Forget SixFlags. The french people are about to realize an old mashup for the Eiffeltower, a huge free fall bullet for humans. At 300 meter height thrill seekers step into a four meter high metal cabin and will then have a free fall. At a 77 meter per second speed the projectile will go into a 50 meter deep basis to slow the speed. Inside the grenade several conical pilons will preserve physical health.
If it wasn't Mother Nature, who gave us ten fingers, we'd never heard of a thing called Qwerty. According to some, it was editor Christopher Sholes who invented the modern keyboard after some sleepless years in the late 1860s. But that's not true. He just made the machine that fits the fingers.
First keyboard designs showed an Abcdef-keyboard, just every character alphabetically in a three rows. Without a zero and one. People used the capital i and o for substitute. Unfortunately the typebars got stuck and he had to find another way to make the typing machine work. Many trial and errors later the Qwerty system was born. Over the years few keys have been added but one can still type TYPEWRITER from one keyboard row.
You might not think so but the pictures you see here are actually the same. On the left you see a tree, obviously. But when you apply few techniques on it - e.g. adjust the color information of the file, pixel by pixel - the same picture suddenly shows a cat.
The art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way is called Steganography. It is of Greek origin and means "covered, or hidden writing" and finds its way back 440 BC as Herodotus mentions two examples of steganography in The Histories of Herodotus. Only the sender and receiver know that there is a hidden message in the image. On this point it differs from cryptopgraphy where its clear that a message exsist but its coded.
Here you'll find more steganography examples (a little outdated).
Cyclist and especially those and dark and unclear roads are always aware of their limited visibility. Most of them have a light, ofcourse, but that's most of the time a lightpoint at a defined position. Car drives may not notice when they are not fully focused or having a difficult moment.
Alex Tee and Evan Gant at Altitude came up with a new concept of a personal light lane. The idea is that a bike not only need the space of the vehicle itself but for a safe ride also includes the invisible square around the bicycle. Light Lane sort of beams a virtual lane on the street.
I had my first ever email-address halfway the 1990s, probably at the moment the world wide web was about to come and conquer. Informed by a friend I dialed a number and got in touch with a machine. Can you believe that... I took the phone and actually called a computer! And it said hello to me. (in his own tongue ofcourse).
I signed up lat this local non-profit ISP slash bulletin board slash community and got an email-address. Next thing I did was sending an email to the friend that was standing next to me. Cannot remember what I wrote but I assume it was kinda "test 123, hello how are you" message. The friend took over the machine, logged in into his account et voila, my message was in his inbox!
That email has not been used much. I remember writing a few post on newsgroups. And what else should I use it for anyways? If I had something to say I just drove to my friends, wrote them a letter or gave them a call. Beside, i did not know any of them having such thing as an email.
My first email disappeared in the big digital unknown and at this moment I have 586MB of electronic messages in my 7.2GB mailbox.Which, I suppose, I far beyond the total storage at that local ISP.
Did my previous post tell a sad story about the grown-up Knut, this story is perhaps even more sad.
When after the second world war Europe was busy rebuilding the land, the two superpowers had started a cold war. One of the subjects both sides used to show their power was space. More specifically, going into space. On October 4, 1957 USSR launched Sputnik 1 into space and it made them the first to have a device orbiting around the earth.
Then came Laika.
Laika (Russian: Лайка) was an ordinary dog taken from the Russian streets and put into the Sputnik 2 satellite. At that time little was known about living things in space and in contrary of the chips used by the United States, the Russians scientists used dogs. On November 3, 1957 Laika was launched into the dark space. It was known beforehand she would not return to earth alive because the Sputnik would simply burn when reaching the atmosphere. The plan was to poison her with food. That however was not needed anymore. Laika died just few hours after being in space as a result of overheating and stress.
