Eideard

You’d think they’d be used to loaded guns by now

A passenger’s gun went off Sunday morning in the security line at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, police say.

TSA officers found a loaded .22-caliber Magnum revolver in Richard Popkin’s carry-on bag during an X-ray scan, police said.

And while an Atlanta police officer responding to the scene tried to clear the five “snake” shot bullets – small game pellet ammunition – in the handgun, a shot went off, according to an Atlanta Police incident report obtained from Hartsfield officials.

No one was injured, but according to the responding officer’s account from the incident report, “I was grazed by a pellet fragment on the left side of my face. However, there were no visible injuries.”

Popkin…told police he didn’t realize the pistol was in his messenger bag…

Popkin was arrested and charged with carrying a weapon in an unauthorized place and is being held at the Clayton County jail pending bond.

I understand why people make stupid excuses to cover their buns in a case like this. But, there are legal procedures for transporting guns. I own a lockable, purpose-made gun transport case for handguns.

Of course, you still run the risk of the TSA or airport employees stealing your gun.

Four robots have set out on an epic 66,000km journey across the Pacific Ocean. Created by US firm Liquid Robotics, the four are aiming to set the record for the longest distance at sea travelled by an unmanned craft.

Throughout their journey the robots will gather lots of data about the composition and quality of sea water. The journey is expected to take about 300 days, and is designed to inspire researchers to study ocean health.

The robots were launched from the St Francis Yacht Club on the edge of San Francisco harbour on 17 November.

Initially the four will travel as a flotilla to Hawaii and then will split into two pairs. One will go on to Australia and the other will head to Japan to support a dive on the Mariana Trench – the deepest part of the ocean.

The robots manage to move thanks to interaction between the two halves of the autonomous vehicle. The upper half of the wave-riding robot is shaped like a stunted surfboard and it is attached by a cable to a lower part that sports a series of fins and a keel.

Interaction between the two parts brought about by the motion of the waves enables the robot to propel itself.

Electrical power for sensors is provided by solar panels on the upper surface of the robot…

The wave-riding robots are veterans of ocean-going science and helped monitor the spread of oil during the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Before now the longest single journey they have undertaken was over a distance of 2,500 miles.

Bravo. Does anyone know if we will be able to trace them along their travels?

Here’s a link from Ursarodina to sign up for periodic updates: http://tinyurl.com/86op5n5

 
One of the more enjoyable forms of non-violent protest. Directed in this instance upon one of the leading bigots in the Republican Party.

“Doc, I have this funny wart on my whatsis”

The vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV) can prevent 90 percent of genital warts in men when offered before exposure to the four HPV strains covered by the vaccine, according to a new multi-center study led by H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and UCSF.

The four-year, international clinical trial, which also found a nearly 66 percent effectiveness in the general population of young men regardless of prior exposure to these strains, provides the first reported results of using the HPV vaccine as a prophylactic in men.

Initial data from this study informed the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to approve the vaccine for boys in 2009 to prevent warts, while results from a substudy led the FDA to expand approval late last year to prevent anal cancer.

While the HPV vaccine was approved in 2006 for girls to prevent cervical cancer, the vaccine’s benefit for young men was not initially addressed. Yet infection and diseases caused by HPV are common in men, the researchers said, including genital warts, which are one of the leading sexually transmitted diseases (STD) for which treatment is sought nationwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that half of all sexually active Americans will get HPV at some point in their lives…

The authors noted that while they find it likely that the prevention of HPV infection and disease in men will have additional benefits, such as preventing anal, genital and throat cancers, these benefits need to be directly demonstrated through further clinical trials.

More good reasons for expanded trials. If we could get Congress and the FDA to discuss the question without special permission from someone in the Old Testament.

A man accused of swiping an Apple iPhone out of a woman’s hand in San Francisco may have been shocked when police found him only nine minutes later. It turns out the phone had been tracking his every move.

The iPhone was being used to test a new, real-time GPS tracking application, and the woman holding it was an intern for the software’s maker, Mountain View-based Covia Labs.

Covia CEO David Kahn had sent the intern into the street to demonstrate the software. Police say Horatio Toure snatched it and sped away on a bicycle.

Khan was watching a live map of the phone’s location on a computer and says he was immediately struck by how quickly the image began moving down the street.

Then someone told him the iPhone had just been stolen.

Police arrested Toure nine minutes later, and the intern identified him as the thief.

The Plastiki, a boat with a hull built of 12,500 plastic bottles, set sail from a Sausalito yacht harbor this morning on a risky and adventurous voyage across the Pacific.

The purpose, said expedition leader David de Rothschild, is to draw attention to the health of the oceans and to demonstrate the value of recycled plastic bottles. De Rothschild and his crew of five hope to sail to Australia, a voyage of about 11,000 nautical miles.

The Plastiki, named in honor of Norwegian explorer Thor Hyderdahl’s raft Kon Tiki, is a boat like no other in the world. Besides the hull of recycled plastic water and soda bottles, the vessel is made of a hardened plastic called PET.

The boat is a twin-hulled catamaran rigged as a ketch. It will rely on the wind for propulsion and has only a small auxiliary engine. No such boat has ever made an ocean passage before.

Skipper Jo Royle said the first port of call will be one of the Line Islands, a small group of atolls south of Hawaii.

The voyage can be followed on the Internet at www.theplastiki.com.

