The high-tech gear for climbing Mount Everest

In 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach Mount Everest’s summit. According to National Geographic “the expedition had climbers carrying loads approaching 44 pounds apiece. Today, ultralight gear cuts significant weight from a climber’s load—often half the weight, or less, of Hillary’s pack load.”

Here are the high-tech pieces that Hilaree O’Neill, a 39-year old ski-mountaineer, will carry as she treks up the same path as Hillary and Norgay did 59 years ago.

  • The North Face – Prophet 52 Backpack
  • Black Diamond Half Dome Helmet
  • Black Diamond Raven Ultra Ice Axe
  • Smith Optics’ I/O Interchangeable Polarized Goggles

 

  • Scarpa’s Phantom 8000 boots
  • Black Diamond’s Sabretooth crampons
  • Tiny handheld radios & cellphone
  • Apple iPad

 

The article also goes on to compares today’s technology to what Edmund Hillary used.

The ice axe:

1953: Made by Claudius Simond in Chamonix, France, Hillary’s ice axe was constructed of forged steel with a European ash wood handle.

2012: Weighing just 12 ounces, the Black Diamond Raven Ultra Ice Axe (above) has a hollow aluminum shaft and a stainless steel head. It measures 20 inches in hand—about a foot shorter than Hillary’s.

 

See all the gear and comparisons and learn more about National Geographic’s hike of Mount Everest.

Do what unsuccessful people don’t like to do

The key to success is sometimes just the willingness to put one foot in front of the other one more time.

I have ten marathons under my belt, including four New York races and one Boston.  When you are running a grueling race with thousands of people, for the most part it doesn’t matter where in the pack you finish.  What matters is simply that you finish.  It’s all about persistence.

The difference between those who finish and those who give up lies in the old axiom that successful people do those things that unsuccessful people don’t like to do.  Successful people have the determination, the will, the focus, the drive to complete the tough jobs – like running a marathon.

Keeping your eye on the prize is usually easier said than done.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the demands of a long-term project.

  • Focus on what you can accomplish rather than the obstacles that stand in front of you.  Direct your energy toward achieving a goal, and tackle the problems with an emphasis on edging closer to a successful result.
  • When you identify a roadblock, develop a realistic plan to overcome it.
  • To paraphrase Winston Churchill: Never, never, never, never, never, never, never give up.

Read the full article – Harvey Mackay, Inc.

 

// Photo via Mike Baird

Little League – webcomic of DC superheroes as children in elementary school

Little League is an awesome web comic that imagines all of DC’s superheroes as kids. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman all spend their days walking home from school, playing at recess, and attempting to save the world.

It’s super funny and cute!

“Little League” is a side project of “Gifted” creator Yale Stewart. A weekly webcomic, it follows the adventures of popular DC comic characters as children in elementary school. Mostly funny, with a dash of pathos, it should be an enjoyable read for any fans of DC Comics characters as well as people who enjoy the traditional syndicated comic strip.

These are comics #20-21 and you can read all the old ones on the Little League website (I’ve already done so!).

 

Trailer for Total Recall 2012 – with cast interview from Comic-Con

Your RECALL EXPERIENCE Begins August 3rd

Here is the trailer for the original version from 1990 with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone.

 

Director and Cast Interview from Comic-con ’11

Total Recall — Welcome to Rekall, the company that with one little implant can turn your dreams into real memories. For a factory worker named Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell), the mind-trip sounds like the perfect vacation from his ordinary existence. But when the procedure goes horribly wrong, Quaid becomes a hunted man. With the line between fantasy and reality blurred and the fate of his world hanging in the balance, Quaid goes on the run to discover his true identity, his true love, and his true fate. Based on Philip K. Dick’s classic story “I Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” this new take on some of his most visionary ideas is directed by Len Wiseman and stars Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston, and John Cho, all of whom will be appearing.- CCI

Perpetual Ocean – NASA recreates the ocean currents of the world

This visualization shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through Decemeber 2007. The visualization does not include a narration or annotations; the goal was to use ocean flow data to create a simple, visceral experience.

This visualization was produced using NASA/JPL’s computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II or ECCO2.

ECCO2 is high resolution model of the global ocean and sea-ice. ECCO2 attempts to model the oceans and sea ice to increasingly accurate resolutions that begin to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans.The ECCO2 model simulates ocean flows at all depths, but only surface flows are used in this visualization.

A full 20-minute version in HD is available at the Perpetual Motion NASA site.

 

Another writer ponders the similarities to Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night:

What you’re looking at is the surface current flow (not anything deeper) of oceans around the world, recorded from 2006 to 2007. The white lines are the currents, and the darker blue colors of the water represent bathymetry (the fancy word for misnomer “ocean topography”).

The image is wondrous, isn’t it? I had no conception of how many massive whirlpools sit off the world’s coasts. It’s hard to imagine how difficult sea travel must have been to early explorers, trapped in currents without motors, relying only on wind, guts, and the stars to take them somewhere they’ve never seen before. Heck, it seems scary to undertake now.

And all this pontification is ignoring just how unthinkingly beautiful the visualization looks.

via Co.Design

Historical and Recreational Map of Los Angeles – by Jo Mora, 1942

“Historical and Recreational Map of Los Angeles,” designed by Jo Mora in 1942 and dedicated to his “buen amigo” Charles Lummis. The map squeezes in an extraordinary amount of historical facts and figures onto its 23- by 30-inch surface, depicting almost the entire history of Los Angeles up to that point, while looking toward the future.

