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Posts Tagged ‘Denver International Airport’

10 Interesting Links From July 17th

July 18th, 2009 Greg Smith No comments
  • Report on DIA jet: "massive gust of wind" – The Denver Post – The captain of a Continental Airlines jet that went off the side of a Denver International Airport runway last December during takeoff said the plane suddenly veered to the left "as if hit by a 'massive gust of wind,' or as if the tires had hit a patch of ice and lost traction," according to a report issued by air safety investigators today. Continental Flight 1404 traveled over fields, an airport taxiway and a raised service road before coming to rest near a DIA fire station.
  • Pay-as-you-drive insurance, privacy, and government mandates – Ars Technica – The proposal centers on a simple idea: infrequent drivers are less of an insurance risk. By pricing policies according to the mileage driven, insurance companies can offer discounts to lower-risk infrequent drivers, and put an appropriate cost penalty on heavy drivers. The state estimates that 30% adoption of PAYD insurance nationwide would reduce miles driven by at least 10% among subscribers, and save 55 million tons of CO2 over the next ten years. The benefits of such a system could be quite dramatic, as California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner is sure to emphasize.
  • Tornado watch in far SW Colorado – The Denver Post – A tornado watch continues in effect until 9 p.m. for far southeastern Colorado, including Baca, Brent, Crowley, Kiowa, Las Animas and Otero counties. An earlier tornado watch for the metro Denver area expired at 7 p.m.
  • EU fine gives Intel first loss in 22 years – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel posted a loss of $398 million, or 7 cents a share, compared with net income of $1.6 billion, or 28 cents a share in the same period last year.
  • Consumerist – Unruly Teen Charges $23 Quadrillion At Drugstore – Visa buxx – Kids these days! Hawkins writes, "My lectures about financial responsibility appear to have failed: yesterday [my teenaged daughter] charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 at the drug store." You would think Visa would have caught the error and addressed it, if you were high. What Visa actually did was slap a $20 "negative balance" fee on it, of course.
  • Scientists Discover Light Force with ‘Push’ Power | Science Blog – A team of Yale University researchers has discovered a “repulsive” light force that can be used to manipulate components on silicon microchips, meaning future nanodevices could be controlled by light rather than electricity.
  • Apple rejects bird chirp, search query apps over Internet content | iLounge News – Apple has rejected updates to two more applications—FastFinder from Bananas Design and Chirp! Bird Songs from Spiny Software—due to what the company considers to be an inappropriate rating based on the apps’ ability to connect to the Internet
  • ABQ will soon have a loan program for solar energy systems aimed as easing up-front costs – New Mexico’s largest city has made quick work of legislation passed earlier this year to boost consumption of renewable energy — such as the installation of solar energy systems on both residential and commercial rooftops. The key component allows municipalities to create special districts through which loans for installation of the systems are made to property owners who then pay off the loan through a property tax assessment rather than through making monthly loan payments.
  • House cats know what they want and how to get it from you – Anyone who has ever had cats knows how difficult it can be to get them to do anything they don't already want to do. But it seems that the house cats themselves have had distinctly less trouble getting humans to do their bidding, according to a report published in the July 14th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. The rather crafty felines motivate people to fill their food dishes by sending something of a mixed signal: an urgent cry or meowing sound embedded within an otherwise pleasant purr. The result is a call that humans generally find annoyingly difficult to ignore.
  • This Young House Is No More, And Our Entire Blog Is Moving To Young House Love As Of Now! | Young House Love – On July 7th, as many of you know, we were busy celebrating our two year wedding anniversary. But on July 8th we got a nice little present in the form of a cease and desist letter from a prominent home improvement magazine/TV show which bears a few similarities to our old site’s name (you guys can figure it out, right?). Don’t they know the two year anniversary present is cotton, not paper? Anyway, they basically ordered that we immediately surrender the use of our old name and URL because they believed consumers were getting confused and may think that Young House Love was in some way related to their brand. Picture us scratching our heads. In almost two years of blogging under that moniker not one person has ever asked if we were related to that company.
  • How Weird Is Denver International Airport

    December 6th, 2007 Greg Smith No comments

    I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Portland Oregon on short trips several times this year. There is very rarely a direct flight from the Sunport to anywhere except a state directly next to New Mexico. This time I went through Denver International Airport for the first time. I was pretty interested to fly through Denver this time because of the conspiracy theories associated with it.

    Denver Airport

    Lets start with the murals. I didn’t get a chance to see them, I wasn’t sure if they were past the security area and if I had time get to where they are. I’ve read about them and there many pictures up on Flickr. When you see the giant picture of the nazi dude with the dead children, well that’s just disturbing. There is another mural showing different people of the world bringing down this nazi dude. I think the point of which is to show what happens if the people of the world don’t come together to eliminate the bad guys. Still, this is pretty odd. It doesn’t help the rest of the conspiracy theories.

    anomalies-unlimited.com is the main source for the conspiracy theories. As I read through the sites, its easy to dismiss many of their claims. First one being that “Denver already had what everyone said was a perfectly fine airport – Stapleton.”According to Wikipedia, Stapleton was serious too small and poorly designed to be the 4th busiest airport in the US, which is what DIA is now. I believe Wikipedia’s explanation more then anomalies-unlimited.

    I won’t go through all the things that anomalies-unlimited points out. Some of it just doesn’t make sense that it’s part of a conspiracy. However there are some odd things they do warrant future inspection. Such as the fact that DIA was 2 Billion (with a “B”) over budget. Where did that money go? anomalies-unlimited seems to suggest that it went to a vast underground military complex that exists under the airport and that the purpose of the airport was really just to build this complex. Seems to me that one would build such a complex under a less busy airport.

    My limited experience at the airport indicates that the airport is pretty well designed and huge. I think the A gates went from 1 to 99. Although I generally dismiss the conspiracy theories, I did note something strange at the A gates. There are these mosaic tile images of people standing and walking through the terminals located on the floor. They are kinda weird in that they are top views and you can only make them out if you get up high (there is a higher level one can view them). In between these mosaics are a border and on these boarders are words like “North America”, “Europe” and “Antarctica”. Next to these words are random symbols that seem to have no purpose at all. These are all mosaics which are pretty easy to make out, with continent names in upper case. Near some of these content names are other words in lower case and the tile colors are really close to the back ground making it hard to figure out what they say. The symbols kinda look like random characters from the Zapf Dingbats font. Perhaps these are codes to the Aliens that come through DIA to tell them which continents they need to go through when they arrive.

    anomalies-unlimited.com does have one final item that I agree is strange, the odd tablet with a masonic symbol on it. Above that tablet is what appears to be a keypad. What the heck is this thing and why are there no better pictures of this thing than the poor quality ones on their website?