Author: Richard

Our friend Shilpa made us aware of the beautifully-bejeweled Glass Beach of Fort Bragg, California. From Unfinished Man:

Glass Beach is a protected part of MacKerricher State Park, but in 1949, it was the site of an unrestricted dump. For 18 years, people drove out to the scenic expanse of ocean 

Close-up view of the colored glass beads mixed in the sand at Glass Beach near Fort Bragg, CA (glassbeach36xy) (Photo credit: mlhradio)

cliffs, marveled at the beauty of the natural world and the majesty of the depths, and then threw all their shit in.

Eventually, California realized that dumping automobiles, appliances, toxic substances and razor sharp shards of glass into the water was probably a bad idea, and looked elsewhere for a dumping site. […]  

Despite our obviously brilliant handling of the situation, Mother Earth had a few tricks up her sleeve, and spent the next 30 years tumbling away the jagged edges of our insensitivity and leaving behind brilliant pebbles of polished glass. As the shores grew into glimmering beaches, the state realized that people were visiting to collect the glass and to see the rainbow sands reflecting the sun, and quickly annexed it into a national park. The result? We finished up what nature graciously started, spent a few years cleaning up rusting metal hulks and all sorts of wonderfully dangerous debris (nothing says sandcastle fun like getting tetanus from a lead-filled 50s throwback), and Glass Beach is now a protected treasure that I’m dying to visit. 

Straight from Ars Technica: 

Verizon has filed a patent for a DVR that can watch and listen to the goings-on in your living room. In the application, the company proposes to use the technology to serve targeted ads appropriate to whatever you’re doing in the, uh, privacy of your own home–fighting, cuddling, or hanging out with your cats.

Verizon is far from the first company to think of this unassailably creepy use for a set-top box. Comcast patented similar monitoring technology in 2008 for recommending content based on people it recognizes in the room; Google proposed yet another patent for Google TV that would use audio and video recorders to figure out how many people in a room are watching the current broadcast.

Remind me to read the fine print next time I have to sign a Verizon terms-of-service agreement. 

Forget parks that have been swallowed up by lakes – try whole cities. In 1959, the Chinese government flooded a valley in Zhejiang, China, to build a hydroelectric power station. Two ancient cities fell beneath the waters:

Before the valley was flooded, there stood at the foot of the Wu Shi mountain (Five Lion Mountain) two magnificent ancient cities – Shi Cheng and He Cheng. Shi Cheng was built more than 1300 years ago in 621 AD during the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907) and was once the center of politics, economics and culture. He Cheng is even older: established in 208 AD during the Han dynasty (AD 25 – 200) as a business hub along the Xin’anjiang River.

The cities of He Cheng and Shi Cheng remained forgotten for 40 years until 2001, when Qiu Feng, a local official in charge of tourism, discussed ways to provide entertainment on Qiandao Lake with a Beijing-based diving club. He thought about utilizing the towns and asked the divers if they could dive into the water and have a look at it.

You can read the whole article – and check out some more impressive pictures – here.

Gruß vom Krampus! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fewer Christmas traditions are stranger than that of Krampus. Krampus, as you may or may not be aware, is St. Nicholas’s sinister (and lesser-known) demonic sidekick. If old St. Nick is the good cop who rewards well-behaved children with gifts of toys, then Krampus is the bad cop by far: he punishes naughty children by beating them with birch switches (and by terrifying them with his demonic visage). The tradition has its origins in the old trope of saints vanquishing demons through the power of God and forcing them into their thrall. 

While most Americans remain unfamiliar with Krampus (despite his frequent examination on blogs such as this one), he is widely celebrated in Austria, Hungary, and the alpine regions of Europe. According to Wikipedia, young men in those parts will traditionally “dress up as the Krampus in the first two weeks of December, particularly on the evening of 5 December, and roam the streets frightening children with rusty chains and bells.” So grab your mask, hit the streets, and get in the Krampus spirit! Just be prepared for some weird looks, if you’re not in Europe.

Salon.com brings us a detailed update: 

[R]umors that a legendary vampire ghost has awakened are spreading fear – and a potential tourist opportunity – through the remote village [of Zarozje].

