Author name: hubs

Hail Stone Cocktails (Cockthails? Hailtails?)

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On Saturday evening several parts of the Denver metro area experienced a quick but rather violent hail storm. So I decided to make the best of it and make some Hail Stone Cocktails. I simply mixed lemonade, lemon pellegrino, gin, muddled mint, and hail. Garnish with a sprig of basil and enjoy.

Hail Cocktail !

There has been some debate on reddit as to how safe drinking this cocktail is. I can only tell you that it didn’t make me sick and it tasted great. I’m venturing to guess that the most dangerous ingredient was the gin, not the hail. But that is coming from a guy who has eaten watermelon snow on several occasions.
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Worlds Tallest Waterslide Is Set To Open Soon

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Verruckt

It is called Verrückt. At 168 feet and 7 inches tall, it’s drop is longer than both Niagara Falls and the Statue Of Liberty. It is slated to open in Kansas City, MO at the Schlitterbahn Kansas City Waterpark on June 5th (tentatively).

The water slide was originally slated to open on May 23 was delayed after test riders reportedly go airborne. Officials say they need more time to “fine tune” the water coaster before park goers are allowed to ride it. Check out the unsuccessful test runs in this video from the Travel Channel
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Vulfpeck Makes $20,000 Off Of A Silent Album While Sleeping

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Brilliant! The funk band Vulfpeck made $20,000 in streaming revenues from Spotify for an album of complete silence. All ten tracks of the album, titled “Sleepify”, were streamed by fans on repeat all night while they slept. The tracks on “Sleepify” – cleverly titled “Z” through “Zzzzzzzzzz” – are all 31 or 32 seconds long. This is the minimum length a song must be played to be considered a payable ‘listen’ by spotify. The band earned somewhere between $3 and $4 dollars a night per fan.

The album was originally released to generate money so that the band could go on tour and not charge admission fees but Spotify has asked Vulfpeck to remove the album because it broke Spotify’s terms of content – Vulfpeck complied.

“Sleepify” is by far Vulpeck’s most commercially successful album to date which is a bummer because these guys are really pretty good. Give it a listen if you like funky themes, TV anthems, and laid-back instrumentals. Then go buy their album.

[bandcamp width=100% height=42 album=2653417828 size=small bgcol=ffffff linkcol=63b2cc]

Flooded Google Street View

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Flooded street

This is what my street could look like according World Under Water. It is a Google Maps powered website (Chrome only) that it lets you pick any Street View location and see what it will look like after sea levels have risen. The site was created to bring awareness to World Environment Day on June 5. Unfortunately it uses the same effect for every location and the sea level doesn’t change depending on your geography. Regardless, it’s an admirable idea and the illusion is fairly believable.

A list Of The 100 All-Time Best Film Noir And Neo-Noir Movies

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In two months Taschen Books will be releasing a photography book called Film Noir. TASCHEN’s 100 All-Time Favorite Movies. The 688 page book is a film-by-film photography book of the 100 greatest Film Noir movies since 1920. It will contain posters, tons of rare stills, cast/crew details, quotes from the films and from critics, and analyses of the films. The list of the 100 greatest film noir movies in the book is below.




1920-1959

1920

  • The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

1927

  • The Lodger

1931

  • M<

1938

  • Port of Shadows

1940

  • Rebecca

1941

  • High Sierra
  • The Maltese Falcon

1943

  • Shadow of a Doubt
  • Ossessione

1944

  • Phantom Lady
  • Double Indemnity
  • Gaslight
  • Laura
  • The Woman in the Window
  • Murder, My Sweet

1945

  • Hangover Square
  • Mildred Pierce
  • Detour
  • The Lost Weekend
  • The Spiral Staircase
  • Leave Her to Heaven

1946

  • Gilda
  • The Postman Always Rings Twice
  • Notorious
  • The Big Sleep
  • The Killers

1947

  • Body and Soul
  • Nightmare Alley
  • Out of the Past
  • T-Men
  • The Lady from Shanghai

1948

  • The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
  • Call Northside 777
  • They Live by Night
  • Force of Evil

1949

  • Champion
  • The Third Man
  • White Heat

1950

  • Gun Crazy
  • Night and the City
  • In a Lonely Place
  • The Asphalt Jungle
  • Sunset Boulevard

1952

  • The Thief

1953

  • Poison Ivy
  • Pickup on South Street

1954

  • Rear Window

1955

  • Diabolique
  • The Big Combo
  • Rififi 366
  • Kiss Me Deadly
  • The Night of the Hunter

1956

  • The Killing
  • Foreign Intrigue

1957

  • Sweet Smell of Success

1958

  • Elevator to the Scaffold
  • Touch of Evil
  • Vertigo
  • It Happened in Broad Daylight
  • Murder by Contract

