card from the other player. If that player has the card her/she must give it to the caller. The caller continues until he/she does not gain the called card. When a player has all four cards in the “Book” (or set), he/she sets them aside and continues play. The card game continues until all complete “Books” are gathered. The player with the most sets of Authors wins the game.

Be sure to check out the other decks of Authors Cards too. 

BELVIDERE, ILLINOIS — Built by Frank Lloyd Wright, it’s believed to be the only chapel the famed architect designed and is an early example of what became his trademark “prairie” style.

But like many Frank Lloyd Wright designs, the Pettit Memorial Chapel in the Belvidere Cemetery fell victim to his love of letting nature flirt with man’s work. With no drain spouts and lots of square lines, the chapel was helpless against the onslaught of rain, wind and snow over the years, said Belvidere Cemetery board member Pat Purvis.

“Frank Lloyd Wright was all for the looks, but ... his buildings are hard to maintain,” said Purvis. As a longtime member of the Belvidere Junior Women’s Club, she helped raise money to restore the chapel once in the late 1970s. “He didn’t have rain spouts. He liked to see rain falling. He liked to see icicles. They were not built for good preservation.” 

From a lecture by Michael Crichton:

Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.

And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy…the list of consensus errors goes on and on.

 

A very nice first-person account by a pediatrics resident 

It started selling the financial calculator in 1981, the same year IBM Corp. introduced the personal computer. Today, with very few changes, the 12C is still HP's best-selling calculator. With its mortgage amortization and bond calculation functions, it is as essential to many real estate salespeople as a smile and firm handshake. When introduced, the calculator sold for about $150 -- more than $305 in current dollars. Today it retails for about $70. (via Fark) 

A set of checkers with hand-sculpted bottle caps for checker pieces. The caps are custom painted with red Coca-Cola pieces and white Coke pieces.

Also, you might want to check out the Lord of the Rings Checkers edition. 

A new Dutch invention can make cars, busses and other vehicles no less than 50 percent more efficient and thus more environmentally friendly. Better still, the technology is already available; it all comes down to a smart combination of existing systems. (via SachsReport) 

. . . is a build-it-yourself TiVo 

From Kevin Kelly -- Cool Tools:

In the summer of 2001, French filmmakers Gedeon and Jules Naudet began working on a profile of a rookie firefighter in New York City. They spent hundreds of hours filming an energetic probie named Tony Benetatos at a firehouse in lower Manhattan. It all was pretty standard, snoozy stuff: cooking meals, cleaning trucks, aligning boots. Then came the morning of September 11, when the company received a call to investigate a gas leak near the World Trade Center. Jules went on the call, heard a roar from above, snapped his camera skyward, and filmed the first plane striking Tower One. What follows was two hours of pandemonium, as the firefighters race to the scene, establish a command center and then watch all hell break loose. The most chilling part of the extraordinary 9/11 is how it captures the human element of a tragedy that is still unimaginable in its scope. Particularly eerie is the firefighter's slow realization that this is one blaze they won't put out. That's set against the steady and unnerving background sound of the bodies of tower jumpers smashing through the ground-floor atrium. Observes one firefighter: "How bad must it have been up there if the better option was to jump?" -- James Daly

9/11
2002, 120 min
By Gedeon, Jules Naudet and James Hanlon
$20
Amazon
 

The Vladivostok News:

Eleven participants in the Trans Continent Challenge Rally who headed all the way from Lisbon on the Atlantic to Vladivostok on the Pacific arrived in the city on Wednesday and were welcomed by Mayor Yuri Kopylov as well as Father Frost (Ded Moroz) and Snow Maiden (Snegurochka) participating in Russian Christmas festivities on the central square.

The rally participants were treated to traditional bread and salt and received memorable presents and books about Vladivostok from the mayor after they symbolically poured the water taken from the Atlantic Ocean into the Pacific waters of Zolotoi Rog Bay in Vladivostok

 

Four player chess? Here it is. Two, three, or four players pit kingdom against kingdom. Play in teams of two or individual games. Capture a king instead of checkmating him, and use his pieces against the rest of your opponents. Challenging fun. Standard chess board is also included for traditional chess action.  

Weird, yet oddly satisfying Flash animation. 

Atkins Nutritionals:

A recent survey commissioned by Prima, a leading British women’s magazine, gives us our opportunity. The results may seem shocking to young women who imagine that a health-club membership and a good attitude entitle them to claim that they are fit. Prima’s team compared the activity level of women 50 years ago with that of the average woman in 2003. The results were enlightening. How about this for a partial explanation of our current weight troubles: Back in 1953, a typical woman’s physical exertions burned 1,512 calories a day. Fifty years later, the average is 556 calories burned per woman per day. How about food consumption? The average daily intake for a woman in 1953 was 1,818 calories. Today, we take in 2,178. As you can see, the bigger difference is in how much less we exert ourselves.

 

USA Today — Danish toy maker Lego said Thursday it was expecting a $237.6 million pretax loss, the worst in the privately held company's 72-year history. The company, whose colored plastic building blocks have been a favorite children's toy for decades, fired executive vice president and chief operating officer Poul Plougmann over failed marketing strategies. Lego also dismissed Francesco Ciccolella, who was responsible for corporate development. Additionally, the company said it would possibly lay off some of its 8,000 workers worldwide. The company now plans to stop making the electronics and movie tie-in products and return to its core mission: producing plastic building blocks for children. (via Fark) 

Mark Steyn:

Whether the terrorist (a) does the proper paperwork upfront, (b) applies for a retrospective amnesty, (c) gets rejected and ordered to be deported, or (bonus category d) gets arrested for immigration violations and then released (like Sniper Boy John Lee Malvo), it makes no difference: Whichever menu option he selects, the federal government will let him carry on living here until he's decided which Americans he wants to kill.

The world's most powerful nation has an illegal immigration problem because it has a legal immigration problem. Transferring millions of people from the unofficial shadow network to the arthritic bureaucracy that allowed the problem to get this big is unlikely to solve it.

 

With the Lego Digital Designer, you can build anything in your imagination using virtual bricks, right on your computer. Free download. 

"If a Boeing 767 runs out of fuel at 41,000 feet what do you have? Answer: A 132 ton glider with a sink rate of over 2000 feet-per-minute and marginally enough hydraulic pressure to control the ailerons, elevator, and rudder. Put veteran pilots Bob Pearson and cool-as-a-cucumber Maurice Quintal in the cockpit and you've got the unbelievable but true story of Air Canada Flight 143, known ever since as the Gimli Glider." (via Incoming Signals) 

Lego Bible Stories from the Old Testament and the New Testament (via Cynical-C Blog) 

Replica of a human hamster wheel, used in the 1700s to 'put the sick person back on the right track'. From the Glore Psychiatric Museum. 

Mark Steyn:

In that sense, Dean is the perfect man to drive the party over the cliff. He says Vermont is the way America should be. You mean a land of broken-down farms for the natives and weekend homes for the wealthy? Where everyone in the eastern half drives out of state to shop, work and get medical treatment? Where the only kind of business is boutique mail-order specialities — the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Ben and Jerry’s Premium Ice Cream, Cold Hollow Apple Cider? Dean seems likely to complete the party’s transformation from a mass movement into an upscale niche business. Whenever he talks about the south, he sounds condescending. Likewise, the religious. Likewise, blacks. The Park Avenue populist is the perfect standard-bearer for an upper-middle-class college-town party.