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(via Fast Company)

Each and every one of us is living in a sci-fi novel, and this spills into real life into a million different ways ... like the way that Hollywood location scouts and real estate agents now routinely use unmanned drone aircraft. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gone from military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to simply becoming a routine movie industry tool. The FAA isn't too sure about how to deal with the drones of Hollywood.

And neither is the LAPD.

This past January, the Los Angeles Police Department issued a highly unusual warningagainst the use of drones by real estate agencies. The LAPD sent a letter to the California Association of Realtors, a trade group, warning that Realtors “who hire unmanned aircraft operators to take aerial photographs for marketing high-end properties” were in violation of FAA rules and local motion picture filming ordinances. Users were warned that the LAPD's Air Division intends to prosecute violators in the near future. However, the letter appears to be hot air: Unmanned aircraft flying at heights under 400 feet are currently unregulated by the FAA.

What makes the letter even more interesting is that it was written on behalf of FilmL.A., a private corporation that serves as a public-private liaison between the motion picture industry and local government. FilmL.A., which is largely responsible for issuing filming permits, was founded as a result of Los Angeles City and County's privatization of their film permit offices. Amateur UAV aficionados have noted that filming via UAV does not require the costs incurred via a conventional film permit. In addition, FilmL.A. represents crane operators, who have a vested interest in restricting UAV use for motion pictures.

Meanwhile, drone filming for real estate and location scouting continues unabated. Boutique drone firm HeliMalibu specializes in photography and video of luxury real estate properties via drone aircraft. HeliMalibu uses a custom multirotor UAV which is equipped with multiple cameras and flies autonomously. The drone, which looks like an H.R. Giger helicopter, has filmed many of Los Angeles' ritzier neighborhoods. According to The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Miller, HeliMalibu's services were used to sell the Bel-Air home of ex-Architectural Digest owner Bud Knapp, along with the Holmby Hills residence of Paramount CEO Brad Grey. HeliMalibu also provides services to the feature film industry, such as filming car races.

California-based Air Drone Productions, which advertises its work on reality show Gene Simmons' Family Jewels and Disney's Road Dogs, has a 45-minute battery life “Cinema Flyer” UAV drone aimed the film industry. The drone has multiple camera setups and a one-mile video transmission range.

UAV manufacturer DraganFly produces a series of UAVs aimed at the real estate and motion picture industries. The UAVs, which feature a variety of camera configurations, can be custom designed for wildlife photography, news media, property assessments, and location scouting. DraganFly's UAV is on the small side (think of a camera-equipped remote control helicopter on steroids) and designed to both fly into tight spaces and hover in midair.

#uav #drones #real estate #surveillance

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Why Is It So Hard for New Musical Instruments to Catch On?

New instruments have come to market at a steady clip in recent years, offering novel and occasionally fanciful ways to perform music. Maybe you’ve heard of the the Eigenharp, the Tenori-on, or the Harpejji?

Or maybe not. Good luck hearing any of these contraptions on the recordings of prominent modern artists. You’re more likely to come across Tibetan singing bowls (Fleet Foxes), 17th-century Indonesian angklung (Okkervil River), or the zither (P.J. Harvey). In other words, established pop and rock musicians seem more inclined to try just about any instrument other than a new one. The turntable might be the last new implement to break into pop music; there’s even debate over whether that qualifies as an instrument, despite having its own form of notation and a course at Berklee College of Music. According to hip-hop lore, Grand Wizzard Theodore invented scratching 36 years ago. Suddenly, the turntable became a device used not just for listening to music, but performing it. And like the guitar, it turned into a focal point in live performances.

Now consider some of the instrumental developments in the 36 years prior: the solid-body electric guitar, the pedal-steel guitar, the steel drum, the electric bass, the synthesizer, and the drum machine.

Music technology in general has charged forward, and computers, digital sampling and MIDI have dramatically shaped music. But no one mimes to music on the “air sampler” and the idea of a “Software Hero” video game, with its own simulated laptop, is a little glum. Will a brand-new instrument ever capture hearts, minds, and speaker systems again? Read more.

[Image: Composer Tod Machover poses with a Beatbug, a percussive instrument, in a 2003 AP photo.]

