Never get involved in a land war in Asia

and never agree to transcribe 20 hours of meetings from an Australian business meeting.

That's what I've been doing for the last 4 days...utter nightmare. Could NOT understand their accents. Making it worse were the bad audio levels and the fact that a lot of the people preesnt insisted on talking over each other from all around the room except in front of the microphone... I will never transcribe ANYTHING every again.

Anyway, so sorry to be MIA from my blogs.

Designer creates wetsuit that lets wearers 'fly' underwater

From Digital Designer: Designer creates wetsuit that lets wearers 'fly' underwater

A French designer has created a wetsuit that is designed to allow the wearer a feeling of "flying" while underwater. It is unclear if the product, called 'Oceanwings' is planned for production.

French designer Guillaume Binard partnered with Aqua Lung to create a wetsuit that was inspired by skydiving wingsuits, reported Laughing Squid. The concept was reportedly submitted to Designboom, a website that encourages its readers to submit projects to share with other readers.

The wetsuit, called 'Oceanwings' is designed to allow the wearer to have an underwater 'flight' experience. The premise is that the wearer can swim through the water like a fish, with ease.

Aqua Lung/YouTube

Here the diver spreads on of his "wings" as he gets ready to dive into the water

Like this image1

It has "webbed" arms when extended, and the lower portion of the suit is restricted to keep the wearers legs in position while gliding underwater.

Aqua Lung posted a demo video, which was directed by Jérôme Espla, on its YouTube page on Feb. 5, 2013 to show how it works with a brief description.

[q]This movie shows how powerful are sub-aquatic activities feelings & emotions.

Through out a neoprene wing suit called "Oceanwings", the analogy between aerial and aquatic flight illustrates this intense tridimentionnal feeling met by the underwater Humans. [/q]

No word at this time on whether or not the wetsuit will be put into production. The video, however, is generating a lot of attention.

Aqua Lung/YouTube

'Oceanwings' is supposed to create an underwater 'flight' experience. Here the video illustrates the diver gliding downward

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/343395#ixzz2LBPSQYC5

Switch off crisis for biggest aquarium in Spain

Okay, perhaps not really Volcano Seven material....but there's got to be a plot for a book here!


From the Olive Press:  Switch off crisis for biggest aquarium in Spain

THOUSANDS of rare and endangered fish are at risk of death as Roquetas Aquarium falls further into financial hot water.
Due to a €9,500 unpaid electric bill, Endesa are turning off their electricity supply on February 7, which will cause the death of more than a thousand different species of marine life, including rare and protected fish.
The Aquarium, in Roquetas de Mar, Almeria, is the largest in Andalucía and has been struggling under a €3.5 million debt for several years.
Aquarium director, Enrique Fernandez, is in crisis talks with the energy company and the courts in the hope of postponing the switch off until the summer when the top tourist attraction will benefit from increased revenue.

Talking to the Spanish press earlier this week he admitted that, ‘things look bad’ because the survival of the animals depends on the electric power that powers the tanks.
It is thought a cash injection of 150,000€ would be needed just to keep the centre operating.
The owners- a consortium of Spanish businesses which includes the bank, Cajamar-have been unable to find an alternative aquarium in Spain big enough to take their stock.
Aquarium Roquetas de Mar opened in July 2006 but fell into financial difficulty in 2009.
The tourist attraction managed to stay afloat but has been struggling to pay its staff for several months.

 

South Africa: We're no croc hunters, say Limpopo cops

Well, I don't really know if this qualifies as a Volcano Seven story, but....



News 24: We're no croc hunters, say Limpopo cops

Johannesburg - Limpopo police said on Saturday they were not involved in hunting down crocodiles that escaped from the Rakwena Crocodile Farm after floods in the province.
"[Police] do not have the capacity or the expertise [to hunt the crocodiles], however we are monitoring the situation on a daily basis," Brigadier Hangwani Mulaudzi said in a statement.
Mulaudzi said there were no incidents reported regarding the crocodiles.
Zane Langman, the son-in-law of Johan Boshoff, who owns Rakwena, told Beeld newspaper on Thursday that around 15 000 crocodiles escaped from the farm into Limpopo River during the floods.
A few thousand crocodiles were recaptured in the dense bush next to the river and in the adjacent orange groves.
Langman told the newspaper he and Boshoff were forced to open the crocodile farm's gates, out of fear that the force of the water would crush the walls of Boshoff's home.
"We've been recapturing them as and when the local farmers phone us to tell us that there are crocodiles on their property.
"In Weipe there were a lot, and I also heard there was a crocodile a on school's rugby field in Musina," Langman said.
Most of the recapturing efforts were taking place at night, he said.

OMG!

Never realized I hadn't posted in over 2 weeks!

Sorry, folks

Things have just gotten away from me the last week and a half...posting should be back on schedule starting this weekend.

What did Google Earth spot in the Chinese desert?

(Google Earth via Wired)

From Yahoo News:What did Google Earth spot in the Chinese desert?