A local council warned villagers to put garlic in their pockets and place wooden crosses in their rooms to ward off vampires […]

“Five people have recently died one after another in our small community, one hanging himself,” said Miodrag Vujetic, a local municipal council member. “This is not by accident.”

You can read the full article here.

This is beautiful (and a bit creepy, if you’re uneasy around water and submerged things): 

Grüner See, literally “Green Lake”, is a lake in Styria, Austria, near the town of Tragoss,

 located at the foot of the snow-capped Hochschwab mountains. During winter, the lake is only 1-2 meter[s] deep and the surrounding area is used as a county park. It is a particular

 favourite site for hikers. But as the temperature starts rising in spring, the ice and snow on the mountaintops begins to melt and runs down into the basin of land below. The lake swells up to engulf the entire area including the park. During summer, the lake reaches its maximum depth of around 12 meter and is claimed to look the most beautiful at this time.

Apparently, the lake is popular among divers when it’s at its summertime deepest. Check out more stunning images of Grüner See here. 

It almost seems laughable, but there are parts of the world even today where superstitions are serious business: 

Sales of garlic are booming in western Serbia after the local council issued a public health warning that a vampire was on the loose.

The warning came after an old ruined mill, said to once have been the home of notorious vampire Sava Savanovic, collapsed.

Savanovic was said to have lived in the old watermill on the Rogacica river, at Zarozje village in the municipality of Bajina Basta where he drank the blood of anybody that came to mill their grain.

Read more here. 

Here’s an unusual – and apparently effective – fundraising strategy: 

Tinker may be miniature — as in a miniature horse — but he’s a big money raiser for the Salvation Army.

He uses his mouth to hold and ring a red bell, and he picks up with his mouth a “Thank You Merry Christmas” sign. He can also bow and give kisses.

Major Roger Ross, a Salvation Army commander, said Tinker is one of their biggest money raisers in the area: He brings in 10 times the amount of a regular bell ringer.

“A good kettle for a couple of hours brings in about $250, and for the same time period (Tinker and his owners) have been known to bring in $2,500,” he said. “They line up to put money in the kettle.”

The 13-year-old horse, who’s brown, black, grey and white, has been ringing for four seasons.

I have to admit – if I were solicited by a horse, I would be hard-pressed to resist making a donation. You can read the full story here. 

In a fascinating development, neuroscientists at the University of Waterloo have built a functioning virtual simulation of a rudimentary brain:

Spaun, which stands for Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, has 2.5 million simulated neurons organized into subsystems to resemble the prefrontal cortex, basil ganglia, thalamus and other cognitive machinery in the brain. It also has a simulated eye that can see, and an arm that draws.

Spaun can recognize numbers, remember lists and write them down. It even passes some basic aspects of an IQ test, the team reports in the journal Science.

The simplified model of the brain, which took a year to build, captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and psychological behaviour, says Eliasmith, director of Waterloo’s Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience.

Here’s your daily odd tidbit, sourced by Wikipedia. Out in space there exists a giant bubble of nothing – huge, statistically-unlikely emptiness. Astronomers have dubbed it the Boötes

English: A map of the Boötes void. Credits: Powell, Richard. Atlas of the Universe Copyrights information: atlasoftheuniverse.com/copyright (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 void (after the constellation Boötes), or the Great Void. Read on: 

The Boötes void or the Great Void is a huge and approximately spherically shaped region of space, containing very few galaxies.  At nearly 250 million light-years in diameter 

(approximately 0.27% of the diameter of the visible universe), or nearly 236,000 Mpc³ in volume, the Boötes void is one of the largest known voids in the universe, and is referred to as a supervoid. The center of the Boötes void is approximately 700 million light years from Earth. According to astronomer Greg Aldering, the scale of the void is such that “If the Milky Way had been in the center of the Boötes void, we wouldn’t have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s.”

You can check out the original page here.

A Saudi woman. (Photo credit: Retlaw Snellac)

Saudi Arabia, already known for its staggering misogyny, just got a little more Orwellian (or, for the Margaret Atwood fans — Gileadean?):

RIYADH — Denied the right to travel without consent from their male guardians and banned from driving, women in Saudi Arabia are now monitored by an electronic system that tracks any cross-border movements.

Since last week, Saudi women’s male guardians began receiving text messages on their phones informing them when women under their custody leave the country, even if they are travelling together.