Thursday, March 29, 2012

Fab Photos of Fab Clean Room are Fab

Hungarian photographer Gyuri Szabo has been shortlisted for the final round of the PDN Photo Annual 2012 awards.

Gyuri gained access to an aerospace clean room before the machinery was installed. This series also includes photographs of other parts of the facility, such as walkways and cubicles.

Thanks to his excellent lensmanship, we get to enjoy the awesome results.

Our small images here really do his work little justice so check out these tasty images and then head over to F in Foto by Gyuri Szabo to see more photos with more pixels in more glorious surroundings. His blog has other photos from this series, as well as some of his other great work.


Thanks to F in Foto by Gyuri for letting us share some of his wonderful work here.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Epic 1930s Jazz is Epic

It's one of my favorite recipes for sweet, swinging success.

Take one heaping of Django Reinhardt, mix in a good amount of Stéphane Grappelli, sauté over a low but steady Parisian heat et voila, you have a nicely baked Quintette du Hot Club de France!

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Neil deGrasse Tyson - We Stopped Dreaming

Neil deGrasse Tyson argues passionately for the pittance it would take to revive the agency that inspires the dreams, hopes and economy of tomorrow.
 

Tungsten Trick Hits Market for 1kg Gold Bars

There has been a raft of reports about 400oz gold bars in Hong Kong discovered to have been tainted with tungsten. Now, however, the scam seems to have migrated to the bigger 1kg gold bars.


Not only is tungsten extremely dense it is also not ferro-magnetic, making it an ideal ingredient for fraudsters looking to cook up a batch of modern fool's gold, as it won't be discovered with a simple magnet test. That leaves the use of XRF scanners as the only secure, straightforward method for ensuring you're actually buying pure gold.

Except that this scientific security seems now to have been erased from the success formula. Judging by the latest reports, XRF (x-ray fluoresence) scanners may not offer an adequate defense against this particular form of hoodwinkery.

This modern alchemists' stew seems to be based on a fairly simple recipe: take one bar of certified provenance, drill out some gold plugs, feed in tungsten rods and - unless a buyer is exceedingly careful - you've got yourself a gold sale at 'market value' PLUS a handy pile of surplus gold.

Leftovers have never tasted so raw for dealers in precious metals.

Anybody buying gold has for several years had to worry about the risks of a bubble in the AU market Given that the use of expensive high-tech scanners to determine the gold content of the material in question won't necessarily protect buyers from this form of criminal enterprise, does the gold market face a loss of confidence similar to that seen recently in global interbank lending?

ABC Bullion in Australia has the details of these shenanigans. Story via the SilverDoctors blog.

Life=Love=Dream Talk by Terence McKenna

A fine talk by thinker Terrance McKenna is now available on YouTube.

'Kemp' discusses reality, what it might mean to be 'awake', and other aspects of the human voyage. The talk includes a Jungian take on history as "the collective dream of humanity".