Since Google Earth launched in 2005, there have been dozens of mysterious images (supposed planes and bunkers, even the face of Jesus) captured by the satellites used for the virtual mapping program. But according to Allen Thomson, this one may be the weirdest.
Thomson, a former CIA analyst, was recently using Google Earth while searching for an orbital tracking site in southwestern China when he spotted something strange constructed in the middle of the Kashgar desert.

"I haven't the faintest clue what it might be," Thomson wrote in an email to Wired. "But it's extensive, the structures are pretty big and funny-looking, and it went up in what I’d call an incredible hurry."

Thomson, who served in the CIA from 1972 to 1985, "has made something of a second career finding odd stuff in public satellite imagery," according to Wired. The website explains:

He discovered these giant grids etched into the Chinese desert in 2011, and a suspected underground missile bunker in Iran in 2008. When the Israeli Air Force destroyed a mysterious facility in Syria the year before, Thomson put together an 812-page dossier on the so-called "Box on the Euphrates." Old analyst habits die hard, it seems.

Wired is soliciting theories from readers to pass along to Thomson; but at this point, the desert structure remains a mystery.

Theorizing about unexplained images from Google Earth has become a global parlor game.

In 2007, a Google Earth user spotted what was initially thought to be a cruise missile flying over a Utah desert. Others claimed it was simply a "jet airliner with dark-colored wings."

In 2010, a Brooklyn-based photographer discovered an image of what appeared to be a commercial airplane hidden in a housing complex in Bushwick. (Some users claimed it was a film set; others thought it was simply a low-flying plane caught by Google's satellite.)

Google Earth users also spotted what looked like a large plane submerged in the Atlantic Ocean near JFK Airport, sparking plenty of conspiracy theories.

The same year, a British man purportedly using Google Earth "to assess potential vacation spots" discovered what he said was the face of Jesus on Hungarian farmland. “I’m not a religious person looking for images of Mary or Jesus in everything," Zach Evans told the Sun newspaper (via the Daily Mail), "but this is obvious."

2,000-Year-Old Treasure Discovered In Black Sea Fortress

From Yahoo News:  2,000-Year-Old Treasure Discovered In Black Sea Fortress

Residents of a town under siege by the Roman army about 2,000 years ago buried two hoards of treasure in the town's citadel — treasure recently excavated by archaeologists.

More than 200 coins, mainly bronze, were found along with "various items of gold, silver and bronze jewelry and glass vessels" inside an ancient fortress within the Artezian settlement in the Crimea (in Ukraine), the researchers wrote in the most recent edition of the journal Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia.

"The fortress had been besieged. Wealthy people from the settlement and the neighborhood had tried to hide there from the Romans.  They had buried their hoards inside the citadel," Nikolaï Vinokurov, a professor at Moscow State Pedagogical University, explained. [See Photos of the Buried Treasure]

Artezian, which covered an area of at least 3.2 acres (1.3 hectares) and also had a  necropolis (a cemetery), was part of the Bosporus Kingdom. At the time, the kingdom's fate was torn between two brothers —Mithridates VIII, who sought independence from Rome, and his younger brother, Cotys I, who was in favor of keeping the kingdom a client state of the growing empire. Rome sent an army to support Cotys, establishing him in the Bosporan capital and torching settlements controlled by Mithridates, including Artezian.

People huddled in the fortress for protection as the Romans attacked, but Vinokurov said they knew they were doomed. "We can say that these hoards were funeral sacrifices.  It was obvious for the people that they were going to die shortly," he wrote in an email to LiveScience. The siege and fall of the fortress occurred in AD 45.
Curiously, each hoard included exactly 55 coins minted by Mithridates VIII. "This is possibly just a simple coincidence, or perhaps these were equal sums received by the owners of these caskets from the supporters of Mithridates," the team wrote in its paper.
A Greek lifestyle
Vinokurov's team, including a number of volunteers, has been exploring Artezian since 1989 and has found that the people of the settlement followed a culture that was distinctly Greek. The population's ethnicity was mixed, Vinokurov wrote, "but their culture was pure Greek. They spoke Greek language, had Greek school; the architecture and fortification were Greek as well. They were Hellenes by culture but not that pure by blood."
Greeks are known to have created colonies on the Black Sea centuries earlier, intermarrying with the Crimeans. The customs and art forms they introduced appear to have persisted through the ages despite being practiced nearly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from Greece itself.
This Greek influence can be seen in the treasures the people of Artezian buried. Among them is a silver brooch engraved with an image of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, and gold rings with gems engraved with images of Nemesis and Tyche, both Greek deities.

When archaeologists excavated other portions of the torched site they found more evidence of a Greek lifestyle.

"In the burnt level of the early citadel, many fragmentary small terra cotta figures were found depicting Demeter, Cora, Cybele, Aphrodite with a dolphin, Psyche and Eros, a maiden with gifts, Hermes, Attis, foot soldiers and warriors on horseback, semi-naked youths," the researchers wrote in their paper, adding fragments of a miniature oinochoai (a form of Greek pottery) and small jugs for libations also were found.

All this was torched by the Romans and later rebuilt by Cotys I, who had been successfully enthroned by Rome. However the treasures of the earlier inhabitants remained undiscovered beneath the surface, a testament to a desperate stand against the growing power of Rome.