Month: February 2021

‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin – rest his soul – pushed it to the limit many times

Aside Markosun Animals, Bizarre

In this classic episode of ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve handles the deadliest snake in the world, the Inland Taipan or Fierce Snake. He is taking a major chance in the video below, one bite and he is a dead man. But that is how Steve operated.

The inland taipan (Oxyuranus microlepidotus), also commonly known as the western taipan, the small-scaled snake or the fierce snake, is a species of extremely venomous snake in the family Elapidae. The species is endemic to semi-arid regions of central east Australia. Aboriginal Australians living in those regions named the snake Dandarabilla. It was first described by Frederick McCoy in 1879 and then by William John Macleay in 1882, but for the next 90 years, it was a mystery to the scientific community; no further specimens were found, and virtually nothing was added to the knowledge of this species until its rediscovery in 1972.

Based on the median lethal dose value in mice, the venom of the inland taipan is by far the most toxic of any snake – much more so than even that of sea snakes – and it has the most toxic venom of any reptile when tested on human heart cell culture. The inland taipan is a specialist hunter of mammals, so its venom is specially adapted to kill warm-blooded species. It is estimated that one bite possesses enough lethality to kill at least 100 fully grown humans, It is an extremely fast and agile snake that can strike instantly with extreme accuracy, often striking multiple times in the same attack, and it envenomates in almost every case.

Eerie ‘Doll Altar’ Found in England

Aside Markosun Bizarre

There is also a Barbie doll tied to a tree. Video below.

A woman walking through a wooded area in England stumbled upon a rather unsettling scene in the form of an eerie collection of baby dolls that had been fastened to trees as part of what appeared to be a makeshift altar. The eerie discovery was reportedly made late last month as the witness, who opted not to reveal her name perhaps for fear of running afoul of whoever crafted the chilling display, was visiting an infamous forested area known as Cannock Chase.

Happy to be escaping her house for a respite from the strict coronavirus lockdown currently enacted in England, the woman set about exploring a spot which was once the grounds of a hospital that had been in operation about a century ago and later served as a temporary village, of sorts, for miners. Now an abandoned patch of wilderness, whatever creepy vibes may have been in the air were undoubtedly compounded by the strange scene which the woman found.

“As I dug through the undergrowth I saw these dolls,” she recalled, “they were in some sort of order. Their dresses were all raggedy and they were all tied and nailed to the trees.” Fortunately for those who appreciate footage of nightmarish scenes, the woman managed to film a bit of the bizarre ‘altar,’ which consisted of several of the toys seemingly arranged in a circle around a snow-covered board that sported candles atop it.

While one could be forgiven for being frightened by the unnerving assortment of dolls, the woman actually found the display rather compelling and later returned to the spot a second time. “It wasn’t that scary,” she observed, revealing that during her second visit to the site, she “talked to the dolls and wished the children who used to live in the mining village eternal rest.” The purpose of the puzzling scene is a mystery with some suggesting that it is connected to witchcraft while others argue that it is merely an elaborate prank meant to scare people walking through the woods.

Interesting Photos from around the World

Aside Markosun Images

macdonald's in norway

McDonald’s in Norway

 

rednew

Great reflection

 

cool zippo bradford penn

Street lights at the Zippo factory in Bradford, Pennsylvania

 

cobra

Just a Cape Cobra checking out the beach near Cape Town, South Africa.

The warm climes are nice to live in, but you do have to deal with this kind of crazy nonsense.

 

ireland

Powerful Atlantic storm off the coast of Ireland

 

 7.8 earthquake in Ecuador

 

7.8 ecuador

 

Japan earthquake 2016

japan quake

 

rednew3 japan quake

 

rednew1

Buddies

 

rednew2 florence

Photo shot using tilt frame making Florence, Italy look like a miniature.

 

tree

4 legged tree

 

whale

Surfing whales

 

rednew2 new zealand

Maori rock sculpture in New Zealand

Interesting Ring House in Japan

Aside Markosun Buildings

Japanese architecture is always pushing the limits for what is considered unique. It is quite often fascinating rather than architecturally brilliant and I think thats what appeals to the people who enjoy it – it’s different. This particular house is somewhat dated now, built in 2006, but it is still a stunning example of thought provoking and original Japanese architecture.

