Author: luapo

so I became an equalizer.

Officials in Colombia’s second-largest city on Monday inaugurated a giant, outdoor escalator for residents of one of its poorest neighborhoods.

For generations, the 12,000 residents of Medellin’s tough Comuna 13, which clings to the side of a steep hillside, have had to climb hundreds of large steps authorities say is the same as going up a 28-story building. Now they can ride an escalator Medellin’s mayor says is the first massive, outdoor public escalator for use by residents of a poor area.

“It turned out very well,” said Mayor Alonso Salazar, adding that he has not heard of any such project elsewhere in this world.

Salazar said officials from Rio de Janeiro plan to visit Medellin to see if such an escalator would work in that city’s favelas, which also cling precariously to hillsides.

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Next time you’re in a meeting, try this little experiment: Take a big yawn, cover your mouth out of courtesy and watch to see how many people follow suit. There’s a good chance you’ll set off a chain reaction of deep breaths and wide-open mouths. And before you finish reading this article, it’s likely you’ll yawn at least once. Don’t misunderstand, we aren’t intending to bore you, but just reading about yawning will make you do it, just as seeing or hearing someone else yawn makes us do it, too.

­So what’s behind this mysterious epidemic of yawning? First, let’s look at what this bodily motion is: Yawning is an involuntary action that causes us to open our mouths wide and breathe in deeply. We know it’s involuntary because we do it even before we’re born: According to Robert Provine, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, research has shown that 11-week-old fetuses yawn.

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As is the case every year, our top 10 lists have a few notable absentees in 2011. These include the top grossing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. On the other hand, 127 Hours and Sucker Punch were both hugely popular among the downloading public, while their box office grosses were relatively modest.

The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from thousands of BitTorrent trackers. All release formats, including cammed versions are counted. Afterwards, the data is carefully checked and corrected if needed.

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“Each year more than 100,000 people are injured and hundreds are killed in red-light running related collisions,” reads the text at the beginning of one montage taken from various cameras in New Jersey. And after all the smashing, sliding, crashing and crunching is done, more text states, “Please, Stop on Red. The life you save may be your own.”

But while a rep for the company, American Traffic Solutions, tells NJ.com that cameras like the ones it produces “change driver behavior and help save lives,” a rep for the National Motorists Association points out that the videos don’t exactly demonstrate this behavior change: “Oh, so they’re showing how their red light system doesn’t stop crashes?”

Regardless, we know why you’ve read this far. To get to the video. So without further blah blah, here are a bunch of people in New Jersey crashing into each other: