In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage.
When you've got the most powerful factory V8 in the world, even the best driver can struggle with getting that power to the pavement. The 662 horsepower and 631 pound-feet of torque the 2013 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 is packing can easily turn its rear tires into expensive clouds of smoke. That's why the 2013 Ford Shelby GT500 is the first Shelby Mustang to be factory-equipped with launch control. "With so much more power and torque on tap from the new 5.8-liter V8," says SVT senior engineer John Pfeiffer, "launch control makes it easier for drivers to take advantage of the performance." What's different about the Shelby GT500s launch control is that drivers can engage it by just pressing a single button, and it's also capable of being fine-tuned for the best reesults.
Launch control is by now a familiar technology, with systems operating by holding engine RPM at a set point to help facilitate clean, repeatable launches. "Launch control is essentially a special mode of the traction control system that integrates the brake and engine management systems to keep the tires balanced on the peak of the mu-slip curve," explains SVT's Pfeiffer. In plain English, it's designed to send as much torque to the tires as they can handle. What's different about the system in the 2013 GT500 is its flexibility. "Most of our competitors' launch control systems have a fixed engine launch speed," says SVT Engineering supervisor Eddie Khan, but since "not every driver has the same style, and surface, tire, and climate conditions vary," he points out, "we've given Shelby GT500 drivers the ability to adjust the engine speed to achieve the best and most consistent performance."
Drivers can use TrackApps through the instrument cluster or tap a switch to the left of the instrument panel to enable the system. Through TrackApps, the engine launch rpm can be adjusted between 3,000 to 4,500 rpm with steps of 100 rpm. There are other tricks up the GT500s sleeve, too. Extinguish the traction control while using launch control and you'll get an rpm-only mode that keeps the brakes out of the picture to avoid sacrificing any possible speed. Launch control also works with the different stability control modes to allow some wheelspin when that's the fastest way out of the hole. "It's not as intrusive as some TC systems have been in the past," said SVTs Khan. "We'e given our drivers the ability to exert control over all the power and torque this Mustang can produce."
A San Clemente woman remains hospitalized with severe burns she suffered after rocks collected from an Orange County beach ignited in the pocket of her cargo shorts, authorities said.
The 44-year-old woman, who has not been identified, went to San Onofre State Beach with her family on Saturday, where her children collected colored rocks. The woman took the rocks from her children and put them in her pocket. After the family returned home, the rocks combusted in her right pocket, said Capt. Marc Stone of the Orange County Fire Authority.
Stone said paramedics arrived to find that the woman had suffered second- and third-degree burns from her right thigh down to her right knee, as well as second-degree burns on her right hand. Her husband also had burns on his hands after attempting to help her.
Stone said the rocks are being examined by county health officials to determine what caused them to ignite.
Frenemies Ford and General Motors have taken to cyberspace for a little verbal sparing, trading snarky shots this week over which company is more likeable on Facebook.
GM set itself up Tuesday after news broke that the carmaker decided not to spend $10 million on Facebook advertising the same week the social media juggernaut prepares for its initial public offering expected to raise $100 billion dollars.
Ford used the opportunity to tweak its crosstown rival, tweeting: "It's all about the execution. Our Facebook ads are effective when strategically combined with engaging content & innovation."
GM couldn't leave that alone, going onto its Facebook page, "Just wanted to let our millions of Facebook fans know, we're still here, and we 'like' you back!"
Both carmakers will continue to use Facebook, where both have millions of followers of their brands and vehicles. And, really, they are both right.
Ford has done an extremely good job incorporating Facebook into its marketing strategy. When it came time to launch the new Ford Explorer, it did it through Facebook reaching millions of people.
GM has determined its money will be better spent in other areas. A recent Associated Press-CNBC poll showing more than half of all Facebook users never click on sponsored ads and only 12 percent said they felt comfortable to buy anything over Facebook. Google, The Wall Street Journalpoints out, is much more effective.
You're not the only one who's sick and tired of all the fees levied on event tickets sold through Ticketmaster. Members of jam band String Cheese Incident are so fed up with fans having to shell out extra cash, that they're taking a stand by buying up bunches of tickets and reselling those to concertgoers, sans fees. So sort of a reverse scalp, maybe?
