The National Park Service announced that the 397th national park will be in Patterson, NJ — a mere 30 miles from me! I had no idea that Patterson Great Falls even existed, but now I want to go to there.
Photo by eutrophication&hypoxia
The weight difference is unlikely to make much difference to holidaymakers’ baggage allowances, however, because each new tome is about as heavy as a single molecule of DNA.
Read the article for a full explanation.
(via Marginal Revolution)
From an old article about a White Sox / Rangers brawl:
George W. Bush, general partner of the Rangers, was in a box seat near the Texas dugout when the brawl broke out and said he considered for a second running onto the field.
“I thought about it, but then I saw Bo coming out and decided to stay where I was,” said Bush.
With quick thinking like that, is it any wonder he was such a fine president?
(via South Side Sox)
So this is an outrage — not because America is A-OK, but because these people are in no position to pass judgment.
Paul Krugman on the S&P’s big downgrade announcement.
(via @nbauman)
A copy of The New Yorker should not weigh 500 MB. … Condé Nast would never ship the paper magazine in a box that weighs 50 pounds. But that’s exactly what their digital editions feel like.
For most of my “web career”, I have been a definite taker of open source projects and not much of a giver. While I’ve always liked the idea of sharing work, I’ve always found an excuse to pass (not enough time, someone better than me should do that, baseball is on tv). Thankfully, Harvest asked me to spend some time working on a project we could share and no excuses were allowed.
Today, we officially released the first open source project I’ve been a significant contributor to. Chosen is a jQuery/Prototype plug-in for enhancing select boxes and I’m damn proud of it.
Chosen aims to solve a lot of the user experience issues presented by select boxes with way too many elements. It also aims to keep things easier for developers by relying on semantic markup and progressive enhancement. Double win.
After going through the experience of releasing an open source project, I’m disappointed it didn’t happen sooner. I used new tools and techniques (hello, CoffeeScript) through the process and the learning experience more than justified the time expenditure. I will definitely be going down this road again.
You can read more about Chosen on its project page or on the Harvest Blog.
The economics department at Lehigh University took a stab at answering that very question:
On page 51 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry receives a letter detailing the equipment that he is required to purchase for Hogwarts. The letter is reproduced here. Centives went to Amazon.co.uk to estimate how much each of the items would cost.
[snip]
One Pair of Protective Gloves (Dragon Hide or Similar)
Would Spirafil Synthetic Insulation and GORE-TEX waterproofing technology qualify as ‘similar’ to Dragon Hide? If so then they’ll cost you about £76.
Their conclusion is that a year at Hogwarts will cost you about the same as a year at a private American college (like Lehigh). If they’re right, it’s easy to understand why the Weasley’s are so poor. Putting 7 kids through 7 years of Hogwarts would set them back about 2 million bucks. Tough to do on one government salary!
(via Marginal Revolution)
Kottke linked to a handful of 10 hour videos the other day and it continues to boggle my mind that YouTube can handle them. I imagine the file size for such a crazy length of video is fairly large.
It seems that almost all of the 10 hour are computer generated, so their creation time isn’t anywhere near as long as the time it takes to watch them start to finish. I did stumble across one that, as far as I can tell, was filmed in real time: Jon Counts to 1,000,000.
The final 3 hours of counting to 1,000,000 come in part 2 of the video. Combined, they add up to whopping 77+ hours. It’s truly an insane act of video making.
This is a video of a 400 pound lioness trying to eat a small child at the zoo. Even though there are several inches of glass between the lion and child, there’s still something very disconcerting about watching a lion “attack” a helpless child.
After watching that video, it’s not hard to imagine what would happen if you wandered into the enclosure, right? You’d have to be nuts to wander into the den of a caged lion or tiger or…
Apparently, the people Buenos Aires disagree. Just give the Lujan Zoo $50 and sign their waiver acknowledging the animal might eat you and you can spend some time with adult lions, tigers and bears.
If you’re lucky, you might even get a giant tiger to roll over on its back like my chocolate lab. If you’re unlucky, well, you probably had it coming.
Sand Shovel by Ben Bunch
For the right price in Las Vegas, you can live out any number of boyhood fantasies (easy buddy, we’re gonna keep this clean). You can drive Ferraris, Indy Cars and Dune Buggies, pilot Fighter Jets or play basketball with Michael Jordan. A new company called Dig This has created my favorite adolescent adventure yet: construction equipment playground.
I’ve transcribed their terrible, flash-laden website so you don’t have to:
Under the watchful eye of our experienced instructors you will be successfully operating one of these yellow giants in less than 10 minutes through a course that will take you through a series of at least 3 activities where you will move mountains, stack monster rocks, dig huge holes, and so much more.
Who’s up for a Vegas weekend? I can’t wait to get back to my glory days in the sandbox. I mean, how much different can a 3 ton Caterpillar excavator be from the 3 pound Tonka version?
Patrick Filler lives in Hoboken, NJ with his fiancée, Kristina, and his dog, Jackie Brown. He’s a web developer by trade who spends his free time eating pizza, drinking coffee and watching baseball and football. Occasionally, he blogs here.
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