 

ring10

 

As an upscale weekend enclave, Karuizawa may be Tokyo’s equivalent of New York City’s Hamptons (minus the beach), but the developer had nonetheless failed repeatedly to sell the raw land on which Ring House now stands. In an attempt to turn his luck he marketed the land together with a house, commissioned by the youthful Tokyo based firm TNA. The developer, a youngster himself, had seen TNA’s work published in a magazine and was keen to give the newly minted design team a chance to build.

 

ring

 

ring3

 

The team created a mini-tower at the maximum height, skinned in alternating bands of wood and glass — an irregularly striped sheath that evenly balances transparency and opacity. As sunlight floods into the interior by day (or electric illumination glows from within the volume by night), the wrapper allows views straight through the house.

 

ring2

 

ring1

 

ring4

 

ring5

 

ring6

 

ring8

 

ring9

 

ring7

The First Cellular Phone, and It was Big!

Aside Markosun Technology

DynaTAC is a series of cellular telephones manufactured by Motorola, Inc. from 1983 to 1994. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X commercial portable cellular phone received approval from the U.S. FCC on September 21, 1983. A full charge took roughly 10 hours, and it offered 30 minutes of talk time. It also offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers. It was priced at $3,995 in 1984, its commercial release year, equivalent to $9,831 in 2019. DynaTAC was an abbreviation of “Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage.”  It weighed 1.75 lb., stood 13 in. high.

Several models followed, starting in 1985 with the 8000s, and continuing with periodic updates of increasing frequency until 1993’s Classic II. The DynaTAC was replaced in most roles by the much smaller Motorola MicroTAC when it was first introduced in 1989, and by the time of the Motorola StarTAC’s release in 1996, it was obsolete.

Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first publicized handheld mobile phone call on a prototype DynaTAC model on April 3, 1973. This is a reenactment in 2007.

The first cellular phone was the culmination of efforts begun at Bell Labs, which first proposed the idea of a cellular system in 1947, and continued to petition the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for channels through the 1950s and 1960s, and research conducted at Motorola. In 1960, electrical engineer John F. Mitchell became Motorola’s chief engineer for its mobile communication products. Mitchell oversaw the development and marketing of the first pager to use transistors.

Motorola had long produced mobile telephones for cars that were large and heavy and consumed too much power to allow their use without the automobile’s engine running. Mitchell’s team, which included Martin Cooper, developed portable cellular telephony, and Mitchell was among the Motorola employees granted a patent for this work in 1973; the first call on the prototype was completed, reportedly, to a wrong number.

While Motorola was developing the cellular phone itself, during 1968–1983, Bell Labs worked on the system called AMPS, while others designed cell phones for that and other cellular systems. Martin Cooper, a former general manager for the systems division at Motorola, led a team that produced the DynaTAC 8000x, the first commercially available cellular phone small enough to be easily carried, and made the first phone call from it. Martin Cooper was the first person to make an analog cellular mobile phone call on a prototype in 1973.

 

First ‘space helicopter’ set to take to Martian skies

Aside Markosun Space

NBC News

When NASA’s Perseverance rover touches down next week, it will carry one of the strangest devices ever seen on Mars — a drone destined to make the first controlled flights on an extraterrestrial planet.

Dubbed “Ingenuity,” the drone weighs just 4 pounds, and it will stay stored beneath the rover’s belly while Perseverance runs through its initial surface checks and experiments.

But about the middle of April, the rover will scout out a flat area without large rocks to deploy the drone, and soon after that Perseverance will release Ingenuity to make the first flights on Mars.

“It’s pretty unique in that it’s a helicopter that can fly around,” said Tim Canham, the operations lead for the Ingenuity project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

“There was a balloon mission on Venus years ago, so we can’t claim to be the first aircraft,” he said, referring to the two Soviet Vega space probes that deployed balloons attached to scientific instruments in the clouds on Venus in 1985. “But we can claim we’re the first powered aircraft outside Earth.”

Canham will coordinate the five test flights scheduled for the Ingenuity drone over 30 days, with each at least three days apart.

“The first flight will be very basic – it will just go straight up, hover and go straight down,” he said. “After that, we’ll do a couple of flights where we go horizontally, to test how it works.”

The car-size Perseverance rover has seven complex scientific instruments, so it can take panoramic video, monitor the weather, perform ultraviolet and X-ray spectroscopy on anything it finds, and look for signs of ancient microbial life.

But, Ingenuity will carry out no science on its test flights. It will only take photographs of the Martian terrain with its two cameras, one facing forward and one down.

