AWCbee – News: Music, Movie, Films

The recent “acqua alta” (high water) in Venice, Italy reached a depth of 1.56 meters (5 ft, 1 in.) on Monday – the deepest flood in 22 years, and the fourth highest flood level in recent history, claimed Venice’s Tide Center. The water began to subside on Tuesday, while residents and tourists made their way through the city, hip-waders or not – one man even took the opportunity to ride his wakeboard through Piazza San Marco (until police stepped in). Although this flood was severe enough for the mayor to ask tourists to temporarily stay home, Venetian floods are fairly routine, several occurring every year, and residents usually take it all in stride.

Shopkeepers block the entrance of their shop with a wood panel as water rises in the streets of Venice.

A man wades through the Piazza San Marco during floods.

A view of a flooded dock area of Venice.

Tourists wade through flood waters in a shopping district of Venice.

Women sit on a table while water rises in their shoe shop during floods.

Italian manufacturer Santambrogio Milano design and produce their Simplicity line of furniture using superdurable tempered glass. The collection uses the ultra-clear Diamant Glass by Saint Gobain. The glass bed and sofa below are only the latest in a growing line of glass furniture that Santambrogio Milano have produced, past pieces include tables, benches, chaise lounges, and entire kitchens and bathrooms all made of glass.

It’s because of their true commitment and dedication towards sports.

Beijing Olympics 2008 Results

The Malaysian website Tech ARP, which previously figured out the release schedule for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3, has looked into its crystal ball again and predicts Vista SP2 will be released to manufacturing in April 2009. First, though, a release candidate (RC) will be released in February.

So, what will be the big attractions in Vista SP2? 

• Windows Search 4.0
• Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack
• Native Blu-Ray recording
• Windows Connect Now support for easier Wi-Fi connections
• UTC timestamp support in the exFAT file system to enable correct file synchronization across timezones

Keep in mind that Vista SP2 will only install on systems running Vista SP1.

So, how does the Vista SP2 release schedule jibe with previous service pack releases? ZDNet’s Ed Bott (whom I assisted many moons ago on the book Special Edition Using Windows Me) has run the numbers on the typical timespan between service packs, and finds that the space between Vista SP1 and the predicted release of Vista SP2 is on par with most Microsoft service pack releases other than those for Windows XP: about a year after the previous service pack.

Why is Windows XP an exception? Bott notes that Windows XP broke the pattern established by Windows NT4 and Windows 2000. It took almost two years to release XP SP2 after XP SP1, and almost four years elapsed between XP’s SP2 and SP3. Thus, Vista SP2, if it comes out as predicted, will mark a return to normal.

So, what do you think? Does the projected release date for Vista SP2 make sense, or does it still seem “rushed” as some have suggested? Hit Comment and tell us your thoughts.

Maybe it’s part of our own human arrogance, but there’s something fascinating about imagining the world with us no longer in it. Not a world where we never existed, but the world as it would go on if at this very moment, today, rapture-like, we all of a sudden disappeared. Not vacated and had time to clean-up what we thought shouldn’t be left behind, but just vanished with little warning.

With “Bankrupt”, acclaimed NYC-based photographer Phillip Toledano gives us perfect snapshots of something that equates our abolition about as closely as it can while we’re still hanging around. In another facet of his study of those sort of sterile, factory, monolithic modern offices he examined in his series “Cubelife”, here he looks at offices that are no longer because they went under. The interesting this is that, as is part of the risk of the modern Western economy, businesses now can almost literally disappear – bankrupt and shut down and finished in a day. These aren’t places where everyone was notified and packed up and left everything spotless for their predecessors. These are buildings where people quite literally grabbed what they cared about and then just disappeared.

The detritus speaks volumes. And raises questions – “why is there a single white gym sock on the office floor?”. With nobody remaining there to answer our queries, we’ll simply never get to know…

“As I started shooting bankrupt offices I found it to be more archaeology than photography. Everywhere I went I found signs of life, interrupted.”

Below is my favourite shot: the two errant pencils thrown into one of those awful, generic, cheap-ass flatboard ceilings found in faceless offices from coast to coast:

Toledano is super well known and much blogged about for his disturbing body-morphic series “Hope & Fear” (check out the “baby suit”…) but he’s also got some of the most innovative, interesting editorial work around. His entire site is definitely worth a full scope out, but here are just a few of my favourites:

This has to be one of the biggest Porsche crashes in history.

Apparently there was a collision between two freight trains , one carrying over 100 brand spanking new Porsche’s. It ’s hard to believe that trains have the responsibility of carrying these $100,000 , but in Europe it is a common instance, the crash though is not. There is reportedly over 1 million in damage and over 18 Porsche cars damaged.

