I don’t quite know what to make of ParaHawk USA. Just watch:
ParaHawk USA
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011A Lesson in Order
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011The ever-contrarian Steve Sailer finds Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature — about the drop in violence over time — reminding him of a lesson his father tried to teach him years ago:
As we walked down the street in suburban Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, we’d occasionally come upon a parked car whose headlights had been left on. To spare the driver a dead battery, we’d open the car door and flick the lights off.
My dad’s acts of disinterested neighborliness were feasible because, implausible as it now seems, few people bothered to lock their cars back then. Indeed, it was still common in 1965 for motorists to store their keys conveniently in the ignition switch. One of the earliest magazine articles I can recall reading advised drivers that due to the sudden growth in car thefts, they should start taking their keys with them.
As the 1960s went on, my father and I increasingly found that parked cars with burning headlights were locked, so there was nothing we could do. The last time we successfully turned off anybody’s lights was 1972.
The blight of car theft spread overseas. At a business lunch in the leafy suburbs of Oxford in 1994, a half dozen English colleagues regaled me for 45 minutes with stories of their cars being stolen.
Slowly the forces of order responded. Manufacturers armored the ignition system so that thieves could no longer hotwire cars. In the 1980s, obnoxious alarms became common. The Club came along, a big red steel contraption that sent the message, “It will take too long to steal my car. Steal my neighbor’s car instead.”
In response to all this target-hardening, criminals switched to stealing cars directly from motorists: carjacking. In Los Angeles, the most publicized enormity came in 1993, when a carjacker brutalized a young woman for her BMW in placid Sherman Oaks, killing her unborn child. After the public outcry, the LAPD took carjacking seriously, and this most horrifying version of car theft declined.
Indeed, stealing cars isn’t the career it used to be. According to FBI statistics, despite the recession, motor vehicle theft declined 40 percent from 2006 to 2010. The howling of accidentally triggered car alarms seems to have become less frequent as the need for the devices has fallen.
While reading the galleys of Professor Pinker’s immense book, I paused to take a walk. I passed a car with its lights on. Out of ancient habit, I tried the door. For the first time in 39 years, I succeeded in turning off a neighbor’s headlights.
The past is a foreign country.
First manned flight with an electric multicopter
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011Tiny electric remote-controlled multicopters have taken off — pardon the pun — in the last few years, but now an outfit known as e-volo has demonstrated the first manned flight with an electric multicopter:
I didn’t realize until he landed that the silver globe under the pilot’s chair was a simple exercise ball.
(Hat tip à mon père.)
Three Kinds of Corporate Neo-Urbanism
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011Venkatesh Rao describes three kinds of corporate neo-urbanism, represented by Google, Meetup and Zappos respectively:
You could attempt to create the right environment within a large campus, located sufficiently far away from the main urban hub so that it is relatively cheap (Google), you could suck it up and compete for the hipster talent that is willing to pay the costs of Big City life and limit your growth (Meetup), or you could attempt to swallow a likely cheaper location whole, and catalyze the emergence of the neo-urban scene you need for your workforce (Zappos).
(Hat tip to Cameron Schaefer.)
It’s the Great Cthulhu, Charles Dexter
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011
Joe Son
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011From the moment the short and squat Joe Son accompanied the hulking cross-bearing Kimo to the Octagon for UFC 3, he’s been a bit of a punch-line.
He followed that by rather dramatically professing his own faith in Jesus — and expertise in the eponymous art of Josondo — and entering the Octagon, where he took countless then-legal low blows. So, yeah, punch-line.
Then he showed up in Austin Powers as Random Task, throwing a shoe, rather than Odd Job’s razor-brimmed hat. There, at least, he seemed in on the joke.
Things turned dark though when his past came to light:
Son pleaded guilty to felony vandalism in 2008 and was placed on probation. As a condition of his plea agreement, Son was required to provide a DNA sample. In 2008, the DNA sample was linked to a 1990 gang rape. Already in custody for a probation violation, Son was arrested at the Theo Lacy facility on October 7, 2008.
In October 2008, Son was charged by California authorities in relation to his participation in a 1990 gang rape. He was initially charged in Orange County, California, with five counts of rape, two felony counts of forcible sodomy, two felony counts of sodomy in concert by force, seven felony counts of forcible oral copulation, and one felony count of sexual penetration by foreign object by force. He faced a maximum sentence of 275 years to life if convicted.
Son and an accomplice tortured and repeatedly raped the victim before releasing her with her underwear tied around her eyes. During the trial the woman, now aged 41, said Son told her: ‘It’s Christmas. This is your lucky day.’
Before jury selection began for his trial in early August 2011, the initial charges against Son were dropped having expired due to the statute of limitations. Son was then charged with conspiracy to commit torture and murder, crimes which have no statute of limitations. In late August, Son was found guilty of one felony count of torture.
During the trial, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office maintained that both Son and his co-defendant, Santiago Lopez Gaitan, pistol-whipped their female victim, threatened to kill her repeatedly, and raped her before finally releasing her. His co-defendant in the case Santiago Gaitan, 40, pleaded guilty to rape, kidnapping and other charges, and was sentenced to 17 years and four months in prison. In September 2011, Son was sentenced to life in prison.
In October 2011, Son was accused of killing his cellmate, a convicted sex offender.
On a much, much lighter note, Joe Son lost a fight to Joe Moreira — who had gone on to train Kimo in jiu-jitsu — at Xtreme Pankration 2, in 2002. His listed method of losing? Submission (Terror).
I’m not sure what that means.
(Hat tip to John, who brought over UFCs 1 and 2 on nth-generation VHS tape, lo those many years ago.)
Alien is the Scariest Movie of All Time
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011For Halloween io9 compiled its list of the 50 Scariest Movies Of All Time, with Alien taking the top spot.
A few weeks ago they discussed the “secrets” of the making of Alien, as revealed in Alien Vault:
- We owe Alien to the failure of Jodorowsky’s Dune.
- Roger Corman almost made Alien.
- There’s an actual blueprint of the Nostromo, as well as a detailed schematic.
- The Nostromo was a self-contained set.
- The Who’s Roger Daltrey gave us the weird light show when the facehuggers are awoken.
- Yaphet Kotto was so dedicated to improv, he thought he could change the movie’s ending.
- Sigourney Weaver wore thigh-high hooker boots to her audition.
- It’s a myth that the ten-minute self-destruct countdown unfolds in real-time.