Magic Mountain Lodge

The Magic Mountain Lodge is a luxury resort set in a private nature preserve in the mountains of Chile. It’s built to resemble a hollowed-out mountain. Fountains at the top can pour water over the surface, making it look like a series of caves in a waterfall. You can view more pictures at the link. The photos showing the lodge after heavy snowfall are particularly striking.

Official Website -via Offbeat Home

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Magic Mountain Lodge

Cash is King, Except in Sweden

Got
cash? Not necessary in Sweden, who has gone (mostly) cashless:

Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes in
1661. Now it’s come farther than most on the path toward getting rid
of them. […]

In most Swedish cities, public buses don’t accept cash; tickets
are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. A small but
growing number of businesses only take cards, and some bank offices
— which make money on electronic transactions — have stopped
handling cash altogether.

“There are towns where it isn’t at all possible anymore to
enter a bank and use cash,” complains Curt Persson, chairman of
Sweden’s National Pensioners’ Organization.

The upside? Crimes are down:

The number of bank robberies in Sweden plunged from 110 in 2008
to 16 in 2011 — the lowest level since it started keeping records
30 years ago. It says robberies of security transports are also down.

“Less cash in circulation makes things safer, both for the
staff that handle cash, but also of course for the public,” says
Par Karlsson, a security expert at the organization.

Link
– via GeekPress

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Cash is King, Except in Sweden

The Spanish Link In Cracking the Enigma Code

peetm sends this quote from the BBC:
“When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, both Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy sent troops to help the nationalists under Franco. But with the conflict dispersed across the country, some means of secure communication was needed for the German Condor Legion, the Italians and the Spanish forces under Franco. As a result, a set of modified commercial Enigma machines were delivered by Germany. … A key figure in trying to understand it was Dilly Knox, a classicist who had been working on breaking ciphers since World War I. He was fascinated by the machine and began studying ways in which an intercepted message might in theory be broken, even writing his own messages, encrypting them and then trying to break them himself. But there was no opportunity to actually intercept a real message since German military signals were inaudible in Britain. However, the signals produced by the machines sent to Spain in 1936 were audible enough to be intercepted and Knox began work. … Within six or seven months of having his first real code to crack, Knox had succeeded, producing the first decryption of an Enigma message in April 1937.”


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US Army debuts app marketplace prototype: iOS first, Android coming soon

Image
The promise of an Army app store has been bandied about for quite a while now, but it looks like it’s slowly becoming a reality. The US Army has today officially announced a prototype of the Army Software Marketplace, a web-based app store that currently includes twelve different training apps that have been approved for Army-wide use. That includes just iOS apps initially, but the Army promises that it will soon include apps for Android devices as well. It’s also of course looking to expand considerably beyond those dozen odd apps, noting that the prototype is just “a first step in establishing and exercising new submission and approval processes that will eventually enable Army members, organizations and third-party developers to release applications for Army-wide distribution.” And you thought the approval process for some of the current app stores was stringent.

[Thanks, Souheil]

US Army debuts app marketplace prototype: iOS first, Android coming soon originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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US Army debuts app marketplace prototype: iOS first, Android coming soon

'Antimagnet' Cloak Hides Objects From Magnetic Fields


ananyo writes “Researchers have made a cloak that can hide objects from static magnetic fields, realizing a theoretical prediction they made last year. This ‘antimagnet’ could have medical applications, but could also be used to subvert airport security. The cloak’s interior is lined with turns of tape made from a high-temperature superconductor. Superconductors repel magnetic fields, so any magnetic field enclosed within a superconductor would be undetectable from outside. But the superconductor itself would still perturb an external magnetic field, so the researchers coated its external side with an ordinary ferromagnet. The superconductor tries to repel external field lines, whereas the ferromagnet tries to draw them in — together, the two layers cancel each other out (abstract).”


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California DoD bases sitting on 7 gigawatts of solar potential



The US Military is sitting on a potential 7GW of untapped solar power capacity in the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, according to a recent Department of Defense report that analyzed the applicability of a variety of solar technologies across seven military installations.

Initially nine military installations were analyzed, seven in California and two in Nevada, taking in sites used by the Army, Navy, and Air Force as well as the Marine Corps. By comparing competing solar energy technologies on such a large scale, the report (titled Solar Energy Development on Department of Defense Installations in the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, available in PDF on the ESTCP website) gives insight as to the commercial viability of solar power in the US today.

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California DoD bases sitting on 7 gigawatts of solar potential