Archive for the ‘amazing’ Category
Crayon Physics
I found this video of a “crayon physics” game on Robert Scoble’s site – very cool!
Oregon Man Flies 193 Miles In Lawn Chair
I learned about this lawn chair flight from Matt Promise’s blog.
Balloons suspend Kent Couch in a lawn chair as he floats in the skies near Bend, Ore., Saturday, July 7, 2007. Couch, on his way to Idaho, carried a global positioning system device, a two-way radio, a digital camcorder and a cell phone. He also had instruments to measure his altitude and speed and about four plastic bags holding five gallons of water each to act as a ballast, he could turn a spigot, release water and rise.
Couch is the latest American to emulate Larry Walters — who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons. Walters had surprised an airline pilot, who radioed the control tower that he had just passed a guy in a lawn chair.
Here is an article on Fox News.
Kwajalein Atoll
When I worked at CompuServe around 1993, I saw a picture of Kwajalein Island on Alisa DeSisto’s cubicle wall. As it turns out, she was stationed there for a year or two. I was fascinated by the concept of people actually living on such a tiny island (about twice as long as the airport runway!) in the Pacific Ocean many hundreds of miles from any decent size chunk of land. Is this place cool, or what? 🙂 Click on the link or picture to view Kwajalein on Google Maps so you can explore virtually. Google allows zooming in to the 200 ft. resolution level.
The Real Rain Man
Who was the game winning pitcher in game three of the 1926 world series? Who were the four people in George Washington’s cabinet? When was Sir Walter Raleigh executed? What day of the week was that? Kim Peek has no trouble answering questions like these and thousands more from memory. He is the person the “Rain Man” character was based on. He reads eight books a day. A page that would normally take three minutes to read takes him eight to ten seconds. He reads the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye and retains 98% of it. The neurologist who originally diagnosed him only gave them five minutes of his time because he was late for a golf game; he said they should put Kim in an institution and forget about him.
Other parts of the series:
