What is the official term for these guys?

The kind people at Reddit suggest either Wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tubeman or Air Dancers

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Idle Curiosities at 7:30 PM MST

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While not quite a definitive answer, I have a store-baked Blueberry pie here from 4 days ago and it tastes fine.

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Other, Idle Curiosities at 10:42 PM MST

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I figured I’d like to start readings works by Isaac Asimov, but the sheer volume of stories is overwhelming. I didn’t know where to start and I was paralyzed by the fear of starting with the wrong book and say spoiling hundreds of other books/stories.

Luckly the people from Ask MetaFilter came to the rescue and recommended reading the stories in the order of publication.

Here is a list of his books with publication dates grouped by series. I shall start with “Foundation”.

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Other, Idle Curiosities at 10:38 PM MST

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I got to wondering how broadcast news vans work. Specifically, what does that giant mast/antenna do? Does it send a signal somewhere? If so where? What frequencies does it use? How is that legal?

Well the internet was fairly quite on this issue. But I did turn up some information. (Please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong on any of this.)

I got this information from this Tour of a News Van article.

The giant mast is an antenna that broadcasts in the microwave frequencies. The article said it uses 2/2.4 Ghz which perhaps is an unregulated space like WiFi or portable phones? The same article later seems to imply that the vans broadcast using the Broadcast auxiliary service (BAS). (I guess the BAS lets them somehow use the same frequencies they use to broadcast their actual news?) But one way or another they use microwaves to communicate with news stations located many miles away. The article even says they can use helicopters as microwave repeaters to get more range.

The article also mentions that the vans also have the ability to uplink to sattelites in which case they don’t have to fool with the giant mast. It also noted that they can mount cameras atop the mast and control them remotely, I guess for those high shots.

Questions I still have:

Why don’t they use a directional antena like some people do to extend wifi? Wouldn’t that work better?
Is that wire thing snaking up the mast part of the antena?

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Other, Idle Curiosities at 8:54 AM MST

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This strange article “Giant badgers terrorise Iraqi port city” says that these giant man-eating badgers are known as Al-Ghirayri and locally as Al-Girta. I did a search for that name and turned up nothing. Shame, I really wanted to see a picture of man-eating badger.

(just a regular badger I guess)

Here’s some progress towards an answer. The folks in the comments on the Digg article of this suggest that this is a video of one of the beasts. And here is a the Wikipedia entry on your standard Honey badger (maybe the same thing?).

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Idle Curiosities at 2:22 PM MST

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