Instead, the Ingenuity project is designed to show drones can be an important addition to the ongoing explorations of distant planets, Canham said.

“Our job is really to prove that the aerodynamics, as we’ve tested them here, work also on Mars,” he said.

Mars is a hard place to fly, which is why Ingenuity weighs so little and needs two counter-rotating 4-foot-long helicopter rotors to stay aloft.

Perseverance, nicknamed Percy, is a car-sized Mars rover designed to explore the Jezero crater on Mars as part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. It was manufactured by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was launched on 30 July 2020, at 7:50 a.m. EDT (11:50 UTC), and is scheduled to land on Mars on 18 February 2021, 3 p.m EST/8 p.m UTC.

Perseverance carries seven scientific instruments to study the Martian surface at Jezero crater. It carries several cameras and two microphones.

Technical details
Length 2 m (6 ft 7 in)
Diameter 2.7 m (8 ft 10 in)
Height 2.2 m (7 ft 3 in)
Launch mass 1,025 kg (2,260 lb)
Power 110 W (0.15 hp)

Dutch take to the ice as canals and lakes freeze over

Aside Markosun Weather
People ice skating on a frozen canal in the Weerribben-Wieden nature reserve in Overijssel during a cold winter day in The Netherlands on February 12, 2021 in Belt-Schutsloot, Netherlands.IMAGE COPYRIGHTGETTY IMAGES

Ice skating fever is gripping the Netherlands after days of sub-zero temperatures froze lakes, ponds and canals across the country.

Many welcomed the opportunity to don their skates amid coronavirus restrictions.

“This is the perfect reason to go out and have a little fun with the museums and everything being closed,” one woman told Reuters news agency as she strapped on her skates in Amsterdam on Friday.

But officials have urged people to stay close to home and avoid crowds to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Dozens of skaters briefly glided along the surface of Amsterdam’s historic Prinsengracht canal on Saturday.

People walk and skate on ice on the Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 13 February 2021.IMAGE COPYRIGHTEPA

It was the first time since 2018 that skating there had been possible, reports said.

“It’s a once-every-so-many-years experience, so when you get the chance, do it,” one man told the Associated Press news agency.

People walk and skate on ice on the Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 13 February 2021.IMAGE COPYRIGHTEPA

Elsewhere in the country, people made the most of frozen lakes, ponds and canals before a thaw expected to begin in coming days.

As the wintry weather continues, skaters are taking the chance to skate in one of the frozen lakes close to the Dutch city of Nijmegen, on February 12th, 2021.IMAGE COPYRIGHTNURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
People ice skating on a frozen canal in the water village of Giethoorn in the Weerribben-Wieden nature reserve in Overijssel during a cold winter day in The Netherlands on February 12, 2021 in Giethoorn, Netherlands.IMAGE COPYRIGHTGETTY IMAGES
People ice skate during a cold wave across the country, in Amsterdam, Netherlands February 12, 2021.IMAGE COPYRIGHTREUTERS

At the frozen Nannewiid lake in the north of the country, groups played hockey, parents pulled their children along on sledges, and dogs took to the ice.

A boy plays ice hockey on the Nannewiid, a lake frozen over as temperatures stay below zero and locals enjoy activities like speed skating, ice hockey, using sleds and walking dogs on February 12, 2021 in Oudehaske, Netherlands.IMAGE COPYRIGHTGETTY IMAGES
People skate on the Nannewiid, a lake frozen over as temperatures stay below zero and locals enjoy activities like speed skating, ice hockey, using sleds and walking dogs on February 12, 2021 in Oudehaske, Netherlands.IMAGE COPYRIGHTGETTY IMAGES
A man walks his dog on the Nannewiid, a lake frozen over as temperatures stay below zero and locals enjoy activities like speed skating, ice hockey, using sleds and walking dogs on February 12, 2021 in Oudehaske, Netherlands.IMAGE COPYRIGHTGETTY IMAGES

Our correspondent Anna Holligan shared photos of people enjoying the ice in The Hague.

People skating in The HagueIMAGE COPYRIGHTANNA HOLLIGAN/BBC
People skating in The HagueIMAGE COPYRIGHTANNA HOLLIGAN/BBC

“Take advantage of the good weather and the ice, but do it under Covid-19 measures,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte told a news conference on Monday. “You can skate with another person, but what you can’t do is organise big competitions. Unfortunately that doesn’t work.”

BBC