The New York Times reports on String Cheese Incident's (heretofore known as SCI) ambitious plan to express discontent with the system, which ultimately results in a loss of money for the band.
One Friday afternoon recently, about 50 fans and friends of the band String Cheese Incident took $20,000 in cash to the Greek Theater in Los Angeles to take a small stand against the system - in this case, Ticketmaster.
With money advanced by the band, each person had enough to buy eight tickets at $49.95 apiece for the group's show in July. Once all tickets were in hand, almost 400 of them, they were carried back to String Cheese headquarters in Colorado and put on sale again through the group's Web site - for $49.95.
MIke Luba, a band manager, explained, "We're scalping our own tickets at no service charge. It's ridiculous."
The band has a solid following, and wants to be able to offer tickets to its entire summer tour without service fees charged by Ticketmaster and other vendors. They're willing to eat the cost this summer in order to show their fans how much they appreciate them, said one member.
This battle against Ticketmaster isn't coming out of the blue -- SCI has handled as much as half of its own ticket sales to many of its shows. It sued Ticketmaster in 2003, accusing the company of abusing its market power by denying the group more than the 8 percent of tickets it customarily makes available to acts.
That case was settled, and allowed the band to handle tickets for five years, an agreement which ended in 2009.
"I would argue that on some level they are our tickets," Luba said. "If people in a free market find that Ticketmaster's service is easier and more effective, by all means go for it. But we have found a group of people who are used to buying tickets directly from the band's Web site."
Ticketmaster didn't comment, citing a confidentiality agreement with the band. One that Luba noted as well after a few interviews.
In other recent SCI/ticket news, scalpers used an Americans with Disabilities Act loophoole to snatch up all the wheelchair-accessible seats, resulting in some fans with actual disabilities not being able to buy tickets to an SCI show at Red Rocks in Colorado.
It'll take you a lot of time and effort to keep an old car on the road. Or you could just throw some shit together, like Jalopnik readers' ten worst barely-functional ways to fix a car. More »
Calling it "Holden's worst kept secret," a report in Australia's Drive indicates that the General Motors antipodean brand will announce "very soon" that it will be exporting "thousands of Commodores to the U.S. from 2013." Or, put another way, we will be getting thousands of Chevrolet SS Performance sedans - the Pontiac G8 in a previous life - starting next year.
The report says Holden is divulging the news earlier than planned because leaks just about everywhere, including OnStar, as well as trade-publication reports and speculation about GM's 2013 NASCAR entrant, have got everyone looking southward for confirmation of the answer we already (almost) know.
Drive says our rear-wheel drive Chevrolet will get a revised take on the VF-model Commodore that has an aluminum hood to make it lighter and less aggressive wheel arches to make it more slippery. No hard numbers are attached to the export rumors, but it is expected to number "much fewer than the 50,000-odd" units that were predicted for the Pontiac G8 program.
The scintillating line for bitter enthusiasts still chafing over the confirmed-then-cancelled G8 ST Ute corn tease is that the exports "could also expand to involve ute and sportwagon variants." Drive didn't, but we will emphasize the word "could," since we've been here before. However, that does jive with a report in Car and Driver indicating the same thing. Holden's announcement could be made as soon as later today right now - see below for update.
*UPDATE: Well that didn't take long. General Motors has officially confirmed that the new Holden-derived sedan sold in the U.S. will be called simply Chevrolet SS. The "limited production" SS will race in NASCAR beginning with the 2013 Daytona 500 and will appear in showrooms in 2014. GM isn't getting into specifics, but says "The much anticipated Australian-built car will benefit from significant technology advances which enhance overall performance." As to additional bodystyles like a wagon or pickup, well, GM isn't saying. See more in the official press release added below, and click on the image above to get a look at GM's newest racer all camo'd up.
One of the things I love about the internet, and specifically Twitter, is how an offhand comment turns into awesome. And it happens within seconds.
For some reason, a super-hi-res picture of the Earth is making the rounds right now. It’s a gorgeous pic, and lots of people are sending me the link via email and Twitter. The thing is, I wrote about this picture back in April, on Earth Day. But such is the nature of the interwebz that stuff pops back up.