#musical #new instruments #early adopters

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TINY GLANCER   A six-week-old marmoset, abandoned when her mother could no longer produce enough milk, is seen with a staffer at Western Sydney’s Wild Animal Encounters in Australia.  Moments after this photo was taken, the marmoset ate that dude’s finger.  (Photo: Newspix via the Telegraph)

#marmoset #thumb #cute

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#parent #kids #guilt #tantrums #discipline #rituals #mealtime #franticlife

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The cleverest thing I've heard in...months...

Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Henry Miller (from Henry Miller on Writing)

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished. 2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.” 3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand. 4. Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! 5. When you can’t create you can work. 6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers. 7. Keep human! See people; go places, drink if you feel like it. 8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only. 9. Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude. 10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. 11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

George Orwell (From Why I Write)

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Margaret Atwood (originally appeared in The Guardian)

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. 2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type. 3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do. 4. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick. 5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting. 6. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B. 7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine. 8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up. 9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page. 10. Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

Neil Gaiman (read his free short stories here)

1. Write. 2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down. 3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it. 4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is. 5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. 6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving. 7. Laugh at your own jokes. 8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Check out the rest of the authors’ advice at OpenCulture

#ideas #writing #brainstorm #quotes #opening lines #creative writing #writing tips

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#ducks #formation #order #symmetry #family

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Scott went to Afghanistan to see the enemy for himself. He didn't find the enemy, just a foreign place, full of people eager to see an American. Even when he did find a possible enemy, this guy was opaque enough to use the Socratic method on Scott. What followed was a complete revelation to me, why western ways were going to be always unwelcome in that part of the world. Change is unwelcome...

#Scott Carrier #afghanistan #taliban #travel #journalism #utah #palantir #islam

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Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World

I love mystery cities, lost in the jungle. This article made me feel like a kid again, thinking of sir Percy still lost out there...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/world/americas/land-carvings-attest-to-amazons-lost-world.html is the original link, pics.

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — Edmar Araújo still remembers the awe.

As he cleared trees on his family’s land decades ago near Rio Branco, an outpost in the far western reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, a series of deep earthen avenues carved into the soil came into focus.

“These lines were too perfect not to have been made by man,” said Mr. Araújo, a 62-year-old cattleman. “The only explanation I had was that they must have been trenches for the war against the Bolivians.”

But these were no foxholes, at least not for any conflict waged here at the dawn of the 20th century. According to stunning archaeological discoveries here in recent years, the earthworks on Mr. Araújo’s land and hundreds like them nearby are much, much older — potentially upending the conventional understanding of the world’s largest tropical rain forest.

The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.

Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who helped discover the squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines, the enigmatic animal symbols visible from the air in southern Peru.

“What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes,” said Mr. Ranzi, a paleontologist who first saw the geoglyphs in the 1970s and, years later, surveyed them by plane.

For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may not have been as “Edenic” as some environmentalists contend.

Instead of being pristine forests, barely inhabited by people, parts of the Amazon may have been home for centuries to large populations numbering well into the thousands and living in dozens of towns connected by road networks, explains the American writer Charles C. Mann. In fact, according to Mr. Mann, the British explorer Percy Fawcett vanished on his 1925 quest to find the lost “City of Z” in the Xingu, one area with such urban settlements.

In addition to parts of the Amazon being “much more thickly populated than previously thought,” Mr. Mann, the author of “1491,” a groundbreaking book about the Americas before the arrival of Columbus, said, “these people purposefully modified their environment in long-lasting ways.”

As a result of long stretches of such human habitation, South America’s colossal forests may have been a lot smaller at times, with big areas resembling relatively empty savannas.

Such revelations do not fit comfortably into today’s politically charged debate over razing parts of the forests, with some environmentalists opposed to allowing any large-scale agriculture, like cattle ranching and soybean cultivation, to advance further into Amazonia.

Scientists here say they, too, oppose wholesale burning of the forests, even if research suggests that the Amazon supported intensive agriculture in the past. Indeed, they say other swaths of the tropics, notably in Africa, could potentially benefit from strategies once used in the Amazon to overcome soil constraints.

“If one wants to recreate pre-Columbian Amazonia, most of the forest needs to be removed, with many people and a managed, highly productive landscape replacing it,” said William Woods, a geographer at the University of Kansas who is part of a team studying the Acre geoglyphs.

“I know that this will not sit well with ardent environmentalists,” Mr. Woods said, “but what else can one say?”

