Restaurant owner Shannon Bennett said the four men – wearing business suits – walked into the venue’s Lui Bar with travel suitcases and ordered Negroni cocktails before throwing themselves off the building.
“Basically, four guys came upstairs with parachutes hidden underneath their jackets,” Mr Bennett said. “One went to the bathroom, followed by the rest, straight out to the balcony and pretty much jumped straight off.”
An auto journalist on a drive through San Francisco yesterday morning happened to come across the above Porsche 911 right after it plowed into a patch of fresh, wet cement. Yes, this is why people think Porsche 911 drivers are asshats.
Kingda Ka, the tallest roller coaster on Earth, drops its passengers a life-flashing 418 feet. Ferrari World’s Formula Rossa, the fastest, literally takes riders’ breath away at speeds of up to 150 mph. Though thrilling, these are phenomena of degree, not kind. BRC Imagination Arts, a Southern California design firm, has proposed something entirely new: a ride that creates the sensation of zero gravity for up to eight seconds at a time.
BRC drew its concept from the “Vomit Comet,” the plane NASA uses to train astronauts. The KC-135A aircraft flies a looping parabolic path, creating about 25 seconds of microgravity each time it zips up and over the parabola’s camelback hump. BRC’s proposed theme-park ride would travel a somewhat simpler trajectory—up and then back down a soaring steel edifice, similar to the existing “Superman: Escape from Krypton” coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain in California. But unlike Superman and other open-car coasters, the vomit-comet ride would be fully enclosed. Rather than the thrill of hurtling forward to one’s perceived doom, riders would enjoy the illusion of floating within a stable chamber.
Ever wonder what you’d sound like speaking German? Or maybe Mandarin? Microsoft Research has a new technology they’re cooking up which will take the sound of your voice and synthesize it as part a spoken language translator.
According to MIT’s Technology Review, the system in it’s current form requires an hour of training (which, presumably, means an hour of you talking to a computer), and can translate between 26 different languages.