I appreciate that folks think enough of me to send me stuff, in case I hadn’t seen it. But in this case I figured I’d better stem the tide, so I tweeted about it, just basically saying thanks, but I already wrote about it.
Right after tweeting that, I realized how hipster it sounded. So I decided to go full hipster, tweeting:
It says, "I wrote about the Earth, it’s an obscure planet, you’ve probably never heard of it. #BadAstrohipster". I added the #BadAstrohipster hashtag as an afterthought; hashtags were originally meant to be used as a way to organize and categorize tweets, but now most ...
Former postal employee, Jacquelyn V. Myers, ran afoul of the law.
Myers, 55, of Tallahassee, claimed she was physically unable to work as a rural letter carrier due to a lower back injury from a 2009 annual letter carriers’ food drive, reports WCTV CBS News-6 in Tallahassee.
However videotapes taken during that time show Myers running barefoot on gravel in a cross-country event, swimming, cycling, and even running in the Boston Marathon in 2010, according to the report.
That's when her luck ran out.
The jury didn't buy her claim and convicted Myers, who now faces up to 5-years in prison.
The next 9/11-like attack involving a plane will come from the ground — not through airport security — a Republican congressman and former airline pilot told a top TSA official.
While it is occasionally used recreationally for its hallucinogenic properties, the experiences are often extremely mentally and physically unpleasant, and frequently physically dangerous.>Ryan Duffy went to Colombia to check out a strange and powerful drug called Scopolamine, also known as “The Devil’s Breath.”It’s a substance so intense that it renders a person incapable of exercising free will.The first few days in the country were a harrowing montage of freaked-out dealers and unimaginable horror stories about Scopolamine.After meeting only a few people with firsthand experience, the story took a far darker turn than we ever could have imagined.
I DON’T know about you, but I’ve always found the debate about what our mobile devices are doing to us — to our behaviors, our manners, our minds — at least as interesting as reports about what we’re doing with these devices.
What about that gent who was talking loudly into his Android phone on the Metro-North train this morning? Was he really that obnoxious before we all went wireless — or did the device somehow change him? And what about all those young people who spend hours upon hours texting and sexting and Facebooking? What kinds of adults will they become?
Is the casual anonymity of Internet discussion turning us into boors? What did we once do with all the hours we now spend obsessively checking e-mail and texts? Smoke?
MY therapist called me the wrong name. I poured out my heart; my doctor looked at his watch. My psychiatrist told me I had to keep seeing him or I would be lost.
New patients tell me things like this all the time. And they tell me how former therapists sat, listened, nodded and offered little or no advice, for weeks, months, sometimes years. A patient recently told me that, after seeing her therapist for several years, she asked if he had any advice for her. The therapist said, “See you next week.”
When I started practicing as a therapist 15 years ago, I thought complaints like this were anomalous. But I have come to a sobering conclusion over the years: ineffective therapy is disturbingly common.
Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the origins of the arts
Rich and seemingly boundless as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about reality external to our bodies, is pitifully small. Our vision is limited to a tiny segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, where wave frequencies in their fullness range from gamma radiation at the upper end, downward to the ultralow frequency used in some specialized forms of communication. We see only a tiny bit in the middle of the whole, which we refer to as the “visual spectrum.” Our optical apparatus divides this accessible piece into the fuzzy divisions we call colors. Just beyond blue in frequency is ultraviolet, which insects can see but we cannot. Of the sound frequencies all around us we hear only a few. Bats orient with the echoes of ultrasound, at a frequency too high for our ears, and elephants communicate with grumbling at frequencies too low.
Tropical mormyrid fishes use electric pulses to orient and communicate in opaque murky water, having evolved to high efficiency a sensory modality entirely lacking in humans. Also, unfelt by us is Earth’s magnetic field, which is used by some kinds of migratory birds for orientation. Nor can we see the polarization of sunlight from patches of the sky that honeybees employ on cloudy days to guide them from their hives to flower beds and back.
The Marathon’s Accidental Route to 26 Miles 385 Yards
At the Summer Olympics, the marathon will be the only foot race measured by the standard system instead of the metric system.