Bon voyage, folks. It ain’t ever easy with a craft this small.

In line to enter the World Wide Developers Conference 2009
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

A decade ago, San Francisco’s trendy South of Market district was the birthplace of hundreds of web design firms that have since gone under or been swallowed by rivals.

Now it is the turn of the “app army“, the scores of companies devoted to churning out small programs known as applications that run on Apple’s iPhone and rival devices, as well as on regular computers for users of Facebook and similar websites…

Indeed, veteran industry executives, investors and analysts are calling the shift to internet-capable devices and the apps that run on them a once-a-decade leap in technology, on a par with the great personal computing boom of the 1980s and the debut of the World Wide Web in the 1990s.

“The ramp [growth rate] of the iPhone and iPod touch in the first eight or nine quarters is more than five times the ramp for the internet,” says Kathryn Huberty, Morgan Stanley tech analyst. These devices, and faster wireless networks, are both now reaching about a fifth of the global population, she estimates, which will drive much more rapid development : “Globally,” she says, “2010 is the tipping point.”

No company is more central to the shift towards the mobile internet than Apple, which enjoys a wide lead in distributing applications. More than 100,000 apps are available on its App Store and more than 2 billion have been downloaded in less than a year and a half.

To keep that gusher flowing, Apple has sought to inspire more outsider developers with the rare rags-to-riches stories — like that of Steve Demeter, a bank programmer who earned $250,000 in two months of 2008 after launching a simple game called Trism…

The advantages the bigger companies have over the smaller developers — scale, expertise and marketing know-how — mean there may not be any “app millionaires” in the years ahead, says Matt Murphy of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who runs a fund devoted to backing iPhone developers.

But small groups that have multiple successes will be pursued by bigger companies. “There will be teams of people who get a hit franchise acquired for north of $1 million,” Mr Murphy says.

Useful article. Beaucoup information.

As visionary as their leadership may be, this is a phenomenon that, after all, even surprised Apple.

For the last four years, John E. Scannell has run Bay Quackers, a tour company whose open-air amphibious vehicles, known as ducks, roam the streets of San Francisco. As the vehicles cruise past sights and eventually plop down in the bay, passengers use a kazoo-like device to quack at passers-by.

It is, Mr. Scannell said, a purposefully absurd way of introducing visitors to a city that is often purposefully absurd.

“You have permission to regress a little bit,” he said. “It’s not so much the sound that’s cool, but it’s when people look over and see this duck beside them, people turn and wave and smile at you. And if you’re a visitor from another city, there’s no better way to be greeted.”

But if a new duck in town, if you will, has its way, Mr. Scannell’s quacking days could be over. Last month, a rival company, Ride the Ducks, filed suit in Federal District Court here to stop Bay Quackers from using quacking devices on its tours.

At issue is a “sound mark,” the auditory equivalent of a trademark, which Ride the Ducks says it holds on a quack created by a yellow bill-shaped kazoo (called a Wacky Quacker) and which it says Bay Quackers has violated by using a similar kazoo that creates an identical quack.

“If you blew theirs and ours, you wouldn’t hear any difference,” said Bob Salmon, vice president of marketing and sales for Ride the Ducks, whose company has been using its kazoo for more than a decade. “It’s a very important part of our product. We’re very interactive with people on the street, and the way that we interact is using our Wacky Quackers…”

The suit seeks not only a preliminary injunction on the use of the rival’s kazoos, but also destruction of “all noisemakers or other implements” that produce quacks on Bay Quackers tours.

RTFA – if you feel like it. I think these people should get a fracking [quacking?] life!

Bad enough we have some of the dumbest decisions on the planet about intellectual property, style, look-and-feel. Now, we’re supposed to fight all the way to bankruptcy court over stupid sounds. Cripes!

Daylife/AP Photo by Eric Risberg

Zeppelins, the giant floating airships used to carry passengers and drop bombs until the 1930s, haven’t been seen in American skies for more than 70 years.

Now, a California company is bringing the iconic aircraft back to the United States, with plans to offer aerial tours of the San Francisco Bay area in a newly built zeppelin. It’s one of just three in the world; the others are in Germany and Japan.

Airship Ventures zeppelin arrived in the Bay Area on Saturday, passing over the Golden Gate Bridge en route to its new home at Moffett Field, a former naval air station in Mountain View, about 40 miles south of San Francisco.

Fifteen feet longer than a Boeing 747, the 246-foot-long Zeppelin NT (New Technology) was built in Hamburg, Germany, and transported by container ship to Beaumont, Texas, before a cross-country flight to California.

Starting Friday, Airship Ventures will offer rides that provide a bird’s-eye view of Napa and Sonoma wine country, the Big Sur coastline, San Francisco and other parts of the Bay Area. The cabin holds 12 passengers and two crew members, and tickets start at $495 per person for an one-hour ride.

Certainly not in my budget; but – surely looks like fun.

Police allege a San Francisco man angry at being rejected for the “Price is Right” TV show forced the evacuation of a high-rise by claiming he had a bomb.

Police cordoned off California and Battery streets in the Financial District after the man walked into a law office with a blinking white tube on his belt and wires leading to his hand.

The man allegedly said the tube was a bomb he devised because he was angry about being rejected as a contestant on the “Price is Right,” said police who arrested the man after determining the tube contained no explosives.

I could see the logic – if he was a lobbyist marching into Congress saying he didn’t get his money’s worth.