Why Go Anywhere...?

The newest feature of the Canadian side of Niagara Falls is a cool statue of Nikola Tesla that was unveiled in July to commemorate Tesla's 150th birthday.  Check out the statue here at the Tesla Society website, along with a load of other cool photos related to Tesla and his work.

Thanks to boingboing.net for the original post. 

It seems that the loyal fans of Battlestar Gallactica are organizing a movement!  They've created a site to facilitate premier parties nationwide.  From the site:

Everyone we've ever met who's into Battlestar is pretty frak'n cool. So we thought, why not get all these people together and have one big cool nationwide party when the new season Premieres on October 6th. 

 So if you're a fan, or even just a fan of one of the characters, you can either hold your own party of search for one in your area on the site.

Check the site out here.
Originally found via boingboing.net here.

Called IDEA, the Industrial Design Excellence Awards for 2006 are out and there are some super-cool items on the list this year.

For the outdoorsman, there's the 2SECOND QUECHUA:

a self-erecting tent. Just throw it in the air and it opens on its own before reaching the ground. All that’s required are six pegs to secure it to the ground

There's the Cocoon Disaster Relief Shelter:

The Cocoon concept shifts the paradigm of emergency shelter distribution from a complex, time-consuming bureaucratic system to small, self-contained, personally deployable setups. It augments current tent solutions that take weeks to deploy and require the military and disaster-relief professionals to assemble. Cocoon kits can be air-dropped into disaster areas within a few hours and setup by the victims themselves

And for the traveling bicyclist we have CityBike Amsterdam, a student design award winner:

CityBike Amsterdam is a progressive public bicycle transportation system for the city of Amsterdam. A fleet of GPS-enabled bikes with remote-controlled electronic locks are deployed throughout the city

And how could I leave out the "Sushi Time" Sushi Plate:

Made from high-quality porcelain with Palisander rosewood chopsticks, the "Sushi Time" Sushi Plate is a sushi and sashimi serving piece for two. The wide outer rim is generously sized and slopes inward toward the center “dipping dimple.” Recesses along the rim secure the chopsticks when not in use. In addition to being highly functional, the design is refined enough to be displayed on the table or shelf when not in use.

It's a great list of some amazingly innovative and creative products. Check out the whole list here.

Want to get the adrenaline pumping in the car? Head down to Yungas region of Bolivia and hit the road. Presurfer says:

There are people who say that it is the most dangerous highway in the world, that spirits inhabit in its curves who struggle among them to distract the conductor. But the certain thing is that the supernatural aid is not necessary to explain the danger of this route that unites the Bolivian plateau with the subtropical zone of the Yungas.

The road is so small and narrow there's actually space for only one truck and the humidity and water jumps in certain turns make the ground tremendously slippery. The wages of the drivers of these vehicles are so low that they are forced to work more hours than the recommendable ones.

Check out all the photos here.

There's a great post over at lifehack.org submitted by a reader about how she revived her cell phone after dropping it in a toilet:

No. I took the phone home, removed the battery and put it in the oven for a good bake on the “warm” setting, followed by a half hour in front of the blow dryer. It sprang back to life. I thought that was pretty cool, although the first friend I called wanted to know if I’d washed the phone before dialing. I guess he was worried about getting toilet germs in his ear.

Read the whole story on her blog, I Had an Idea This Morning, here.

In this month's GoNOMAD newsletter there's a great article about a small company that is putting together a bike tour:

After biking through China, Tibet, Laos, Cambodia, Jordan, and Tunis, and competing in the Tour d’Africa in 2004, Wilbert Bonné and Rob van der Geest wanted to find a new, challenging biking expedition. They both shared a dream of cycling through the great expanse of the Sahara desert.

However, after a great deal of research, they could not find a single company that offered the trip they hoped to take. So they created their own company, Bike-Dreams, and planned the company’s first expedition, “Paris-Dakar by Bike.
...
During the ten-week expedition, participants will bike 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles). They will spend 29 days in Europe and 43 in Africa for a total of 70 days on the road. They will spend time in France, Andorra, Spain, Morocco, Mauritania, and Senegal.

It looks lke a great tour, though you might have to have some kind of impulse to punish yourself if you're going to ride a bike that long!

Read the whole article at GoNomad here.

Today the first train will depart along the new railroad to the capital of Tibet, claimed by the Chinese to be the highest railroad in the world. A slew of fears of the potnetial effects the railroad will have on Tibetan culture and increased Chinese control over Tibet have arisen, but the train is nonetheless an engineering feat (from cnn.com):

[the train] features high-tech systems to stabilize tracks over permafrost and cabins enriched with oxygen to help riders cope with high altitudes.

