It is that time of year where many of us grow tired of the lingering winter and gloomy days. If you’re in that boat, here are a few photos to daydream about.
]]> http://richc.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/the-worlds-most-beautiful-and-uninhabited-islands/feed/ 0 RichC http://richc.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/bmw-m-cars-get-tri-turbo-diesel-bbc-top-gear/ http://richc.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/bmw-m-cars-get-tri-turbo-diesel-bbc-top-gear/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:52:32 +0000 richc http://richc.wordpress.com/?p=401 ]]>

Hey BMW … how about bringing those all-wheel drive tri-turbo M diesels over to the U.S.

BMW’s M Division may have started out with a raspy, fighty little petrol 3 Series, but today it stands for something more. Much more. Say hello to the birth of the 3.0-litre triple-turbo straight six diesel M car.

BMW recently revealed its intention to create a new range of M-tuned cars that would sit between the standard range and the ‘proper’ M cars, and today we find out that on launch, the brand will offer a four-wheel-drive BMW M550d and M550d Touring, a BMW X5 M50d and a BMW X6 M50d.

via topgear.com

boston:

Ghost boat found after three-year, 3,500-mile journey

- After wandering the sea for more than three years, the Queen Bee out of Nantucket was found 20 miles off the northern coast of Spain.

(US Coast Guard photo)

I’ve always like Mazdas … I might like them even more in a little over a year.

A Mazda with a diesel engine finally will arrive in the U.S. in early 2013, spokesman Jeremy Barnes tells us. “It’ll be here between 15 and 18 months behind the launch of the full rundown for more details.

It’s disappointing to be commenting on the demise of a free standing Picnik.com, but the premium features will now be available for free until April 19th when the tools will become part of Google’s empire as a complement to Google+.

While traveling and away from my computer, or even as an alternative to Photoshop, I’ve occasionally used this free online image service to resize, crop and correct photos. It isn’t the only free online option, but has been the easiest to use and offers most of the tools needed to prep an image for a blog or email.

If you’ve ever tried using a straw with a can of soda, you now what happens: the straw comes flying out and falls onto your desk. Reddit user triggerhoppe solves this annoyance by threading the straw through the tab on the top of the can.

It’s as simple as turning the tab to the side and sliding the straw through it. This keeps the straw from rising up and falling out of the can. We know drinking soda through a straw helps the sugar bypass your teeth, but it has always been a pain to use a straw with a can. Every dentist in the world will tell you to just stop drinking soda, but at least this way you can help thwart some of the negative effects of soda without straws flying everywhere.

 

Without NASA, the private sector has a bigger incentive to set up …

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen says he will use his wealth to build the world’s largest airplane as a mobile platform for launching satellites at low cost, which he believes could transform the space industry.

Slated to be announced Tuesday, the novel, high-risk project conceived by renowned aerospace designer Burt Rutan seeks to combine engines, landing gears and other parts removed from old Boeing 747 jets with a newly created composite craft and a powerful rocket to be built by a company run by Internet billionaire and commercial-space pioneer Elon Musk.

Dubbed Stratolaunch and funded by one of Mr. Allen’s closely held entities, the venture seeks to meld decades-old airplane technology with cutting-edge booster-rocket designs in an unprecedented way to assemble a hybrid that would offer the first totally privately funded space transportation system.

As someone who has spent a few days working with type (printing), I thought it apropos to share an interesting bit about the “origins of punctuation marks” from a G+ post on my blog … besides I’m too lazy to write something original today.

Question Mark ?
Origin: When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word questio – meaning “question” – at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to qo, which caused another problem – readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

Exclamation Point !
Origin: Like the question mark, the exclamation point was invented by stacking letters. The mark comes from the Latin word io, meaning “exclamation of joy.” Written vertically, with the i above the o, it forms the exclamation point we use today.

Equal Sign =
Origin: Invented by Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde in 1557, with this rationale: “I will settle as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or Gmowe [i.e., twin] lines of one length, thus : , bicause noe 2 thynges, can be more equalle.” His equal signs were about five times as long as the current ones, and it took more than a century for his sign to be accepted over its rival: a strange curly symbol invented by Descartes.

Ampersand &
Origin: This symbol is stylized et, Latin for “and.” Although it was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C., it didn’t get its strange name until centuries later. In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned this symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. But the symbol had no name. So, they ended their ABCs with “and, per se, and” meaning “&, which means ‘and.’” This phrase was slurred into one garbled word that eventually caught on with everyone: ampersand.

Octothorp #
Origin: The odd name for this ancient sign for numbering derives from thorpe, the Old Norse word for a village or farm that is often seen in British placenames. The symbol was originally used in mapmaking, representing a village surrounded by eight fields, so it was named the octothorp.