And yet the precise distance of 26 miles 385 yards is entirely random, established at the 1908 London Games as an accommodation to the British royal family, not as an adherence to historical imperative.
When the modern Olympics began in Athens in 1896, a race of 40 kilometers, or 24.85 miles, was held to commemorate the legend of Pheidippides. He is the messenger who is said to have run from Marathon to Athens to announce a Greek victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. And to have promptly died.
Despite the sky-high prices for land and realty there are still desolate buildings in Japan. This motel had been built in 1973 and was closed and abandoned in 1997. Separate stairs lead from the hall to each of the ten rooms and the interior is very similar to the “love-motels” where you can book a room for two for just a couple of hours. With a whopping 500 million visits a year, love hotels – establishments that offer couples a private, short-stay location in which they can indulge in the pleasures of the flesh – are a booming business in Japan. Indeed, it’s been estimated that 1.4 million Japanese people, or 2% of the country’s population, visit a love hotel each day. Take a look at this collection of photos from this abandoned hotel in Japan.
Michael Lind on American Economic History | FiveBooks
The Collections of The Henry Ford
The American economy has been driven by waves of technological change and the successful adoption of ideas from elsewhere. The author of Land of Promise tells us how it happened, and what history teaches us about the way ahead
Your latest book is a sweeping economic history of America. In a nutshell, how did America become such an economic powerhouse?
Well, it did so as a result of collaboration between the government and the private sector and, increasingly in the 20th century, the non-profit, academic research sector. It’s quite a different story in reality from the tale that is sometimes told of how capitalism grew up without controls in the United States, and then with the New Deal it came under regulation. In fact, the government both at the federal and the state level was deeply involved with projects for promoting the industrialisation of the United States and the creation of a capitalist market from the administration of George Washington onwards.
I am a sleep fucker. Like everything else I’m self-conscious about, I first heard about my disorder from my girlfriend. We had just moved in together and, of course, I didn’t believe her at first. My girlfriend, after all, exhibits all the hallmarks of paranoid personality disorder. Sure, I left the toilet seat up. Sure, I left my dirty socks on the floor. Sure, I felt you up in the wee hours of the morning and then turned over as if nothing happened.
Couldn’t it be, I thought, that she was just dreaming about me initiating sex in the middle of night? Or maybe, I theorized, she was sleepwalking. “I wasn’t sleepwalking,” she insisted, looking at me like she regretted our entire living situation.
A few nights later, I woke up to find myself fondling my girlfriend’s breasts. “It’s 4 am,” she said. “What are you doing?” For once, I didn’t have an answer.
Twenty Citizens’ Worth Of Blood Flowed Through Him: A Medic Confronts The Open Wounds Of Afghanistan
This was originally written for Deadspin’s Blood Week, but shit happens and we’re running it now.
A 20-pound jug of homemade explosives will take off one or both legs somewhere between the knee and hip, perhaps breaking the pelvis and shattering vertebrae as the shockwave travels up through the skeleton. After our first Marine was wounded this way—let’s call him Patient Zero—he was stabilized by his squad’s hospital corpsman and flown to the trauma center a British base that abuts Camp Leatherneck, the hub for Marine operations in southwest Afghanistan.
At the time I was running a forward combat aid station as a general medical officer to a Marine Corps infantry battalion. Standard protocol is to gather the casualty’s disembodied limbs and tissue as best you can and place the material aboard the medevac helicopter with him so it can be destroyed in a dignified manner. But explosions have a way of defying protocol, as I learned later that day when Zero’s cardboard box arrived at my aid station.
The plan was to send the box to the crematorium at Camp Bastion, but I first had to know if the contents had been violated in transit. I opened it. Inside was Zero’s disembodied lower leg retrieved—after he had been choppered away—from the roof of a house near the blast. There was a boot like mine and a sock like mine and an ankle like mine. That all made sense. But what followed from there was all wrong. Rising from the ankle was a disastrous stump: The fibula was a muddy jagged tusk; the tibia was a series of chunks, none larger than a domino; both were swaddled in shredded layers of gastrocnemius, tibialis anterior, and a swishing flap of cold, flaccid fat and skin. Other little pieces were there as well, none larger than a quarter. I noted the contents, sealed and signed the parcel, and assigned a senior corpsman as its courier to the ovens at Bastion.
