It’s like a giant’s lunchbox! This house, which is named Shadowboxx, is in the San Juan Islands in the state of Washington. Olson Kundig Architects designed the 16 by 20 foot roof over the bathhouse to open and close with the push of a button. Link -via Dornob
Read the original post:
The House with a Pop-up Roof
Well, at least they don’t have to change the first part of their names! The Wall Street Journal reported that OfficeMax and Office Depot are merging: OfficeMax Inc. and Office Depot Inc. are in advanced talks to merge, people familiar with the matter said, as the retailers of pens, paper and desks try to fight off tougher competition from rivals like Staples Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. A deal would combine two companies that have been hammered in recent years by weak economic conditions, falling sales and rising online competition. Office Depot’s market value is just $1.3 billion, and OfficeMax’s is about $933 million. Still, the two chains have a substantial retail presence. Office Depot, based in Boca Raton, Fla., has 1,675 stores world-wide, annual sales of some $11.5 billion and about 39,000 employees. OfficeMax, based in Naperville, Ill., has about 900 stores in the U.S. and Mexico, roughly $7 billion in annual sales and approximately 29,000 employees. OfficeMax is scheduled to post its quarterly and annual results Thursday. Link What do you think we should call the new entity?
Read this article:
Office Depot and OfficeMax to Merge
There’s Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, and of course, Florida Man. Florida Man is in the news constantly, with headlines enshrined in a Twitter feed dedicated to “the world’s worst superhero.” Link -via Metafilter
Read this article:
Florida Man: the World’s Worst Superhero
The Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research in Timbuktu, Mali, holds a collection of 30,000 of the world’s most precious ancient manuscripts. Or it did until recently. On January 23rd, al-Qaida-linked extremists, who invaded Timbuktu almost a year ago, ransacked the library and set it on fire. The fire raged for eight days straight. What the extremists did not know was that only about 2,000 of the hand-written documents had been moved to the new library building. However, they didn’t bother searching the old building, where an elderly man named Abba Alhadi has spent 40 of his 72 years on earth taking care of rare manuscripts. The illiterate old man, who walks with a cane and looks like a character from the Bible, was the perfect foil for the Islamists. They wrongly assumed that the city’s European-educated elite would be the ones trying to save the manuscripts, he said. So last August, Alhadi began stuffing the thousands of books into empty rice and millet sacks. At night, he loaded the millet sacks onto the type of trolley used to cart boxes of vegetables to the market. He pushed them across town and piled them into a lorry and onto the backs of motorcycles, which drove them to the banks of the Niger River. From there, they floated down to the central Malian town of Mopti in a pinasse, a narrow, canoe-like boat. Then cars drove them from Mopti, the first government-controlled town, to Mali’s capital, Bamako, over 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from here. “I have spent my life protecting these manuscripts. This has been my life’s work. And I had to come to terms with the fact that I could no longer protect them here,” said Alhadi. “It hurt me deeply to see them go, but I took strength knowing that they were being sent to a safe place.” It took two weeks in all to spirit out the bulk of the collection, around 28,000 texts housed in the old building covering the subjects of theology, astronomy, geography and more. The 2,000 documents that were in the new library were digitized, so the information survives even if the parchment does not. Link -via Metafilter (Image credit: AP/Harouna Traore)
Read the original:
People of Timbuktu save Manuscripts from Invaders
( YouTube link ) A new skit from the Muppets of Sesame Street spoof the TV show Downton Abbey . Steak and kidney pie, anyone? -via Tastefully Offensive
Visit link:
Upside Downton Abbey
Photo: Carl Bento/Australian Museum Surely you’ve seen fossils in museums, but what about this: opalized dinosaur tooth. Opalized fossils occur when silica settled into cracks in the dinosaur bone and then hardened into opal. This one above is a particularly fantastic specimen: an opalized theropod dinosaur tooth from the Australian Museum.
See the original post:
Opalized Dinosaur Tooth
Photo: John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune How cold was it in Chicago? Let’s put it this way: it was so cold that when firefighters fought the fire in a blazing abandoned warehouse, the water froze while the building was still on fire! The Chicago Tribune has the photo gallery that you simply must see: Link – via Metafilter
Link:
Fire and Ice: Firefighter’s Water Froze on a Blazing Building
Silicon Valley’s startup corporate culture is noted for its downscale fashion and manners: flip-flops, office games and casual decor. If that’s the norm, how do you handle casual Fridays? How do you impress others as a nonconformist? By dressing up formally, often with bowties and a tophats: The trappings of a nonconformist workplace were on display recently at the headquarters of a startup here named Pulse: There was the foosball table, the containers of free M&Ms, the bottle of whiskey on top of the fridge. And the guys standing around in suits and ties. It was Friday, after all, and to truly defy conformity at some tech outfits on that day of the week, one must not wear jeans or flip-flops. Pulse employees were practicing “Formal Friday,” dressing in their Sunday best. “It is kind of flipped…because we’re super casual the entire week,” says Akshay Kothari, co-founder of Pulse, a startup that makes a news-organizing app. “You want to break the monotony.” Watch a video at the link, then go buy a bolo tie for next Friday. Because bolo ties are cool. Link -via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: Spark Fun Electronics
Read More:
Startup Companies Replace “Casual Fridays” with “Formal Fridays”
Today is New Year’s Day, which simply means the earth has completed another journey around the sun. But how in the world do we know how long that takes? To answer the question, Phil Plat has “taken a simple concept like ‘years’ and turned it into a horrifying nightmare of nerdery and math.” Let’s take a look at the Earth from a distance. From our imaginary point in space, we look down and see the Earth and the Sun. The Earth is moving, orbiting the Sun. Of course it is, you think to yourself. But how do you measure that? For something to be moving, it has to be moving relative to something else. What can we use as a yardstick against which to measure the Earth’s motion? Well, we might notice as we float in space that we are surrounded by billions of pretty stars. We can use them! So we mark the position of the Earth and Sun using the stars as benchmarks, and then watch and wait. Some time later, the Earth has moved in a big circle and is back to where it started in reference to those stars. That’s called a “sidereal year” (sidus is the Latin word for star). How long did that take? Let’s say we used a stopwatch to measure the elapsed time. We’ll see that it took the Earth 31,558,149 seconds (some people like to approximate that as pi x 10 million = 31,415,926 seconds, which is an easy way to be pretty dang close). But how many days is that? Well, that’s a second complication. A “day” is how long it takes the Earth to rotate once, but we’re back to that measurement problem again. But hey, we used the stars once, let’s do it again! You stand on the Earth and define a day as the time it takes for a star to go from directly overhead to directly overhead again: a sidereal day. That takes 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds = 86,164 seconds. But wait a second (a sidereal second?)—shouldn’t that be exactly equal to 24 hours? What happened to those 3 minutes and 56 seconds? I was afraid you’d ask that—but this turns out to be important. And that’s only the beginning of the explanation of where we get the concepts and the measurements for a “day” and a “year.” Read the rest at Bad Astronomy. Link ( Image credit: ESA ©2009 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA )
See the original article here:
What Does a “New Year” Really Mean?
These magnificently preserved socks date back to Roman Egypt, c. 250-420 A.D. Are they designed for two-toed people? Not quite: The big toe divided from the others suggest that the socks were probably meant to be worn with sandals. It is unclear whether the socks formed offerings to the dead or were used as foot coverings. Note that the holes have not laddered (though they have spread somewhat). Link -via Curious History | Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum
View original post here:
Ancient Roman Socks