I established a Facebook account in 2008. My motivation was ignoble: I wanted to distribute my journalism more widely. I have acquired since then just over four thousand “friends”—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, and of course, closer to home. I have discovered the appeal of Facebook’s community—for example, the extraordinary emotional support that swells in virtual space when people come together online around a friend’s illness or life celebrations. Through its bedrock appeals to friendship, community, public identity, and activism—and its commercial exploitation of these values—Facebook is an unprecedented synthesis of corporate and public spaces. The corporation’s social contract with users is ambitious, yet neither its governance system nor its young ruler seem trustworthy. Then came this month’s initial public offering of stock—a ... Continue reading →

Photo: Jason Paur/Wired UPDATE 7:45 a.m. EDT — Elon Musk announced via Twitter the Guidance, Navigation and Control Bay doors successfully opened in orbit, “Dragon spaceship opens the navigation pod bay door without hesitation. So much nicer than HAL9000.” CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The second time’s the charm for SpaceX. This morning at 3:44 a.m. EDT the company’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off of Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. After a faulty valve led to an aborted launch on Saturday, today’s successful flight marks the third of the Falcon 9 rocket, the second flight of the Dragon capsule, and the first flight for a commercial spacecraft bound for the International Space Station (ISS). After clearing the lightning towers, the million pounds of thrust provided ... Continue reading →

Inside a truck trailer, surrounded by half a dozen flat-screen monitors mounted on carpeted walls, Elon Musk eats Starburst candy with the intensity of a kid on Halloween. He's hunched over in his chair, focusing on the TV that displays a live video feed of a 70-foot-tall rocket ship surrounded by palm trees. The trailer is parked in El Segundo, California, behind the headquarters of Musk's company, Space Explorations Technology, or SpaceX. Ten engineers are sitting with him, each facing a laptop displaying the status of systems on the rocket, Falcon 1. They're linked by a satellite feed to the launch site, a half- mile-square speck of equatorial rock and coral called Omelek. It's really just a concrete launchpad, an air-conditioned hangar, and a double-wide ... Continue reading →

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) -- A man plunged at least 180 feet over Niagara Falls and survived - only the third person known to have gone over without a safety device and live. Niagara Parks Police say witnesses reported seeing the man climb over a railing at 10:20 a.m. Monday and "deliberately jump" into the Niagara River 20 to 30 feet above the Horseshoe Falls. He surfaced in the lower Niagara River basin near the Journey Behind the Falls observation platform. Horseshoe Falls, on the Canadian side of the river, is the tallest of the three main falls, higher than the American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls. The man, believed to be in his early 40s, was rescued about two hours after he collapsed in waist-deep ... Continue reading →

lunaticcarl 97 photos · 113 followers “Ready to run. #preakness” Continue reading →

Here’s a video of the ship breaking operations at the Gadani Ship Breaking Yard in Pakistan. At one point, the yard was the largest ship-breaking yard in the world but today holds the number 3 spot next to Alang, India and Chittagong, Bangladesh. Thousands of laborers risk their lives daily to earn about $4 per day and produce up to 1 million tons of scrap metal annually, which is sold mostly in the domestic market. In fact, ship-breaking at Gadani produced about 70 percent of the country’s steel requirement in 2011, according to Reuters. Ship-breaking at Gadani is inherently dangerous and suffers severely from lax safety standards and unregulated working conditions which of course leads to high injury and death rates. The absence of adequate ... Continue reading →

lunaticcarl 94 photos · 111 followers “Ten thousand. Almost.” Continue reading →

lunaticcarl 91 photos · 111 followers “My solution to the most annoying bill ever.” Continue reading →