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Jobs, classes, community and news for media professionals. This 26-Year-Old Is Making Millions Cutting Out Traditional Publishers With Amazon Kindle. Hansen Writing Ball. Writing ball - model from 1870 Writing ball - model from 1874 Writing ball - model from 1878 A sample from a letter written by Rasmus Malling-Hansen in 1872 to his brother Jørgen - on the writing ball Rasmus Malling-Hansen - 1890 The keyboard of the writing ball The Hansen Writing Ball was invented in 1865 by the reverend and principal of the Royal Institute for the deaf-mutes in Copenhagen, Rasmus Malling-Hansen, 1835–1890.

The writing ball was first patented and entered production in 1870, and was the first commercially produced typewriter. Overview[edit] Its distinctive feature was an arrangement of 52 keys on a large brass hemisphere, causing the machine to resemble an oversized pincushion. The first models typed on a paper attached to a cylinder, and included an electromagnetic escapement for the Ball, thus making Malling-Hansen's machine the first electric typewriter. More-or-less intact Hansen balls have fetched hundreds of thousands of Euros in auctions.

References[edit] Rusting deep below Grand Central station, the armoured train that helped heroic President Roosevelt keep his polio secret. By Mail Foreign Service Updated: 14:30 GMT, 4 March 2011 Lying forgotten two hundred feet below one of America's most iconic buildings lies the closely guarded secret of one of America's finest presidents - rusting away when it could be a monument to his greatness. Hidden under the Grand Central train terminal in New York lies a vast area that was unknown to the outside world until the late Eighties. It houses the power network that is responsible for the electricity that runs the entire station - and was a key target for Hitler during the Second World War. But there is also the little known Waldorf-Astoria platform, which is known by Grand Central staff as the Roosevelt Platform. And there is parked the decaying hulk of the train the four-times elected president used to hide his disability, the paralysis from the waist down which forced him to use a wheelchair in private.

He refused to accept his paralysis, as he was convinced it would ruin any hopes he had of continuing in public office. 'Please kill me': Homeless man claims motivational speaker begged him to assist in suicide. By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 03:06 GMT, 12 February 2011 Suicide? : Jeffrey Locker was reportedly in Harlem saying to strangers 'Please shoot me' on the day he was 'murdered' by Kenneth Minor A homeless man is to claim that the alleged murder of a motivational speaker was in fact an assisted suicide. New evidence suggests he stabbed himself repeatedly so his family could collect life insurance money.

The accused, Kenneth Minor, has always insisted that Jeffrey Locker approached him on the street and begged him to kill him. Now evidence is mounting that Minor, 38, may have been telling the truth. These include findings that the debt-ridden Locker had bought numerous insurance policies, changed their beneficiaries and researched funeral arrangements not long before he died. A number of witnesses also said he had told them he wanted to be killed. Jeffrey Locker, 52, was found bound and stabbed to death in his car near an East Harlem public housing complex on 16 July, 2009. Singularity: Kurzweil on 2045, When Humans, Machines Merge. Google News. How Porn Is Affecting the Libido of the American Male. I met the woman at a Broadway show, but the night’s best piece of acting, I’d say, came from me, back at her East Village apartment, after we’d been having sex for about 25 minutes, with Neil Young wailing the song “Comes a Time” from the laptop on her bedside table.

The dried-out condom had a full-bodied choke hold on me, but I’d already stopped twice to put on a fresh one, and I knew, as I kept earnestly pumping away, that one more condom wouldn’t make the necessary difference. Had I just given up, things might have played out the way they often did, with shades of confused disappointment and inadequacy on the part of the woman and mumbled apologies and awkward shame from me.

But that night, ingenuity struck—unable to actually get off, I found myself flying a fresh route: I faked it. Why would I, a healthy guy in his thirties, need to fake an orgasm? It was mystifying. “Pornography? Porn’s allure and ubiquity isn’t exactly titillating news. Facebook. Sleep No More | Losing Yourself in an Abandoned Hotel | New York City | NYC | Chelsea | Hotel. Published February 01, 2011 Be careful. Things are getting weird on West 27th Street.

Weirder than normal. The kind of weird that may result in you lost inside a 100,000-square-foot cursed hotel, while wearing a Venetian mask. And being stalked by a pack of angry witches... Introducing Sleep No More, or what would happen if Kubrick, Hitchcock, Lynch and Bill Shakespeare got together to transform a compound of abandoned nightclubs into an immersive hotel/speakeasy/interactive play replete with extra-dry martinis and simmered sheep organs, with tickets on sale now. The less you know ahead of time, the better.

