one of my best friends is an army ranger. he is home on leave right now before his company deploys to iraq again. the other day he told me about these gloves they have that are made by oakley. they have a hard carbon fiber knuckle plating which makes these gloves more bad ass than van damme on a harley chasing a terrorist.
they are $70 and you can buy them at oakley.com
as described, exceedingly humbly, on the website, artsalive.ca:
A dance film that gently illustrates the assimilation of technology.
it’s dancing excavators. dancing to ballet music. this is awesome. watch it here.
also, this youtube video has it on abc with commentary by the artist.
my papa sent me this via email so i went and found the video on youtube to share. text is from the email and is unedited so i take no responsibility for it.
Amazing 45 second sequence. You may have to replay to see the bird that entered the engine. Go to large screen if you can. This is footage from the cockpit of an F-16. Cool reaction and professionalism of the two pilots, including cockpit transmission with video.
F-16 engine ingests bird after takeoff at Tyndall AFB. Think you might find it interesting to see a crash from the cockpit of an airplane. It is an instructor pilot in the rear and a student in the front seat of an F-16.
A “Bird Strike,” as seen through the Heads Up Display (HUD). You can see the bird flash by just prior to impacting the engine. You can hear the aircraft voice warning system telling them they have a problem and referring to the “D-6 NL” which means there is no engine RPM. They made two attempts to relight the jet engine, but evidently there was too much damage from the bird strike and they had to eject.
These guys were very cool; note the heavy breathing… They certainly flew longer than one would expect before ejecting. Airspeed can be observed on the HUD’s upper left corner. It goes down to the low 120’s As they struggle to get the engine going again, but as the plane noses over and dives to earth it increases to at least 175 just before impact.
It just goes to show how quickly your day can go to pieces – 45 seconds from strike to ejection. All and all, not bad. They ran the Emergency Checklist, made two relight attempts, and picked out a plowed field for impact before ejecting.
You can follow the audio attached to it and hear the conversation between the pilot and instructor pilot and then the tower.
Including the pilot saying they were punching out. The tower didn’t seem to completely understand it all, and missed the significance of the last transmission. The towers last radio call, he’s talking to an empty aircraft.
The video continues until impact, even after they both eject. A classic “buying the farm” as you can see the plow rows get bigger. A real nice job from the aircrew by keeping their cool and turning the aircraft away from populated areas. No one hurt and no one killed but the dirty bird did cost the Taxpayers a “few” million dollars!
peace
i’ve liked dane cook as a comic for about seven years now. i loved his energy and outlandishness. i’ve seen him several times and met him twice after his shows.
with that said, i don’t so much care for a lot of his new persona. i’m very happy that he, especially as a boston native, has achieved such success and fame. i followed him for a long time before anyone outside of the new england knew who he was, even after his comedy central show. so i’m very happy that his hard work has paid off.
but a few days ago i came across an mp3 mashup of jokes by louis ck and dane cook that are identical. the mp3 portrays dane cook as stealing or at least basing his jokes on jokes that were first done by louis ck. that would suck.
also, apparently this is old and i’m just now finding it. i don’t care, i think it’s worth propagating.
peace
i’m a member of the northeastern university student chapter of the american society of civil engineers, or nuasce as we like to call it. this past week we organized a field trip to a new construction project on campus called ‘parcel 18′. i’m sure it will eventually bear the name of some rich, former northeastern graduate who gives the school an assload of money, but for now it is known by the parcel number of the tax map it is on.
it is going to be a five story complex consisting of three residential dormitory towers, one low-rise cafeteria and an office building. it is located at the corner of ruggles and tremont street:
it has been a parking lot for years for the northeastern-owned building you can see to the right of the parcel as can be seen in this yahoo aerial:
here are some shots of the trip:
this is a shot of the building from ruggles t station which is the big white building in the top of the frame in the above aerials.
the staging area where the trailers and material are stored and managed.
looking up at the construction stairs. the construction elevator is the orange and plywood thing to the right.
sixth floor. this was as high as we could go for safety reasons.
sixth floor again. looking across from the east tower to the middle tower you can see the different floors.
on the sixth floor. asce members listening to our tour guide.
more photos on my flickr page.
peace
