In 2009, Jon Gosselin was offered $365,000 for interviews: how reality stars, celebrity parents and rehab workers
make money selling gossip to celebrity websites and TV shows.
posted by Georgina
on May 23, 2011 -
38 comments
In a single 1931
document, electrical engineer
Alan Blumlein patented stereo records, stereo movie sountracks and surround sound. His equipment was used to make some of the
first stereo recordings at EMI's Abbey Road studios - several decades before the technology came into popular use. Blumlein went on to pioneer
405 line TV (the first wholly electronic format which won out over John Logie Baird's rival system) and to produce the equipment that made the
first outside TV broadcast possible. At the outbreak of World War 2 he was a key architect of the secret
H2S radar project. Unfortunately he was killed in a plane crash while testing the technology and the whole incident was kept secret. Hence he remains an obscure figure despite his achievements. A
recent BBC Radio 4 program contains a lot of the archive stereo footage and tells his story.
posted by rongorongo
on Aug 7, 2008 -
5 comments
Radar picks the worst colleges in America. At least one of the picks is rather dubious, although I suppose being the "worst" Ivy League is a position of some note, and another one of the picks was where my school's valedictorian went. Either way, it's always nice to see the Moonies somersaulting into otherwise non-Moonie related stories.
posted by Sticherbeast
on Aug 27, 2007 -
75 comments
High resolution images of Earth. The German satellite TerraSAR-X was shot into space on June 15, and already four days after sent some beautiful pictures back to Earth. Pictures are described in German, but you'll figure it out.
posted by Glow Bucket
on Aug 13, 2007 -
17 comments
Tales from the DEW Line. In the mid-50's, the Distant Early Warning, or
DEW Line, a series of radar stations along the 69th paralell, began scanning the arctic skies for signs of soviet bombers. Though cut off from direct contact with civilization, and often hoping that nothing would happen, staffers of these remote outposts still found plenty worth writing about or photographing (
1,
2,
3).
posted by Durhey
on Feb 2, 2007 -
36 comments
The President's call for a
troop surge in Iraq will likely be a headache for military recruiters, who have already had to
relax standards to (barely) meet their quotas. But just how desperate are they for warm bodies? Radar prank called recruiting stations around the country disguised as a veritable
Breakfast Club of misfit would-be soldiers, all dramatically unqualified or unattractive for service in some way.
The resulting transcripts are hysterically funny (the writer poses as a flamboyantly gay man, a mama's boy, a martial arts freak, a junkie, an IBS sufferer and a lobotomy patient). The recruiters turn out not to be quite as sleazy as you might imagine, but the conversations are priceless.
posted by P-Soque
on Jan 30, 2007 -
30 comments
"From the first world war until the 30's
air acoustics played an important role in the air defence. Air vehicles carrying a weapon could not be located from the ground e.g. at night time or under cloudy conditions. As radar was still to be discovered, vision had to be
supplemented by
hearing using the sound of the engines."
posted by mr_crash_davis
on Aug 8, 2006 -
8 comments
More NMD to make you nervous. If you're in an area about to be vapourised then you are safe. If you live anywhere else you are not. I live about half a blast radius away from
one of the radar stations in the UK (it doesn't look like that picture anymore - some of the golfballs are now pyramids). From direct assault I maybe won't be hit but the bombs falling out of the sky on their way from Iraq to New York are pretty much going to land on my head. Cool.
posted by vbfg
on Sep 3, 2001 -
8 comments