It's an exciting prospect for those wishing to reach Tibet more conveniently and should help the country economically, but hopefully it will not serve as a distraction tactic to divert attention away from the repressive Chinese government and their attempts to swallow Tibet and its culture and history whole.

Well, it's been a while, but time to get back to business (and uphold this commitment!).

Today I ran across a post on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools Blog about the incomparable Volvo 240:

The Volvo 240 series of cars is quite possibly one of the best used car deals for the cooltools crowd. They were made from 1975 until 1993 -- so there are plenty of them to go around. In fact, Volvo wanted to stop making the cars three years before they actually stop producing them -- the community demand was so great they just didn't stop!

I now have an old 740 wagon, a '93 I believe, with 250,000 miles on it and it might just go forever. But before this one I had an '86 240 station wagon and I believe that it might very well have been the greatest car ever made. I drove it across the country twice AFTER it had 350,000 miles on it and never had a problem with it (at one point I put 7,000 miles on it in two weeks). The only reason it's no longer mine is that the final cross country trip ended in San Francisco and it was going to cost me $450 per month to park the thing...

When you're traveling, especially when you're heading to multiple destinations, one of the best things you can do is travel light. The fewer bags the better! You are less limited in your transportion options and you can pack up and go with your impulse if you have a whim!

Lifehack.org pointed to a great site about traveling with one bag, it's got some great tips for traveling light as well as some saftey info and other useful tidbits.

Check the site out here.
lifehack.org post is here.
Also, check out OneBag.com here - a more extensive site about traveling light.

Got a great travel photo? InsideOut Travel Magazine is holding a travel photo contest with entries due March 15th. Here are the details:

The theme is “Wonders of the World.” Alex Robinson, our photo editor, is looking for photos of something (things, people, places, and/or moments) extraordinary you caught on camera during a trip. If you haven’t submitted photos yet, you only have a few days left so check out the guidelines below and e-mail them to photos@insideoutmag.com:

- JPG format only.
- The size should be 1,000 pixels on the longest side.
- One photo per e-mail, and a maximum of five pictures per participant.
- Include when and where you took the picture.
- Be sure to include your full name, mailing address and phone number.
- Please don’t superimpose text on the photo with copyright information, etc. You retain all your rights, but we’ll include the photographer’s name in a standardized way.
- Send photos to photos@insideoutmag.com by March 15, 2006 (only three days away!).

InsideOut is a great travel mag. Check it out here.
Travel photo info is here.

Slashdot.org pointed to a good article about how the future of space travel will be financed in the future. Here's a glimpse of the article:

Ever heard of 3554 Amun? It's a space rock about 2 kilometers in diameter that looks as if it might have fallen straight out of The Little Prince. There are three key things to know about 3554 Amun: First, its orbit crosses that of Earth; second, it's the smallest M-class (metal-bearing) asteroid yet discovered; and finally, it contains (at today's prices) roughly $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion of cobalt, and $6 trillion of platinumlike metals. In other words, whoever owns Amun could become 450 times as wealthy as Bill Gates. And if you time your journey right -- 2020 looks promising -- it's easier to reach than the Moon.

Slashdot post here.
Main article here.

The NPR website has a very cool section called 'Retracing the Journey' with a bunch of autio stories available for listening online. The current stories are:

• Mapping the Human Race's Journey
• Crossing the Sahara on a Camel
• On the Road in China: The New Silk Road
• Icelanders Make a Viking Journey

The stories are as much the history of humanity and its journey as they are about the individual expeditions...

lifehack.org points to a site at UC Berkeley with a bunch of podcasts of their classes. There are a bunch of classes available for download and listening, including art, history, engineering, comput science, and physics. Nothing like a little bit of higher education!

lifehacker.org post here.
Classes for download here.

There's a hilarious list of the various personality types in a meeting at Jonathan Grubb's blog. Pick out which one you are, then figure out what your friends are. There are some equally entertaining additions by commenters. Here's the list in brief, visit his site for the full description:

• The Talker
• The Boss
• The Sigher
• The Lurker
• The Stealth Lurker
• The Meanderer
• The killer
• The productive, reasonable contributor

Jonathan Grubb's post is here.
Originally found via lifehacker.org here.

This is my bio. It is currently being used as a test for the blogging system! lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum

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