David Pierini - page 60

I stood in the doorway, still teary-eyed from goodbyes with my parents. There, before me, sat the first lesson of my freshman year in college.

Peter Otto had a blond mohawk and twirled a shiny butterfly knife. He had already adorned his side of the room with posters of his favorite bands: The Meatmen, Dead Kennedys and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

“I guess I’m your roommate,” I said and he pointed to the lower bunk. I was chubby, an Eagle Scout and a mama’s boy. But I had one cool card I could play — a boombox that played compact discs, a relatively new music format.

But with only two CDs — a synth-pop album by Kenny Loggins and the debut record from Bruce Hornsby & the Range — there would be no cool, not then anyway. Otto wound up being the best roommate I ever had during two college tours. Some of his music made it into my CD collection, which accelerated in the fall of 1985, but I doubt he ever took to Loggins.

Nearly 30 years later, I keep reading stories that eulogize the CD, report plummeting album sales and lay out how the music industry is now taking its product directly to customers through social media, streaming services or direct downloads from a group’s website.

With “plane” in the name, you expect to see wings. But the European Space Agency’s Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle IXV, or spaceplane, will have to earn them.

A critical test takes place Feb. 11, when the spaceplane will get a push into space aboard a Vega rocket and splash down 100 minutes later in a vetting of the agency’s re-entry technologies.

About the size — and even look — of a small boat, the 2-ton spaceplane will keep an even keel as it re-enters at hypersonic speeds with the assist of thrusters and a pair of aerodynamic flippers on the back. Chutes will deploy to slow it down and give it a gentle landing in the Pacific Ocean.

With the number of smartphone muggings high enough to earn the crime its own category in the police stats, holding a pricey little computer in your hands is like toting a big target.

However, you could also be holding a layer of security: Several apps have emerged that sound an alarm to family, friends and law enforcement in the event a smartphone owner feels threatened, faces an assault or suddenly gets nervous about their surroundings.

If a selfie stick can’t help you get everyone in your group photo, use a satellite.

Of course you would have to build, own and launch your own, which was no problem for Israel Aerospace Industries, whose employees this week gathered for what they called a “space selfie” shot by one of its satellites passing over head.

IAI employees arranged themselves to form the company acronym and looked up for the minute its EROS B satellite was scheduled for a flyby. While the letters are sharp, there are no discernible “cheese” smiles in the black and white photo.

Like glitter itself, the story on shipyourenemiesglitter.com just won’t go away.

But eventually it will and that could mean trouble for the undisclosed buyer of the website that promises to mail glitter bombs to enemies, according to a London-based broker who specializes in online businesses.

In a post published today by FE International headlined How to Waste $85k Buying Glitter, Thomas Smale predicts the buyer won’t make his money back. If Smale is wrong, he will willing pour a bucket of glitter over himself.

Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric are together again and still clueless about technology.

The former Today Show hosts were reunited not on a morning show couch but in BMW’s i3 electric car for a Super Bowl ad that has them reliving a 1994 segment when they could not explain the Internet. The commercial, in just three days on YouTube, has more than 4.6 million views.

“What is the Internet anyway,” Gumbel asks. “Do you write to it like mail?” Gumbel was admitting he did not quite know how to tease a story that would have more information on the NBC website. “That little mark – a – with the ring around it.” A colleague offers the answer “at” with Gumbel saying, “That’s what I said. Katie said she thought it was ‘about.’ ”

The first airplane was in flight for 12 seconds and flew 120 feet. But it was enough to send imaginations airborne.

  Not long after Kitty Hawk, aviators were trying to figure out how to fly a car.

Glenn Curtiss was the first with the Autoplane in 1917. It had a triwing, looked like a Model T and hopped. Before he could actually get its wheels off the ground, World War I broke out and Curtiss diverted his energy toward building aircraft for the U.S. Army.

While we have figured out how to put people in space, we’re still tinkering with a future that has yet to arrive. If you’re waiting for George Jetson’s future, consider that the car his family flew around in was a 2062 model.

The dwarf planet named after the Roman goddess of motherly relationships will soon have a new friend. And scientists and space-exploration geeks here on Earth can’t wait for that friend, the space probe Dawn, to start dishing.