On 6th April 1924, four Douglas World Cruisers and eight American crewmen set out from Seattle to attempt the first around-the-world airplane flight. Each was named after an American city (Seattle, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans). Seattle was lost when it crashed into an Alaskan mountain.
Whereever they went, the six airmen “Magellans of the Air” were welcomed royally. They had to avoid the Soviet Union, which had not given permission for the planes to cross but at a luncheon given by the faculty of the University of Tokyo, they are toasted for “being the first of men to connect the two shores of the Pacific Ocean through the sky.” In Shanghai, girls strewed roses before them. In Calcutta, it took 50 policemen to hold back the mob. They proceeded into the Middle East, and Europe. In Vienna, they were surrounded by Kodaks. They arrived in Paris on the Bastille Day, and greeted by “more generals, ambassadors, cabinet ministers and celebrities than we had encountered in all the rest of our lives”, wrote one airman. In London, they were mobbed by photographers and autograph collectors for the police lines had broken.
En route to Iceland, the Boston sunk during a forced landing caused by engine trouble. At Icy Tickle, Labrador, U.S newspapers eagerly awaited the completion of this 175-day journey. The above picture was taken by Acme/UPI photographer Bob Dorman, who beat the other photographers by dropping the photographic plates and negatives into Manhattan’s East River as he and other photographers were flying back from Labrador to New York. His agency recovered the plates (which were smashed by the impact) and negatives (which were intact) before the plane had landed, thus scoring a beat.
In the beginning, God created dinosaurs and humans, and they walked together in Texas.
At least, according to many people in Glen Rose.
The small town about 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth is home to some of the best-preserved dinosaur tracks in the world; it’s also a heavily Christian community where many locals interpret the book of Genesis literally.
Their belief is bolstered by a phenomenon in the riverbed. Alongside the dinosaur tracks are what resident R.C. McFall and others call “man tracks”—tangible proof of biblical creation accounts and a refutation of the theory of evolution.
McFall walks along the Paluxy River, careful not to place his cowboy boot in a dinosaur track. Muddy water fills the fossilized footprints embedded in this rocky ledge.
By all accounts Earth should be a “snowball planet” like the frigid world Hoth in the 1980 Star Wars film “The Empire Strikes Back.”
Why? Because common theories of stellar evolution predict that the sun was only 70 percent of its current brightness when it first lit its fusion engine 4.5 billion years ago. The sun has been steadily growing brighter since then and will continue so into the future, eventually evaporating away Earth’s oceans.
ANALYSIS: Stellar ‘Speed Bumps’ Could Shape Baby Star Systems
Once Earth amassed an ocean 4.3 billion years ago, it should have quickly frozen over and reflected so much sunlight back into space that it squelched Earth’s ability to thaw out for billions of years.
Life’s journey: pilgrims arrive at Mena in Saudi Arabia, carrying stones to throw at pillars symbolising Satan. Photograph: Getty Images.
How much do we know about the birth of Islam? Much less than we think, argues the popular historian Tom Holland in his new book, In the Shadow of the Sword. In Holland’s opinion, the Quran was written long after the death of Muhammad, Mecca is not necessarily the birthplace of the Prophet and modern Muslims’ reverence for their holy writings stops them from confronting the texts’ dubious historical origins. Bryan Appleyard has described the conclusion of In the Shadow of the Sword as “seismic”; he wrote in the Sunday Times that “Holland’s book leaves almost no aspect of the traditional story of Islam intact”. Another reviewer likened its treatment of the Quran to Dan Brown’s Christianity-as-conspiracy in The Da Vinci Code, “though with a little more class”.
Lifted their bikes up-
side down above
their thousand
heads and
cheered
locked the grid
blocked the inter-
section shut
the whole East
Village down
cars jammed
against that
stopped moment
that break in
time’s flow
nothing moving
nowhere
to go unless
inward until
the helicopter’s
searchlight shook
the air and cops
billyclubbed
a couple kids
to set example
hauled off
a truckload of
others forced
apart the forces
that swirled
together there—
but what I still see
are the wheels
held upward
spoked with light
freed from
the pavement
spinning into sky.