1959

  • Odds Against Tomorrow

1960-2011

1960

  • Purple Noon
  • Peeping Tom
  • Psycho
  • Shoot the Piano Player

1962

  • Cape Fear

1963

  • High and Low

1966

  • Blow-Up

1967

  • Point Blank
  • Le Samouraï

1971

  • Get Carter

1972

  • The Getaway

1974

  • The Conversation
  • Chinatown

1975

  • The Passenger

1976

  • Taxi Driver

1978

  • The Driver

1981

  • Diva
  • Blow Out
  • Prince of the City
  • Body Heat
  • Clean Slate

1982

  • Blade Runner

1985

  • To Live and Die in L.A.

1986

  • Blue Velvet

1987

  • House of Games

1992

  • Basic Instinct
  • Bad Lieutenant

1994

  • Pulp Fiction

1995

  • Se7en
  • Heat

1997

  • L.A. Confidential
  • Hana-Bi

1999

  • The Limey

2000

  • Memento

2005

  • Sin City

2007

  • No Country for Old Men

2008

  • The Dark Knight

2010

  • Black Swan

2011

  • Drive

An Ocean Of Polystyrene Packing Peanuts

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Artist Zimoun has filled the windows of the Art Museum of Lugano in Switzerland with ventilators and 4.7m³ packing peanuts. When the large fans are turned on the packing chips create a cloudy ocean of polystyrene swirls. The turbulent kinetic work is especially striking when viewed at night and is oddly soothing to watch. An excerpt by Guido Comis and Cristina Sonderegger, published in the exhibition catalog says,

“Even though the swirling of the polystyrene in the depth of each of the windows is actually limited to that space, we have the impression that the movement is propagating to the whole length of the Limonaia. To the visual effect adds the ticking of chips on the window panes, which could remind a thin but insistent rain. If, instead, we cross the threshold and get inside the space, the perception produced by the ebb and flow of the chips changes radically becoming more abstract; the movement appears mechanical rather than natural, the buzzing of the ventilators covers up the ticking of the polystyrene on the windows and thus reveals the artificial origin of the motion.”


via Creative Applications

#oneSecond: A Four Volume Set Of Every Single Tweet Created During A Single Second

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#oneSecond 1

Check out this cool data visualization project called #oneSecond. Philipp Adrian created a four volume set of all the tweets created during a single second. Adrian created it as part of an assignment for his typography class while he was a student at The Basel School of Design.

He used Datasift to acquire every tweet in the world on Nov. 9, 2012, at 14:47:36 GMT. The tweets were then layed out in four books covering over 4,500 pages. Each tweet was categorized by language, timezone, avatar type or registration date. Data like followers, friends and status counts determined the appearance for each users tweet. The books contain 5,522 tweets in 42 languages.

#oneSecond 2All images via Philipp Adrian

Some Say The World Will End In Fire, Some Say In Ice

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This comic by Stuart McMillen is an adaptation from Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. It compares Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” with George Orwell’s “1984”. With the recent revelations of NSA surveillance, I think the jury is still out on which vision is more correct. I think both Huxley and Orwell were right – the iron fist of government and the attention-sapping distractions of technology are dangers to modern society. The whole thing resonates quite loudly in today’s internet landscape.

Amusing Ourselves To Death

Fiery Tumbleweed Tornado In Denver

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Controlled burns got a little out of control in Denver last week. A 150 acre prescribed burn at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge was whipped up by a dust devil and fueled by a torrent of tumbleweeds. The whirlwind of tumbleweeds reached up 200 feet into the air from the Uvalda irrigation ditch at the refuge. The fire crossed the control line but was quickly contained and extinguished. The spot fire only burned about one additional acre thanks to quick action from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, South Metro, Denver, Fairmount, and West Metro Fire Departments.


There is also a longer and higher resolution video with no sound of the event.

Denver Public Library Lookup Extension

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My family is full of voracious readers. We all spend a pretty penny at Amazon.com and related sites buying books we are interested in while our Denver Public Library cards sit dormant in the junk drawer. I wanted a way to save some money and support our local library. So I created a Chrome Extension to do just that. Now when we are about to buy the next book for our book club from our favorite online retailer we can, with one click, check to see if the Denver Public Library branch has it available first.

Use the Denver Public Library Lookup Extension for Chrome to instantly search the Denver Public Library at the same time you’re viewing pages at online bookstores. Get the extension by clicking the button below or by visiting the Chrome Web Store.

Right now this extension is for Google’s Chrome web browser only. If you are using Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari, drag the button below up to your to your bookmarks bar.

More detail instructions and some caveats below.
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