talk about putting it into perspective

Dimensions offer a wide variety of historical events, environmental disasters, spectacles and festivals whose geographical areas you can overlay over any location using Google Earth. What if Burning Man took place in your town (I bet it’s a lot bigger thank you think)? What if the Great Wall of China started in Texas? (It would stretch from the Gulf of California to Kentucky.) What’s the flight range of a Predator drone?

Pretty cool stuff.

A new mug from Photojojo looks just like a Canon 24-105mm lens, including a lens cap for a lid. (hat tip: Laughing Squid)

A nice musical detail from the film, Inception.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know that a grainy recording of Edith Piaf singing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” is used as a cue for the dreamers. You also know that while dreaming, time slows down.

With that in mind, it turns out that the throbbing musical sting we hear throughout the movie is that original piece of music… slowed down.

We just aired our July 2010 episode on rural health in Northern California, featuring stories from people living and working in towns all along State Route 299. The map features photos and interviews with people who are in the radio broadcast, plus many more we couldn’t fit into the hour.

I grew up fly fishing on the rivers and streams in this far northern section of California, and have spent some time in many of these towns. It was great to hear host Scott Shafer and reporter Sarah Varney file stories from Weaverville, Trinity Center and Fall River Mills, among other places.

Even greater, in my opinion, is that rather than talking to “experts” on rural health issues from the comfort of a radio studio, we took the show on the road and did all the reporting in the field. I think the show really worked, and the map helps bring a sense of place to Scott and Sarah’s terrific reporting.

photo by Dundas Football Club, used under Creative Commons License

There’s been plenty of talk – rightfully so – of the annoying swarms of bees that are the Vuvuzela horns you hear during the 2010 World Cup.  There reportedly have been more than one million sold since the Cup began last week.

Nothing short of a ban on the horns (it’s not going to happen) would help the players, broadcasters and fans at the matches, but as TV viewers, we thankfully have technology on our side.  A German sound engineer has created a 45-minute sound file you can buy and play during broadcasts.  It’s supposed to cancel out the sound using active noise control, the same way noise-canceling headphones work.

But thanks to another more industrious method, also originally posted by a German (Google translated page), you can just set your computer, stereo or TV equalizer to filter out the sound of the Vuvuzelas.

Apparently, all you have to do is duck your equalizer by at least 40dB at 465Hz and 235Hz.   If you are using your TV equalizer and it doesn’t offer those specific Hz levels, you can probably get away with approximating.

If you really want to get nerdy with it, here’s a video from Lifehacker that shows the before and after results: