Everybody Feels the Wind Blow

A full-sized refrigerator is a pretty sizable appliance, usually requiring at least a van or pickup truck to haul to its destination. This is something the police in Richmond, British Columbia, had to remind a shopper who thought a few ropes and a prayer would get his fridge home in the trunk of a Honda Accord.

Richmond police said they received a call of a dangerous driving situation outside a store called Liquidation World. As you can see in the above photo taken by the RCMP, the fridge -- secured with ropes tied to the rear seat belts -- wouldn't exactly engender confidence in anyone caught in traffic behind the Accord.

The police aren't laughing about this:

While there may be some humor in this situation, we need to take note of the fact that someone could have been seriously injured if this vehicle became mobile in the state it was... We'd like to encourage people to please take the time to properly transport items.

The fridge-buyer ultimately arranged for more appropriate transport of the appliance.

Metro Vancouver man reprimanded for trying to load full-size fridge into car's trunk [Vancouver Sun]

Thanks to Neil for the tip!

Video, from Eric Fischer:

Green dots are tweets about earthquakes. Gray dots are tweets about other topics. Each frame is one second (total of 12 minutes). Thanks to Natural Earth for the land, water, and boundary shape data and the Twitter Streaming API for the tweets.

A Sun Pillar Over Ontario What is that on the horizon? No, it's not an alien starship battling distant Earthlings, but rather a sun pillar. When driving across Ontario, Canada in early June, the photographer was surprised to encounter such an "eerie and beautiful" vista, and immediately took pictures. When atmospheric air is cold, ice sometimes forms flat six-sided crystals as it falls from high-level clouds. Air resistance then causes these crystals to lie nearly flat much of the time as they flutter to the ground. If viewed toward a rising or setting Sun, these flat crystals will reflect sunlight and create an unusual column of light -- a sun pillar as seen above. Such columns of light are not uncommon to see, and a retrospective of past APODs that have featured picturesque sun pillars can be found here.

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Really great shot of the Milky Way at about :38 seconds.

fuckyeahspace:

Time-lapse of a whole night at the ALMA Array Operations Site, located on the Chajnantor plateau, in Chile.

This is unreal. 

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Neat, Randall Munroe has family in C'ville! This reminds me of one of my favorite stories:

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

Randall Munroe writes:

As many people have pointed out, my comic about tweets outrunning seismic waves seems to have been widely verified in yesterday’s earthquake:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earthquake-twitter-users-learned-tremors-226481

It’s always nice to see real-life confirmation of your calculations! The quake started in Virginia at 13:51:04 EST, where most of my family lives.  Texts from my brother in Charlottesville (25 miles from the epicenter) were slowed down by the spike in cell traffic, but I got an IRC message from my brother in Newport News, VA at 13:52:09. Based on USArray/EarthScope detector readings posted at Bad Astronomy, his message overtook the seismic waves outside Philadelphia, and reached New England over a minute before the quake was felt there.

I once heard a story (originally told by Kevin Young) about Gerson Goldhaber, who was a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He was talking on the phone with another physicist at SLAC near Stanford University near the end of the day on Tuesday, October 17, 1989. The SLAC physicist suddenly interrupted with, “Gerson, I have to go! There’s a very big earthquake happening!” and then hung up. So Gerson stepped out into a group of people in the hall, made a big show of yawning and checking his watch, then said, “Aren’t we about due for an earthquake?” Before anyone could respond, the Loma Prieta earthquake reached Berkeley, and he became a legend.

My best friend from college is from Mineral, VA, a town of a few hundred people and one stoplight, which was at the epicenter of yesterday’s quake. A few years ago, he moved to Sendai, Japan, where he got an apartment just a few miles from the coast. Fortunately, he survived the March earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. Last I heard from him, he was moving back home. He really can’t catch a break. Fortunately, it sounds like there’s not too much damage. (Though from what I remember of Mineral, I can’t help but wonder—if the quake did cause damage, how would you tell?)

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I would add a slice for "trying to jam the right lid on the container after you have warped it in 8 directions after a few cycles in the dishwasher." I find microwaving food in tupperware to be an excellent way to destroy these temperamental beasts.

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I have had bugs fly into my ear and it's the pits.

Cards manager Tony La Russa had never seen anything like what occurred Monday at Busch Stadium. Outfielder Matt Holliday called time and was forced to leave the game after a large moth flew into his right ear and got stuck.

This video purports to show how people from countries around the world count large numbers of bills. I can't vouch for the geographical generalizations, but I sure like seeing the variety of techniques! (via Salón DF)

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ze making neat stuff, as he always seems to do.

stop motion of stop motion of stop motion :: click below to watch ::