Mora took a humorous approach to issues surrounding the tangled history of Los Angeles. The amount of detail is astounding, covering a huge spectrum – from the city’s water wars to the rise of the film industry. Excerpts don’t do the map justice (you owe it to yourself to go look at the full size map at the exhibit), but observing the details reveals Mora’s keen understanding of the city.

via KCET

 
Here are some excerpts from the map.
 

The founding of the city:

“Sunshine and mañana + love and fandangos = a delightful Pacific Arcadia.”

“I hereby name this first subdivision in Alta California – Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula”

 

Population growth of L.A.:

“Please help me figure out what IS the matter with the L.A. climate?”

 

The Beach and Conquistadores:

“Such different from our time…no?”

“Seguro que si (of course it is), but what muchachas!”

iTunes University – free online education – is booming with 100s of millions of downloads

This month both Stanford and Open University reached 50 million downloads of their iTunes U content, a major milestone for online education.

Altogether, the service from Apple reached 700 million downloads in January 2012.

 

Stanford News:

In subjects ranging from human behavior to linguistics, Stanford lectures…have been downloaded a whopping 50 million times.

The milestone, reached March 14, comes nearly seven years after Stanford became the first university to offer public access to campus lectures, concerts and courses through iTunes U.

“It shows there is a huge appetite for high-quality educational content,” said Brent Izutsu, the senior program manager for Stanford on iTunes U. “And that will only grow as more people look online to supplement their education.”

The most popular offerings are in engineering, where students can learn to build an iOS app or study quantum physics under one of the fathers of string theory, Leonard Susskind.

 

The Open University:

Open University is the first in Europe to reach more than one million active subscriptions through the iTunes U app since it launched back on 19 January. The University’s 52 courses add to the University’s extensive material on iTunes U which has now seen more than 50 million international downloads, with over 40,000 new downloads each day.

Our most popular course on the iTunes U iPad app The New Entrepreneurs has over 100,000 active subscribers, with another six of our courses having over 50,000 subscribers each. Last week we released a new course Moons: An Introduction which incorporates the University’s first Multi-Touch iBook Moon Rocks: An Introduction to the Geology of the Moon, created using Apple’s iBooks Author.

 

Thx to Pando Daily

Journalists are becoming very popular in Facebook

In September 2011, Facebook introduced the Subscribe feature, allowing anyone to subscribe to the updates of anyone else. For public figures, like journalists, with thousands of followers this has turned out to be a boon.

Since its launch, thousands of journalists have enabled Subscribe, with news organizations like Washington Post (90+ journalists using the feature) and The New York Times (50+ journalists using the feature) leading the way. The average journalist has seen a 320% increase in subscribers since November 2011, according to our analysis of a sample of 25 journalists across a variety of outlets who enabled subscribe in September.

From journalists like CNN’s Don Lemon postingbreaking news about Jon Huntsman to The New York Times Moscow bureau reporter Michael Schwirtz posting live videos as he covered recent protests.

Content Breakdown

Based on the analysis we conducted, here are some of the trends we’re seeing in the type of content journalists are producing on Facebook, as well as what content receives above-average feedback. Let’s start with content types:

  • Questions and Input: 25% of posts contain a question to the reader.
  • Links: 62% of posts contain a link. And when reporters include analysis with the links, those links receive 20% more referral clicks on average.
  • Photos: 12% of posts were photos. Posts with photos receive 50% more likes than posts without photos.

So of the content that journalists are sharing, what actually works?

There are several types of content that seem to produce above-average feedback from subscribers…

keep reading – Facebook + Journalists

Ballona Wetlands – 600 acres of Los Angeles coast will soon be restored

In a first step toward restoring one of Southern California’s few remaining wetlands and opening it to the public, the state has approved spending $6.5 million for planning a massive restoration of the degraded Ballona Wetlands.

(In the plan) initial proposals call for spending $100 million to remove concrete levees and truck out tons of sediment dumped on the property, allowing water from Ballona Creek and the sea to flow into the wetlands. Bike paths would be built atop earthen flood-control berms on the reserve’s perimeter and public boardwalks would allow visitors access to the site without disturbing plants, birds and other wildlife.

“We have the potential at Ballona to restore this degraded and damaged habitat and return it to a beautiful, sustainable natural refuge for people and wildlife,” Luce said.

The vast coastal wetlands once spanned 2,000 acres at the mouth of Ballona Creek, covering much of what is now Marina del Rey, Playa del Rey and Venice. Only a quarter remains today, much of it a dry, fenced-off expanse of brush that is littered with garbage in places, surrounded by high-rises and subdivisions and criss-crossed by congested boulevards.

Developers and environmental activists wrangled over the site for decades before the state agreed in 2003 to spend $139 million to acquire it as an ecological reserve.

via LA Times

 

And, nationally wetlands are still disappearing:

A national wetlands inventory released this week by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that between 2004 and 2009, the lower 48 states lost a net average of 13,800 acres a year. That compared with a slight annual gain in wetlands during the previous six year-period.

“Wetlands are at a tipping point,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said. “While we have made great strides in conserving and restoring wetlands since the 1950s, when we were losing an area equal to half the size of Rhode Island each year, we remain on a downward trend that is alarming.”

via LA Times

Energy 101 – Electric Vehicles

This edition of Energy 101 highlights the benefits of electric vehicles, including improved fuel efficiency, reduced emissions, and lower maintenance costs.

Electric Vehicle = EV

“80% of drivers travel less than 40 miles round-trip for their daily commute. Which is just right for an EV.”

“Many of today’s EV’s can go up to 100 miles on a single charge, and battery technology is continuing to advance. Becoming smaller while storing more energy.”

“It’s a highly efficient technology, up to 80% of battery’s energy is transferred to the car.”