Dawn, launched in 2007 to visit two bodies within the asteroid belt past Mars, is scheduled to enter an orbit of the dwarf planet Ceres on March 6. Ceres is the largest mass in the asteroid belt and has an icy mantle that may harbor an internal ocean of water under its surface. Talk of water on a planetary body always leads to questions of life.

Ceres has long been a curiosity to astronomers and space observers, and its status — is it an asteroid? a dwarf planet? — has been hotly debated ever since its discovery in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi.

Never mind all that. What’s that white spot?

A rare phaser pistol from the original Star Trek television series is “set to stun” when it goes on the auction block next month in Los Angeles.

It is made of fiberglass and one of only two known phasers to have survived the 1960s television series, which starred William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as the leaders of the starship Enterprise.

The phaser could fetch more than $60,000, according to the website Luxurylaunches.com when it hits the block Feb. 21 during a Star Trek auction by Propworx.

Artists don’t always explain themselves well.

Even acclaimed illustrator Christoph Niemann, who can articulate the mysteries of creativity better than many, doesn’t always understand the moment when the head, heart and eyes merge with skills and gifts to produce a brilliant piece. It’s like trying to put into words the act of breathing.

But every Sunday, we can behold the headwaters of his creative flow.

During the third quarter, a referee blew the whistle to signal a timeout. What happened next, signaled the beginning of a sizemic shift in our lives.

But if you left the couch for beer and snacks at that moment of the 1984 Super Bowl, you may have missed the first run of a commercial that made more history than the game itself (sorry Oakland Raiders, 38-9 winners over the Washington Redskins).

On this date 31 years ago, Apple aired a commercial introducing the world to the first MacIntosh personal computer. It was the feature of Today in Media History on the Poynter Institute website.

A 72-year-old grandmother with a broken hip started the revolution with a television remote in her hand. She pointed it at the screen in her living room in 1984 and bought eggs, cornflakes and margarine.

Jane Snowball of Gateshead, England, spent a few pounds and became the first online shopper. In 2013, online shopping generated more than $1.2 trillion worldwide (with the promise of higher figures when 2014 numbers are reported).

Snowball did not use the computer as we know it. She used a device called Videotex, which merged media and business information systems and made them available to “outside correspondents.” She pressed a button on the remote with a phone icon and was able to connect to her local Tesco supermarket with a telephone number. The store received her list and delivered the items to her door.

Karen Koch Rasmussen navigates life just fine without sight. Developing systems to identify the tangibles in life come to her naturally, from how to stock her canned goods to labeling her music collection so she can listen to which ever genre strikes her.

She even has a strategy for when there’s a glitch in her systems, like when a canned item goes in the wrong place. If she grabs tomatoes instead of beans, she may adjust her recipe and roll with the inconvenience.

So when an iPhone app to assist the blind came into her life, thus offering a solution to those occasional challenges, Rasmussen, 26, didn’t quite know how to use a set of eyes that were easily at her disposal.

“I’ve been blind since birth so you learn to get along without seeing,” said Rasmussen, a graduate student in political science in Aarhus, Denmark. “I’m not use to having the opportunity so I would forget there is a solution.”

As promised by the web service, a glitter bomb sent to an enemy can be a real nuisance.

But the glitter that just wouldn’t go away turned out to be on the hands of the man who created shipyourenemiesglitter.com, who after a few days of viral attention and web-site crashing orders begged off.

“Hi guys I’m the founder of this website,” wrote Mathew Carpenter on Product Hunt last week. “Please stop buying this horrible glitter product — I’m sick of dealing with it. Sincerely, Mat.”

Some quick cash might be the remedy to remove the glitter off Carpenter’s hands.

His site went up for sale on flippa.com, receiving more than 300 bids and quickly exceeded the $60,000 reserve bid.

At 9, Mariah Martin already has a handle on future careers. “Veterinarian, professional figure skater, fashion model and teacher – not all at once.”

For now, she must settle for tech entrepreneur.

The Seattle fourth-grader and her father, Scott, understand learning math for many children is no joyride but they have developed an iOS game app they believe will put kids in the driver seat on a road to mastering the basics.

CarQuiz allows drivers to navigate a track with math equations along the way and a choice of three answers a little further down the road. Once the equation appears, the driver must quickly figure out the answer as three choices appear. With a finger swipe, the driver moves into the lane with the correct answer.

I have no plans to buy a smartwatch at the moment, but when I do, I already know the first command to give it.