While researchers piece together the Amazon’s ecological history, mystery still shrouds the origins of the geoglyphs and the people who made them. So far, 290 such earthworks have been found in Acre, along with about 70 others in Bolivia and 30 in the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Rondônia.

Researchers first viewed the geoglyphs in the 1970s, after Brazil’s military dictatorship encouraged settlers to move to Acre and other parts of the Amazon, using the nationalist slogan “occupy to avoid surrendering” to justify the settlement that resulted in deforestation.

But little scientific attention was paid to the discovery until Mr. Ranzi, the Brazilian scientist, began his surveys in the late 1990s, and Brazilian, Finnish and American researchers began finding more geoglyphs by using high-resolution satellite imagery and small planes to fly over the Amazon.

Denise Schaan, an archaeologist at the Federal University of Pará in Brazil who now leads research on the geoglyphs, said radiocarbon testing indicated that they were built 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, and might have been rebuilt several times during that period.

Initially, Ms. Schaan said, researchers, pondering the 20-foot depth of some of the trenches, thought they were used to defend against attacks. But a lack of signs of human settlement within and around the earthworks, like vestiges of housing and trash piles, as well as soil modification for farming, discounted that theory.

Researchers now believe that the geoglyphs may have held ceremonial importance, similar, perhaps, to the medieval cathedrals in Europe. This spiritual role, said William Balée, an anthropologist at Tulane University, could have been one that involved “geometry and gigantism.”

Still, the geoglyphs, located at a crossroads between Andean and Amazonian cultures, remain an enigma.

They are far from pre-Columbian settlements discovered elsewhere in the Amazon. Big gaps also remain in what is known about indigenous people in this part of the Amazon, after thousands were enslaved, killed or forced from their lands during the rubber boom that began in the late 19th century.

For Brazil’s scientists and researchers, Ms. Schaan said, the earthworks are “one of the most important discoveries of our time.” But the repopulation of this part of the Amazon threatens the survival of the geoglyphs, after being hidden for centuries.

Forests still cover most of Acre, but in cleared areas where the geoglyphs are found, dirt roads already cut through some of the earthworks. People live in wooden shacks inside others. Electricity poles dot the geoglyphs. Some ranchers use their trenches as watering holes for cattle.

“It’s a disgrace that our patrimony is treated this way,” said Tiago Juruá, the author of a new book here about protecting archaeological sites including the earthworks.

Mr. Juruá, a biologist, and other researchers say the geoglyphs found so far are probably just a sampling of what Acre’s forests still guard under their canopies. After all, they contend that outside of modern cities, fewer people live today in the Amazon than did before the arrival of Europeans five centuries ago.

“This is a new frontier for exploration and science,” Mr. Juruá said. “The challenge now is to make more discoveries in forests that are still standing, with the hope that they won’t soon be destroyed.”

Lis Horta Moriconi contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 15, 2012, on pageA6 of the New York edition with the headline: Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest To Amazon’s Lost World.

#nytimes #lost city #Percy Fawcett #xingu #geoglyphs #amazon indians

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Amazing Yosemite National Park, climbers on the cracks around El Capitan, meteors and airplanes streaking across the night sky. Spectacular...

#meteor #shower #yosemite #5dmk2 #timelapse #amazing

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What’s better than homemade North African harissa pepper sauce? Learning the recipe.

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PFC's get released as the popcorn bag gets heated in the microwave. A new study sheds light on the interaction between vaccines, such as those given to kids for common diseases and these PFC's and how vaccines appear less effective in their presence.

#PFCs #popcorn #vaccines #vaccine interaction

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This is meant for I am a Tourist. Fun, no?

#Stop motion #flying #flying people #film making

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This is what the Sun looks like when it's angry...

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The Sun has storms, plasma bubbles on its surface. Today the bubbling resulted in a chunk of plasma being ejected in the direction of the Earth. How much damage is that going to cause? who knows, but GPS is probably going to be affected, maybe satellites for cable tv. 

#sun #solar storm #coronal mass ejection #solar flare #solar magnetic disturbance

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Spectacular Aurorae Erupt Over Norway

Over the weekend, the Earth’s magnetic field was struck by a coronal mass ejection (CME). The CME — a vast bubble of solar plasma that had erupted from the sun on Jan. 19 — took longer than expected to travel through interplanetary space, but on Sunday it made contact.

keep reading

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These british soldiers were interviewed before, during and after Afghanistan. They all lived to tell their stories.

#soldier #soldier stories #afghanistan