About time we got back to a bit of MMM, n’est ce pas? This is from Paris 2010 in October, a Renault concept called Dezir. The opposing scissor doors are nonsense but the car itself is gorgeous.
(Via Autoblog.)
I’m a bit behind with these, forgot to set them to autopublish; sorry if some of them are already a tad passé. :)
Wikileaks is having to play a ridiculous game of musical chairs this week. They were forced to move their hosting to Amazon, from which they were promptly booted; and then the DNS for their primary domain name wikileaks.org was deleted by EveryDNS. Their primary domain name is now wikileaks.ch, but if that disappears too you can use wikileaks.beecher.org to access the website; I’ll update the IP address if it changes.
Julian Assange’s personal life is not a factor here, and not just because the timing of the Swedish arrest warrant and Interpol red notice are so incredibly coincidental. Wikileaks is just an intermediary, it isn’t leaking anything, it’s just channeling it. It hasn’t broken any laws, and the likes of PayPal’s assertions that Wikileaks “encourage[s], promote[s], facilitate[s] or instruct[s] others to engage in illegal activity” is a blatant cover-up for their own engagement with – probably actually illegal – government pressure.
What’s truly sad about this nonsense is that leakers feel more comfortable sending this info to Wikileaks and not the mainstream media. If the media got their fingers out of their holes – or rather their publishers stopped cutting costs at the expense of their core business – perhaps Wikileaks would be moot, and Assange wouldn’t have to do their job for them.
Filed under Engineering. Calling this art is like calling Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With… uh… art.
I’ve been reading this forum account of a couple travelling all on their lonesome across Democratic Republic of Congo for several days, it’s gripping! This after they’ve already driven tens of thousands of clicks in Africa, Japan, Siberia, Mongolia, the Stans and the Middle East. Here’s the setup, and some photos. It’s a long story with a bit of distraction in comments from other users, but perfectly readable if you ignore everything not posted by RadioBaobab. The only difficulty with the story is that I’ll now be distracted by days of African history on Wikipedia…
Expedition Portal Forum: in 2006 we sold all our belongings literally: ALL, quit our jobs, took all of our saving money and decided to go on a little trip. We had done our homework during the many months/years we had saved up for it and bought and prepared a Landcruiser. I will go into further detail on the preperations later on. We planned to travel for 1 year. People who have done this too will certainly remember the moment when you say goodbye to all your family and friends knowing you will not see them for an entire year. That is a big decision to make. We travelled overland, 25.000km down Africa west route and after 9 months found ourselves in South Africa. We liked the travelling so much and found it such a pitty that we had such little time left to drive back that we started counting our money: Lo-and-behold, if we didn’t do crazy stuff we could extend our 1 year trip with another year. We shipped our car to Japan and from there drove trough Siberian Russia, Mongolia, Central Asia all the stan countries, the middle east back to Africa. Once there, we really longed to visit the East side of Africa and while we were at it we could visit DRC, a country that I have dreamed and read about for so long. So that is what we did. After the traverse of DRC we would find ourselves back on the westcoast and we would drive back north as central as possible via Niger-Algeria which was a pretty daunty route in 2008. We travelled for 715 days non-stop. 100.000km. We never went home or even set foot on the European continent during that time. In fact, we did not have a ‘home’ apart from our car. We had crossed dozens of remote deserts, driven trough some of the most barren mountain ranges in the world, hacked ourway trough many jungles. Returned on our paths many times when we though we were risking it too much. Always unsupported. Always with the two of us. Always with the same car.
Found completely by accident, while looking for something else. I love surprises like this. :)
Best wished to Randall Munroe, who can make us laugh even when he’s taking time off to deal with a family illness.
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