It’ll be dark. Though if you do that, you’re liable to miss what might best be described as a witch orgy. Which is one of those things you really can’t unsee. Sleep No More 530 W 27th St New York, NY 10001 Sleep No More 530 W 27th St New York, NY 10001 official website Map Data Map data ©2014 Google, Sanborn. iTunes Movie Trailers. Will the Earth Have Two Suns by 2012? In the Star Wars saga, George Lucas imagined a world where twin suns rose and fell in the horizon. Looks like his vision may not be so far-fetched. Astrophysicists say that Betelgeuse, the red super-giant that is the ninth brightest star in the sky, is losing mass—an indication of gravitational collapse. Brad Carter, a senior lecturer of physics at the University of Southern Queensland, explained to news.com.au that the star is essentially running out of the fuel at its core.

“This fuel keeps Betelgeuse shining and supported. When this fuel runs out the star will literally collapse in upon itself and it will do so very quickly,” he said. (More on Time.com: Voyager 1 Nears Edge of Solar System.) “It goes bang, it explodes, it lights up,” Carter said. And while the celestial event could take place before the end of 2012, it may not occur for a million years. As you’d expect, plenty of folks interpret the impending supernova as a sign of the Apocalypse. Museum Collections. Walking Faster May Lead to a Longer Life. Study Shows a Link Between Walking Speed and Life Span Why do I need to register or sign in for WebMD to save? We will provide you with a dropdown of all your saved articles when you are registered and signed in. Jan. 4, 2011 -- A swift stride puts you on the path to a longer, healthier life, researchers say.

Scientists reporting in The Journal of the American Medical Association say that older adults who typically walk 1 meter per second or faster live longer than expected. A walking, or gait, speed of 1 meter per second is equal to 3.28 feet per second. Walking speed can be an important sign of someone's overall health. Stephanie Studenski, MD, MPH, of the University of Pittsburgh, analyzed the collective results of nine previous studies to determine if walking speed explained survival differences among older adults and whether it could be used to predict longevity. Continue reading below...

Faster Pace Boosts Life Span Walking Speed Predicts Survival. There's a mini ice age coming, says man who beats weather experts. Footprints remain after people walked on the snow-covered beach at Weston-Super-Mare, England. Photo: Getty Images Well, folks, it's tea-time on Sunday and for anyone involved in keeping people moving it has been a hell of a weekend. Thousands have had their journeys wrecked, tens of thousands have been delayed getting away for Christmas; and for those Londoners who feel aggrieved by the performance of any part of our transport services, I can only say that we are doing our level best. Almost the entire Tube system was running on Sunday and we would have done even better if it had not been for a suicide on the Northern Line, and the temporary stoppage that these tragedies entail.

We have kept the Transport for London road network open throughout all this. Advertisement In a few brief hours, we are told, the snowy superfortresses will be above us again, bomb bays bulging with blizzard. Do you remember? Never mind the record low attained in Northern Ireland this weekend. Is he barmy? Scientists Cite "Atmospheric River" for Near Continuous Rain. It's the rain that just won't stop -- day after day. It's almost as continuous as the flow of a river, tropical moisture funneled into California by what scientists have come to call an "atmospheric river. " The term was coined only within the last generation of satellite imaging that can actually show the band of moisture. But there's nothing new about the phenomenon. What scientists now realize was an atmospheric river in 1861-62 brought California 45 straight days of rain and caused flooding of Biblical proportions, evocative of Noah and his ark..

It bankrupted the state. "The atmospheric river brings in the moisture. Jones is best known for her earthquake expertise. "We actually made a model of this type of storm, just like we made a model of a Southern San Andreas Earthquake," Jones explained. Fortunately, such extreme storms are relatively rare, though lesser atmospheric rivers have also caused severe damage storms, notably in 1969 and 1986. Not this December. Topologist Predicts New Form of Matter  Back in 1970, a young physicist working in the Soviet Union made a counterintutive prediction. Vitaly Efimov, now at the University of Washington in the US, showed that quantum objects that cannot form into pairs could nevertheless form into triplets.

In 2006, a group in Austria found the first example of such a so-called Efimov state in a cold gas of cesium atoms. That’s puzzling. Surely the bonds that hold triplets together are the same as those that bind pairs. Today, Nils Baas at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology makes another startling prediction. Behind this strange result is a branch of mathematics called topology, the study of shape.

A useful example to consider is the famous Borromean ring shown above left. A key point here is that the circles in a flat 2 dimensional plane cannot form a Borromean ring. It turns out that there is formal mathematical analogy between the Borromean ring and the strange triplets of cesium that Efimov predicted. Terrorism: Can you really stop a bomber by asking, 'Are you terrorist?' By David Rose UPDATED: 12:34 GMT, 15 December 2010 Airport security checks are not only intrusive, demeaning and a mind-numbing drain on our precious time.