I’m going to make my jaw as square as possible, activate the phone for my first call (probably to my wife), and say: “Calling all cars! Calling all cars!”

With Android Wear already here and Apple Watch on the way, we must salute detective Dick Tracy and his his two-way wrist radio.

Comic strip creator Chester Gould first strapped a wrist radio on Dick Tracy in 1946. He upgraded it to a wrist television in the 1960s. Tracy never complained about dropped calls or bandwidth problems.

The curvy roadster with the V-8 engine is the stuff of legend and the muse of copy cats.

The Shelby Cobra turned racing on its head in the 1960s and though so few were ever produced, it became one of the most copied cars in history. Replicas continue to flood the market and a simple search on Ebay will turn up a variety of pricey replica kits.

But there’s one that might have earned a nod of approval from Carroll Shelby had he lived to see it.

For the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Shelby Cobra, a working 3-D printed replica is currently on display at the Detroit Auto Show.

Glitter is the “herpes of the craft world.” Once on you, it doesn’t seem to ever go away.

You might have some moral hang-ups about giving an enemy herpes, but a fast-spreading glitter bomb, while still hostile, seems less malicious and eventually forgivable. Now an Australian startup will be your glitter hitman for a small fee.

The promise of rock-hard abs is still not incentive enough to get many men to the gym. But promise a rock-hard — well, you know — and you might launch a boner-fide exercise craze.

The makers of Private Gym guarantee “100 percent satisfaction” for gents and their partners, thanks to a pelvic fitness program that includes a rather chunky-looking piece of wearable tech.

The exoplanet known as Kepler-16b is a gas giant near the outer limits of the habitable zone, but why should that discourage you from paying it a visit?

NASA has issued a set of three retro space-tourism posters to celebrate the discoveries of the Kepler Space Telescope, which has laid eyes on more than 1,000 confirmed exoplanets and more than 400 stellar systems.

If 16b — which is said to have a temperature similar to dry ice — doesn’t sound appealing, honeymooners might be drawn to the promise of romance with a double sunset. Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars, like Luke Skywalker’s native planet Tatooine, and the travel poster serves up this selling point: “Where Your Shadow Always Has Company.”

You don’t need a smartphone app to tell you that taping dozens of iPhones to your body might set off alarms.

So it’s hard to know what a Hong Kong man was thinking when he tried to walk through a metal detector at Fultan Port in China with 94 iPhones taped to his chest, stomach and legs.

Actually, customs officials were suspicious before he got to the metal detector. After a check of two plastic shopping bags he was carrying, officers directed him towards and metal detector and noticed his “weird walking posture, joint stiffness (and) muscle tension.”

Just when you think there is little left to reveal with photography, Stephen Orlando comes along and shines a new light – ribbons of light to be exact – on motion.

To imagine the push-and-pull sweep of a kayak stroke or the looping follow-thru of a tennis serve, you might think to use video and slow down the sequence of frames to get a sense of the patterns of movement bodies use to propel forward.

Orlando, of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, contains the complete trajectory of movement in a single still frame with long exposures and a simple lighting technique that seems to illuminate the otherwise invisible forces at play.

Mercury is the most cratered planet in the solar system, a popular destination for asteroids and comets.

As bleak a place as this sounds, you may be able to give the pockmarked planet some personality.

The team piloting the MESSENGER spacecraft exploring the closest planet to the sun is calling on “all Earthlings” to name some prominent craters after famous people in the arts and humanities.

The deadline is Jan. 15 and inspiration can be found in pictures of the five craters on MESSENGER’s official website.

If you look at the work of photographer and graphic artist Alberto Seveso, you might inadvertently feel you’re in the throes of a Rorschach inkblot test.

You are staring at ink for sure and, mesmerized, you can’t help but process what the eyes and brain see. Looks like lava, melted plastic or the gas explosions from an evolving star in deep space. The heart will no doubt see beauty but the gut may roil and struggle.

Seveso, a highly sought-after editorial and commercial photographer, hopes he is stirring our insides when he captures the fleeting art of ink or paint being poured into water.

You could say Emma Young is nuts about Doctor Who.

So much so, the craft maker and mother of two from Hampshire England made a squirrel feeder out of the head of a Cyberman, a villain on the popular British Sci-Fi television show.

The Cyberman head used to be a shower radio and Young gutted it, loaded it with peanut butter and nuts and suspended it from a tree branch in her garden.