.::REALITYRECALL::.

The main purpose of this post is to share some photos sent to me taken by my cousin’s brother-in-law in Toowoomba. But first some context.

Paul Norton described the topography of Toowoomba thus:

Just to give people some idea of what seems to have happened in Toowoomba, the city of Toowoomba is located just on the west side of the Great Dividing Range. As you travel from Brisbane to Toowoomba, the road begins climbing slowly after about Grantham and Helidon, then climbs steeply west of Withcott before cresting the range at a bit under 700 metres. The eastern suburbs on Toowoomba are built on the western slope of the range, whilst the CBD is located in something of a hollow at the bottom of this slope, with gentler slopes to north and south. The “cloudburst” (to used Brian’s word on the older thread) on the range looks to have basically been funnelled into the CBD by the topography.

Further to my previous comment, the range forms a neat half-circle around Toowoomba on the east side, centered on the CBD.

That half-circle, according to the Federal member for the area Ian Macfarlane, is the rim of an old volcano, which has eroded away to the west, so the main street forms a virtual gully that drains away to the plains and into the Condamine.

The cause of the floods was a sudden downpour, described on TV as “nothing much” on the radar, but delivered 150 mm (six inches on the old scale) in about half an hour. The result was like a raging gully through the CBD and a vast amount of water down into the Lockyer Valley to the east.

So here are the Toowoomba pics. The first is a long shot of Russell Street:

Russell Street in Toowoomba

Here are the flood waters at the railway crossing:

Flood waters at the railway crossing

Followed by another street scene:

Street scene

The next is a close-up of a building in the background of the second photo. We get a view inside someone’s home:

Home of resident with wall ripped away

I saw the occupant interviewed on TV. The torrent ripped away the side wall of his home exposing the inside with sagging floor.

Next we see the contents of a furniture store floating down the street:

Floating furniture

Here’s a car wrapped around a post:

Car wrapped around a post

And another one somewhat the worse for wear:

Car mauled by Toowoomba flood

That’s it folks. What we see is a raging torrent that came and went fairly quickly in a place where no-one expected to see running water.

The Toowoomba Chronicle has some photo galleries, including this one. Here’s a sample:

Cars piled up in Toowoomba

The Courier Mail has quite an interesting home video of the incident here.

if you are discomforted by laughter towards the end, remember people laugh for reasons other than that they think something is funny. In fact I heard an extended interview once on someone who had done research on why people laugh. “Because it’s funny” from memory amounted to some 14% or one in seven of the instances.

ABC Southern Queensland has further information. I’ll leave you with a photo from this article which illustrates how angry the water was:

Angry flood water in Toowoomba

I’m stunned. Doctors are flabbergasted. The world is square. What. The. Hell. An Italian man was hit by a stray bullet. In the head. But it didn’t kill him! How? Well, he somehow sneezed out the very bullet that shot him.
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Yesterday we saw the junk in the trunk, now here’s what’s powering it. It’s the motor that makes the Ford Focus Electric go, and while we still don’t know many details (we couldn’t get anyone to quote us a weight) it is a reasonably compact little thing. We did, however, get confirmation that it will not be run through either a standard transmission, like the dry-clutch automatic that the regular Focus comes with, nor something like the two-speed transmission that Tesla uses in its Roadster. It’ll be “like a CVT” we’re told, keeping the motor at its most efficient RPM, and while we’re not sure what that looks like on the inside we’re sure that there’ll be no shifting involved, neither manual nor automatic.

Ford Focus Electric motor extracted, split asunder, coppery guts exposed originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 13:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are two kinds of failures: Those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

    —   Laurence Peter

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Saskatchewan’s highest court rules that marriage commissioners who are public servants cannot refuse to marry same-sex couples.

A cross-border kerfuffle over a popular chocolate treat nearly cost a Winnipeg woman a $300 fine and saddled her with a bureaucratic headache.

Police in the Yorkton, Sask., area have made 16 arrests in connection with an alleged prescription drug trafficking ring.

Between slagging each other off with cartoons like the one above and taking each other to court over chipset licenses, there’s been no love lost between NVIDIA and Intel over the past few years — but it looks like the war is over. The two companies just announced a new six-year cross-licensing deal that will see Intel paying NVIDIA a total of $1.5b over the next five years for access to NVIDIA’s technology, while also giving NVIDIA a license to some of Intel’s patents. The two companies have also agreed to drop all pending litigation, because you know, they’re now friends who just exchanged a billion and half dollars. Crucially, Intel won’t give up rights to x86, flash memory or “certain chipsets,” so we don’t really know if this agreement allows NVIDIA to produce integrated graphics for Sandy Bridge — although most manufacturers are going with an Optimus-style discrete / integrated switchable arrangement that pairs Intel’s on-die graphics with a discrete NVIDIA chip anyway, so we’re not so sure it actually matters. We would love to see NVIDIA support Intel’s Wireless Display 2.0 and the new Insider 1080p movie service, though — and if these two coming closer together results in better Intel on-board graphics that can rival AMD Fusion, well, things will get very interesting indeed. Oh, the possibilities of peace.

P.S.- And seriously, what a turnaround for NVIDIA at CES: it’s gone from being the company that was going nowhere with Tegra to completely dominating the Android landscape with Tegra 2, finding its way into all sorts of cars, and upending the desktop processor space with Project Denver — all while pocketing $1.5b of Intel’s cash. Not bad work for one Mr. Jen-Hsun Huang.

Update: NVIDIA just said on its press call that it has “no intentions to build chipsets for Intel processors,” and that Intel will be able to use NVIDIA’s technology in Sandy Bridge, so we suppose that answers that question.

Continue reading Intel agrees to pay NVIDIA $1.5b in patent license fees, signs cross-license

Intel agrees to pay NVIDIA $1.5b in patent license fees, signs cross-license originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Jan 2011 17:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted by Lisa Conquergood, Photos Team Marketing

We are starting off the year with a few new features in Picasa Web Albums. From metadata, to security, to a new way to zoom, there is a little bit for everyone.

More metadata
For those of you who can’t get enough of the technical side, we expanded the EXIF metadata (information stored inside of your image file) you can view for each photo. You can now get over 200 EXIF tags that are available from your photos including Metering Mode, White Space and Color Balance. From the individual photo page — where you currently view ‘Photo Information’ like Camera, ISO, Aperture and Exposure — click on “full details page” to view this new metadata information.

More security
Picasa Web Albums now supports https access. The https protocol encrypts your data as it travels between your web browser and our servers. Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public wifi hotspots like a library or a coffee shop. We are working to make https the default but for now, to access Picasa Web Albums using this secure protocol, type “https” into your browser instead of “http,” so “https://picasaweb.google.com instead of “http://picasaweb.google.com.”

More oohs and ahhs
Now, you can view images in their full resolution splendor by clicking on the magnifying glass on the photos page. This will bring up your image in a lightbox view, from which you can zoom into the image, up to its full resolution. You will need flash to take advantage of this new feature. This works great for panoramas too.

Thank you to Mike Wiacek for this beautiful image.

Today is our final day in NYC and we are currently in the studio shooting the next Fstoppers Original on Sam Yocum. I have just a second as the model gets makeup ready for the second look. I just stumbled upon this fantastic NYC timelapse by Josh Owens.

King's College Dental Institute's Professor Brian Millar thinks that his invention—a noise cancellation device that eliminates the unnerving sound of dental drills—will make people not fear the dentist. Really, Professor Brian Millar? Really? More »

Yet another Google service frees its users from the tyranny of browse-and-select file picking. YouTube offers drag-and-drop video uploading on modern, HTML5-happy browsers like Chrome and Firefox. More »