They don't actually work. But as David Rose reports from Israel, a new generation of scanning systems are so good they can pick out a terrorist by asking a terribly simple question: Are you or are you not a terrorist? Israel's main international airport Ben Gurion's 'find the terrorist, not the bomb' approach has required human beings to operate it. But now, using machines, it can be automated - and in the process, greatly speeded up The security checks at Ben Gurion, Israel's main international airport near Tel Aviv, are intense. The new intrusive body scanners that reveal naked bodies beneath clothing - recently introduced in America amid passenger resentment - are not in use. 'We operate on the principle that it's much more effective to detect the would-be terrorist than try to find his bomb,' says a senior Israeli official. Enlarge. Actors Create 14 Decisive Moments: Solve Sundsbo's Video Portraits.

“The Hurt Locker,” winner of the 2010 Oscar for best picture, took 131 minutes to unfold. What kind of story can be told in just one minute? With a gifted performer, quite a story indeed. From Tilda Swinton’s agonized Joan of Arc turn to James Franco’s suave self-seduction, the minutes add up to a kind of minifestival in “Fourteen Actors Acting: A Video Gallery of Classic Screen Types.” These brief clips portray not only the art, but also the joy and vigor of performance. Kathy Ryan/The New York TimesAnthony Mackie and the photographer Solve Sundsbo, in the T-shirt. They were directed by Solve Sundsbo of Norway, whose clients as a fashion photographer have included Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and Dolce & Gabbana.

“You’re going from making iconic images to creating narratives,” he said, “but there is less of a narrative capacity in 60 seconds, so you need to create something like a poem that can lead your imagination.” Ms. “Celebrity portraiture demands reinvention,” she said. Keith Haring, Artist, Dies at 31 - Career Began in Subway Graffiti - Obituary. By ANDREW L. YARROWPublished: February 17, 1990 Keith Haring, an artist whose graphic talents made him one of the stars of the youthful 1980's art scene and whose images could be found as often on T-shirts as in museums, died of AIDS yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 31 years old. During his brief but meteoric career, Mr. But Mr. From these beginnings emerged a style of illustration that became known throughout the world and a mode of distribution that largely circumvented the traditional art gallery system. In Behalf of Causes As his art became better known and was shown in galleries and museums throughout the world, his prices rose to as much as $350,000 for a canvas.

Many critics dismissed his work as a form of commercial art, but Mr. ''He was one of the most astonishingly unique talents of recent times,'' said Tony Shafrazi, at whose gallery Mr. Mr. 'Tuneful Celebration' Despite arrests for criminal mischief, Mr. By the mid-1980's, Mr. Mr. Question of 'Commercialism' Mr. Victorian Literature, Statistically Analyzed With New Process. Alan Moore, Secondary Literacy, and the Modernism of the Graphic Novel. Alan Moore, "Secondary Literacy," and the Modernism of the Graphic Novel Whether articulated as potentially genuine beings who can be looked at from any side or as more limited, two-dimensional visual figures, comic characters are presented as occupying spatial and temporal locations distinct from other such characters and belonging to an underlying world that exists independent of the panels in which the characters appear –an alternative universe whose "real" dimension seems to depend on events that have been cut out or are occurring between the panels.

Donald Ault, "Imagetextuality: 'Cutting Up' Again, pt. III" Here is our narrative made paradise, brief tales made glorious continuity. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil, Black Dossier In this essay, I want to focus on some of the specific formal qualities of the graphic novel, using as my case study writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O'Neil's three volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Watchmen:The Graphic Novel as Trauma Fiction.

In their articles on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's ground-breaking graphic novel, both Brent Fishbaugh and Jamie A. Hughes indicate that Watchmen experiments with the ramifications of placing superheroes into a real world setting, making them face "scenarios that mirror the [world's] current political and social problems" (Huges 547-8).

In Watchmen , these problems are both personal and national &ndash the mostly impotent superheroes that haunt the pages of this graphic novel struggle with their personal lives, while America faces the threat of nuclear war following a Russian invasion of Afghanistan. On both the personal and the national levels, Watchmen addresses real-world problems, and throughout the story it reveals how these problems affect the characters, many of which are traumatized by events in the story or in their personal histories. Recent literary criticism has focused on the effects of trauma and how they can be realistically presented in literature. Implication Synonyms, Implication Antonyms. A cure for the common cold may finally be achieved as a result of a remarkable discovery in a Cambridge laboratory - Science, News.

Yaddo Home. Armond White vs. The World - Movies - News. New Earth-like planet discovered | Science. SimplyScripts - Movie Scripts and Screenplays.

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Downloadable Movie Scripts, Screenplays and Transcripts. The Daily News - January 1981. BOOKS. Inovation/RETHINK. PearlWHAT. The Miracles of Science. TECHNEXT. Writing. Social Phobia/Social Anxiety Association.