#nerdprom
// Thx to Shaun Dakin
Major League Baseball creates a Tumblr account for Baseball Illustrations
Handplane Hoedown – try out new handplanes for bodysurfing
There is a new trend in surfing, well, rather bodysurfing. A group of environmentalists and shapers have begun crafting the most beautiful handplanes. These items are mini surfboards that you strap to your hand and get low in the water. They let you go fast, real fast and barrel on almost any wave.
Ed Lewis of Enjoy Handplanes describes how it works:
The second best part about Handplanes (first is how much fun they are) is that all of them are made out of recycled or sustainable material. Some are made out of wood, others out of broken and trashed boards.
A few of the companies are putting together a Handplane Hoedown to try out these things:
- Saturday, May 5, 2012
- Sunrise to ???
- Southern California – San Clemente State Beach
- Facebook Event Page
This is not a contest in any way, shape or form. Just a day of fun (ie. Fish Fry) to celebrate the handplane. NO POSTERS, NO BANNERS, NO SALES, NO T-SHIRTS. All word of mouth. This event is for everyone, from the first time garage made handplanes, to the super refined handplanes that are being sold in shops. If you’re into the food tray thing, bring that too. There will be representatives with Demo Planes from Hess, Surfcraft Co-op, Enjoy, and Brownfish, plus any and all other company’s are welcome to bring handplanes for the masses to try-out. Please spread the word via facebook, twitter, instagram, etc.
// Thx to Enjoy Handplanes
A dramatic rescue in progress
//Thx to Irene Chung
Sense of Flying – what’s it like flying down a mountain at 250 km/h?
Nominated for an action sports award in the Vimeo Festival Awards.
See previous Vimeo videos.
Amazon has more than tripled it’s workforce since the recession began (and ended)
Amazon.com added 9,400 employees to its payroll in the quarter ended March 31. That’s the biggest single quarter of headcount growth in Amazon’s history.
The company now employs 65,600 full- and part-time workers worldwide.
With its current trajectory, Amazon is rapidly approaching Microsoft in size. Microsoft employs more than 93,000 but hasn’t been growing as quickly as in the past. More than 40,000 of Microsoft’s employees are in the Seattle region; Amazon doesn’t break down its employment by region.
via Geek Wire
In February, 2012, Amazon purchased 3 million square feet of office space in Seattle, that would more than double their existing office space of 2 million square feet:
In one of Seattle’s biggest real-estate deals in years, fast-growing Amazon.com has agreed to buy three blocks in Seattle’s Denny Triangle — and preliminary paperwork has been filed with the city to build a 1 million-square-foot office tower on each of them.
The deal includes options for Amazon to buy even more of Denny Triangle holdings.
“In terms of economic development and new jobs for Seattle, this is off the charts,” Al Clise said.
via Seattle Times
So, why is Amazon dominating the recession and post-recession?
With physical retail in a continued decade-long slump, it’s a no-brainer that they are “eating their lunch.”
Though, it’s possible that Amazon is ramping up in another area, secretly, as they have been known to do.
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On another note, I tried to find perspective on the size of these companies. I found that, according to reports (pdf), the total size of the tech industry in United States is 4.15 million. Which is an all-time high for the industry bouncing back from 2008, the last time numbers were this good.
I also found that Foxconn and it’s parent company employ 836,000 workers, third largest in the world, and IBM employs 427,000, tenth largest in the world.
// Photo – Bala
Road bike / Cruiser
My favorite kind of bike – road bike – made for travelling at high speeds on city streets. Looks like it’s been modified by removing the curving ram horn handlebars and replacing them with classic cruiser handlebars.
I want one.
via – The World Turns
Whale Wars confronts slaughter of Pilot whales in the Faroe Islands
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, capitalizing on the tremendous success of their Animal Planet TV show, “Whale Wars,” has now taken on a new battle. With the Japanese fleet’s Antarctic hunt finished for the season, the skull-and-crossbones crew have turned their attention on the Faroe Islands with a new show: “Whale Wars: Viking Shores”
In the Faroe Islands, the oceangoing conservation outfit is not hectoring a faceless, corporate, government-subsidized commercial whaling outfit with massive factory ships that kill whales in the name of “research.” On this grouping of 18 small islands in the North Atlantic, a Danish protectorate situated between Iceland and Scotland, the people kill pilot whales by hand, on the shore, as part of a traditional hunt called the “Grind,” (pronounced “grinned”) which residents say is thousands of years old.
The Grind is not pretty, and “Viking Shores” pulls no punches. The Faroese send boats out into the ocean to find pilot whales, which are cetaceans not as large as the fin or minke whales hunted by the Japanese, but are slightly bigger than dolphins. Then they herd the mammals toward one of several dozen beaches on the islands, where residents lie in wait. As the powerful creatures beach themselves in panic, hunters wade into them with long curved hooks and slaughter the whole pod in a bloody frenzy. The Faroese eat a lot of pilot whale.
via LA Times
The second episode of “Viking Shores” airs Friday at 9 p.m. on Animal Planet.
* * *
Read an interview with Sea Shepherd captain and environmental warrior, Paul Waston, on what it’s like to confront the Faroes people on their ancient tradition.
Download episode 1 – Bad Blood for free on iTunes (warning: link opens iTunes).
Miscellaneous Star Wars Art – (the dark side has cookies)
Most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate
“In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in 1 million books. To put it another way: what all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day. By this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate.”
—
Pulled from Breaking Down the Language Barrier via the Google Translate Blog:
The rise of the web has brought the world’s collective knowledge to the fingertips of more than two billion people. But what happens if it’s in Hindi or Afrikaans or Icelandic, and you speak only English—or vice versa?
In 2001, Google started providing a service that could translate eight languages to and from English. It used what was then state-of-the-art commercial machine translation (MT), but the translation quality wasn’t very good, and it didn’t improve much in those first few years. In 2003, a few Google engineers decided to ramp up the translation quality and tackle more languages. That’s when I got involved. I was working as a researcher on DARPA projects looking at a new approach to machine translation—learning from data—which held the promise of much better translation quality. I got a phone call from those Googlers who convinced me (I was skeptical!) that this data-driven approach might work.
I joined Google, and we started to retool our translation system toward competing in the NIST Machine Translation Evaluation, a “bake-off” among research institutions and companies to build better machine translation. Google’s massive computing infrastructure and ability to crunch vast sets of web data gave us strong results. This was a major turning point: it underscored how effective the data-driven approach could be.
But at that time our system was too slow to run as a practical service—it took us 40 hours and 1,000 machines to translate 1,000 sentences. So we focused on speed, and a year later our system could translate a sentence in under a second, and with better quality. In early 2006, we rolled out our first languages: Chinese, then Arabic.
We announced our statistical MT approach on April 28, 2006, and in the six years since then we’ve focused primarily on core translation quality and language coverage. We can now translate among any of 64 different languages, including many with a small web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish, even Esperanto.
Today we have more than 200 million monthly active users on translate.google.com (and even more in other places where you can use Translate, such as Chrome, mobile apps, YouTube, etc.). People also seem eager to access Google Translate on the go (the language barrier is never more acute than when you’re traveling)—we’ve seen our mobile traffic more than quadruple year over year. And our users are truly global: more than 92 percent of our traffic comes from outside the United States.
by Franz Och
Distinguished Research Scientist, Google
// Thx to – The Next Web