I always thought public transportation was fun… for all those doubters out there here is proof.
(Source: treehugger.com)
Brings a new meaning to tracking packages!
By Bryan NelsonTue, Mar 01 2011 at 6:24 PM EST 
Photo: poolie/Flickr In 1992, a shipping crate containing 28,000 plastic bath toys was lost at sea when it fell overboard on its way from Hong Kong to the United States. No one at the time could have guessed that those same bath toys would still be floating the world’s oceans nearly 20 years later. Today that flotilla of plastic ducks are being hailed for revolutionizing our understanding of ocean currents, as well as for teaching us a thing or two about plastic pollution in the process, according to the Independent.
Since that fabled day in 1992 when they were unceremoniously abandoned at sea, the yellow ducks have bobbed halfway around the world. Some have washed up on the shores of Hawaii, Alaska, South America, Australia and the Pacific Northwest; others have been found frozen in Arctic ice. Still others have somehow made their way as far as Scotland and Newfoundland, in the Atlantic. The charismatic duckies have even been christened with a name, the “Friendly Floatees,” by devoted followers who have tracked their progress over the years. “I have a website that people use to send me pictures of the ducks they find on beaches all over the world,” said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer and Floatee enthusiast. “I’m able to tell quickly if they are from this batch. I’ve had one from the UK which I believe is genuine. A photograph of it was sent to me by a woman judge in Scotland.” This map details the extent of where the ducks have traveled so far: 
Perhaps the most famous Floatees, though, are the some 2,000 of them that still circulate in the currents of the North Pacific Gyre — a vortex of currents which stretches between Japan, southeast Alaska, Kodiak and the Aleutian Islands that the plight of the duckies helped to identify. “We always knew that this gyre existed. But until the ducks came along, we didn’t know how long it took to complete a circuit,” said Ebbesmeyer. “It was like knowing that a planet is in the solar system but not being able to say how long it takes to orbit. Well, now we know exactly how long it takes: about three years.” Today the North Pacific Gyre is also home to what has been called the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, a massive island of floating debris, mostly plastic, that the gyre stirs like a giant pot of trashy soup. (A short documentary about the gyre paints a pretty grim picture.) Though the rubber ducks have helped raise awareness about the gyre, most of what makes up the garbage patch is hardly so cute. Most of it consists of tiny plastic fragments and chemical sludge, but just about anything that floats which people discard can be found there. Some of the trash got there the same way the rubber duckies did, via lost shipping crates. Though no one knows exactly how many shipping containers are lost at sea every year, oceanographers put the figure at anything from several hundred to 10,000 a year, a startling estimate, though still only a tiny part of a global trash problem. “I’ve heard tales of containers getting lost that are full of those big plastic bags that dry cleaners use,” said Donovan Hohn, an author of a book called “Moby-Duck,” which immortalizes the journey of the 28,000 rubber duckies. “I’ve also heard of crates full of cigarettes going overboard, which of course end up having their butts ingested by marine animals. In fact, one of the endnotes in my book lists the contents of a dead whale’s belly: it was full of trash. Plastic pollution is a real problem.” Today we know that there are as many as 11 major gyres across the world’s oceans, and all of them are potential vestibules for the world’s trash. And if the Friendly Floatees are an example for anything, it’s that plastic trash endures for a very long time and that it’s a global issue. “The ones washing up in Alaska after 19 years are still in pretty good shape,” added Ebbesmeyer.
how great would this be if this was not an accident. Instead, an aged, rich businessman with no heirs hatched a brilliant plan. He is going to drop nearly 30,000 ducks into the ocean. Anyone who finds a duck and deciphers the code on it, earns a place in the businessman’s will. Okay, it sounds a bit like willy wonka…. but it would be like updated and more digital. It would be cool because unlike willy wonka people would not know what they were winning beforehand and there would be no capitalistic motivation on the businessman’s part.
“Brooklyn artist Daniel Bejar made a copy of the key to his apartment (hopefully not his current one, because of stuff like this). Then he made a copy of the copy. And then he repeated the process, by my count, 67 times. At which point the copy was an uncut blank. Kind of like I Am Sitting In a Room, but with keys. He calls it Visual Topography of a Generation Gap. [via Boing Boing]”
If you were online Monday, there’s a decent chance you spotted this quote:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
To many who found the celebrations of Osama bin Laden’s death unseemly, the line summed up their feelings perfectly. By the end of the day, it was being repeated endlessly on Facebook, Twitter, and several blogs.
Just one problem: There’s no evidence that Martin Luther King ever said such a thing.
By Tuesday morning, the blogosphere was starting to catch on. One of the first was Salon’s Drew Grant, who shot from the hip and grazed an innocent Las Vegas magician with a post headlined, “Why did Penn Jillette create a fake Martin Luther King Jr. quote yesterday?”
Ms. Grant was right to point out that the attribution to Mr. King was bogus, but it turns out Mr. Jillette was just another unwitting vector, albeit one with 1.6 million Twitter followers. Megan McArdle, a blogger at the Atlantic, tracked the original quote down to Jessica Dovey, a recent Penn State grad living in Kobe, Japan, who posted this as her Facebook status:
I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” MLK Jr.
The first sentence is Ms. Dovey’s own, followed by a quotation from King’s 1963 book, “Strength to Love.” At some point along the way, the quote marks vanished, and Dovey’s words got mixed up with King’s. Subsequently, the quote was shortened, leaving only Dovey’s line, now attributed to the civil rights leader.
There’s an old saying that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its pants. (Ironically, like many sayings whose origin is hazy, this one is widely misattributed to Mark Twain.)
Online, it all happens in a flash. A woman shares an eloquent and timely message with her Facebook friends. It gets passed along, quickly mutating into a false yet compelling line backed by King’s unassailable moral authority, and then suddenly goes viral, repeating itself on almost 10,000 web pages within 24 hours.
Now the truth has hoisted its trousers and is off and running. Using Google’s date range filter, skeptics start searching for the quote’s origin, and come up empty. They start working backward, trying to find what epidemiologists call “patient zero.” They find the source, and begin disseminating the real story.
But, if Google’s realtime Twitter results are any guide, the truth still has a lot of ground to cover before it catches up. Maybe it never will, and the misattributed quote, like so many before it, will cement itself in the public consciousness.
Maybe this is inevitable, but let’s at least try to fight on the side of reality. If you have a blog or use Twitter or Facebook, you can copy and paste this line:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” - Jessica Dovey
I am not surprised or fascinated by the quote being attributed to the wrong person. I am far more interested in Megan McArdle’s attempts to figure out the truth and the speed and accuracy she was able to achieve. Additionally the article makes a good point at the end, now that the truth is known, will it make a difference?
POM WONDERFUL PRESENTS: THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD, Pa. (AP) — About 31,000 central Pennsylvanians will soon be living in a joke.
Beginning at 1 p.m. Wednesday, the city of Altoona will change its name to “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” after the latest film by sarcastic documentarian Morgan Spurlock.
(Source: Yahoo!)
[video]
knitting graffiti.
(Source: deputy-dog.com)