Random thoughts from the Pacific Rim
Every now and then it is worth to sit back and remember what a beautiful planet we are living on.
This photo was taken at the end of July by a new weather satellite, GOES14, in a geostationary orbit at a distance of 36000 kilometers. You have to click through to see the breathtaking large version of this photo…
(via Bad Astronomy)
Every now and then the Internet reveals something amazing about us and the rainbow of cultures we represent on this planet… Kazumi just now called me over to her computer to look at the video below, and – wow! – that is definitely one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a very long time!
Mesmerizing and inspirational don’t even begin to describe the art behind this video. And what really blows me away is the confidence and fast, flawless performance of the artist. Check it out:
After my recent post on San Francisco’s original Emanu-El Synagogue I got a link to this photo from Richard over at Sparkletack and in that picture of Sutter Street of just after the earthquake of 1906 there is an advertisement for MJB coffee clearly visible on a wall of one of the destroyed buildings.
That was intriguing, since I actually had written about the MJB coffee ads in San Francisco before here and here, and all the research I had done on the mysterious MJB – WHY? ads pointed at a timeframe of after the earthquake until sometimes in the 1910s for these ads… but here was one done before the earthquake of 1906.
I mentioned this to Richard and he pointed me to a book: “Coffee, Martinis and San Francisco” by Ruth Bransten McDougall, who happens to be the daughter of the founder of MJB Coffee. It’s a spirited and very personal biography of Ruth and her parents Mannie and Renee Brandenstein (later Bransten), which begins with a scene just after the earthquake of 1906 and then moves back to the very beginnings of the MJB brand in the 1880s and on through to the 1930s.
Mannie was a born marketer, and he relished in figuratively and literally painting the town with advertisements for his products, which is why even now, one hundred years after he invented the campaign, one can still find MJB Coffee – WHY? painted on walls in the Bay Area.
Many people in the last hundred years must have passed these ads and wondered… why WHY?
Well… here’s the answer… 
At one point, the young Ruth asks her dad: “Why the WHY?” and Mannie’s answer is: “What’s the difference, as long as people ask. That makes sales.”
My good friend Steve has embarked on a mission to Make Things – and I’m very late to point you all to his site, which is going strong with multiple mentions on and awards from Make and Instructables.
And in addition to build amazing things like the very funny mini-robots for his Robot Cocktail Party, (Award Winners!), he has started to draw and write “Bread”, a daily web comic, currently scheduled for 60 days. The first week is already very promising, so jump in now and you can say you’ve read Steve’s comic since the beginning…
Kazumi and me have been working on MapSkip.com for over two years now and the growth curve was definitely very slow in the beginning… but over the last year the site has finally found its audience and we’ve been able to introduce many new features that have been accepted very well.
And so today, we have been able to welcome our 1000th MapSkip member! We are quite excited about this milestone, and we are looking forward to many more stories from this wonderful group of people who have literally covered the map of the world with their words, pictures and voices.
Definition of Irony: A group of smoking scientists in front of the entrance to the 13th World Conference on Lung Cancer.
Saw that today on the way to the computer store and I was still thinking about how weird the world sometimes can be while I was installing the new hard disk two hours later…