The Porsches fell onto the tracks, where some were squashed – causing €1 million worth of damage to the cars in total.

The drivers of the trains were said to be ok. One thing for sure though is 18 future Porsche owners/dealers won’t be getting these cars anytime soon.

Snoring is the sound produced when the air cannot pass through your air passages easily during breathing while you sleep due to obstruction at the back of your mouth and nose. Snoring brings a lot of problems to you and your bedmate. Loud snoring is a constant nuisance to your bedmate and could rob your partner of a good sleep every night. There are also cases that you stop breathing in a few seconds while snoring and you have to wake up to catch your breath. Snoring is not only annoying to you and your partner it could also be an indication of a serious health problem and you need to cure and get rid of your snoring.

About one third of the population is habitual snorers and most common on males and overweight people. Snoring is a serious problem; this will deprive you of a good sleep at night causing drowsiness, irritability and reduced alertness during the day. You have to find out how to get rid of your snoring before it becomes chronic and may result to other illnesses. Snoring may cause high blood pressure, heart problems and weight gain. This can also affect your relationship with your family members who get irritated with your constant snoring every night. It will bring you social embarrassment if you will sleep outside of your home and you’ll probably be ridiculed by people shocked and surprised by your loud snoring. Before it could affect your life and your health you should find out how to treat your snoring.

Tips to get rid of your snoring problems: 

• Sleep on your side or stomach rather than on your back. Sleeping on your back will promote snoring as your tongue will fall backwards causing obstruction on the free flow of air during breathing.
• Tilt or raising the head of the bed a few inches can help stop snoring.
• Avoid alcohol before bedtime. This relaxes the throat muscles causing tongue to fall backwards obstructing air passages.
• Weight Loss. Excess fat on your neck cause your throat and air passages to become smaller.
• Avoid using too much pillows or overly soft pillows. This could bend your airway passages and will result to more breathing problems while sleeping.
• There are also devices available without prescription like nasal strips that keeps your air passages open while you sleep to prevent snoring. This is effective to some people but very expensive as you need to use new strip every night.

• There are also surgeries offered by otolaryngologists-head and neck surgeons like Uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (UPPP) to stop snoring. But of course this could be the last option considering the side effects and the cost involved.

Snoring is a very serious problem not only to you but to your family members. It can be a symptom of sleep apnea which is a very serious and life-threatening health condition and it is important that you find cure for your snoring problems.

Finally the day came, 10th September 2008 the big day in everyone’s life.

300 feet below Meyrin Switzerland, scientist are set to turn on the one most expensive machine ever built. Meet the world’s largest particle accelerator named The Large Hadron Collider.

At CERN, the Large Hadron Collider could recreate conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old. Above is one of the collider’s massive particle detectors, called the Compact Muon Solenoid.

The Large Hadron Collider was built to look at how the Universe was created by analyzing particle collisions. This has quit a lot of people a little nervous since no one knows what could happen if things go wrong. Either way it’s still a very interesting project which deserves more reading. If you are interested, click on this link for the full New York Times story.

This picture shows how big the tunnel is, 17 miles in which scientist will attempt to circulate a beam of protons…

Scientists and technicians working day and night, monitoring each and everything twice and thrice to making sure they do not put an end to our Universe by trying to figure out how it started…

 A technician assembles the tracker of the magnet core of the Compact Muon Solenoid, a 1920-tonne element at CERN, March 22, 2007. CMS is part of five experiments which will study what happens when beams of particles collide in the 27 km-long underground Large Hadron Collider.

The “Big Bang” is a theory first postulated by physicist and astronomer Georges Lemaître based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity to cosmology. It states that the universe was created approximately 15 billion years ago when it was little more than a tightly woven packet of small atomic mass that exploded and has been expanding from its primordial hot and dense initial condition to the continous expanse of universe that we know today.

CERN will try to recreate a mini-version of the “Big Bang” deep underground by using its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle smasher. Early preliminary testing has been successful and now the agency is ready test or “re-stage” what science believe was the actual birth of our universe, only on a much, much smaller scale.

Evans and his LHC team will send a full particle beam all the way around the collider pipe in one direction before sending beams in both directions, traveling at the speed of light, and smashing them together later in the year. The resulting collision will be monitored on computers at CERN and laboratories around the world by scientists looking for the ultimate proof to the theory, a, or the, particle (called “Higgs boson”)that made life possible. The Higgs boson is thought to be the particle of glue that holds all matter together, thus creating the universe and all life in it.

The particle is named after 79-year old Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, who will be on hand in Switzerland for the experiment. He believes that his “Higgs boson” should appear quite quickly once the two beams collide. Others are not so sure.