Saturday, October 31, 2009
NYC Subways Get LCD Screens Showing Every Train in Real Time {I would've loved this when I lived in NYC}
via Gizmodo
As a New Yorker, this gets me very excited: the Bedford Ave L station just got an LCD screen that shows exactly where all the cars on the line are, so you know how long you'll have to wait.
It's part of a test program on the L line, where they installed boards telling people when the next train would arrive last year. This is just the next step. If it goes well, presumably, they'll expand it to other lines as well.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Opera mobile home resembles the Sydney Opera house
via Auto Motto by HarshPaul on 10/29/09
The new Opera mobile home from Belgian architect Exel Enthoven is stands very true to its name, it’s looks remind one of the landmark Sydney Opera House. The canvas holiday home unfolds from a trailer and is handmade and fitted with hardwood, stainless steel and leather.
Amenities in the mobile home include two beds, a toilet, hot and cold water, LED lighting and a mobile hub. The impressive and luxurious mobile home will be on display at the Design at Work trade fair in Belgium.
Via: Dezeen
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Kahn Fine Antiques of Chatham, Mass.
via A Continuous Lean. by Michael Williams on 10/11/09
If I am out-and-about and I see the an antique store, nine times out of ten I will just keep on driving. Generally, it is the same type of old lady vibe with little of interest to a man like myself. That said, if you ever find yourself in Chatham, Cape Cod make a point to visit Kahn Fine Antiques. The shop — which specializes in nautical items and Americana — is one of my favorite things in one of my favorite places. Growing up I spent a lot of summers on the Cape and I remember even at a young age being obsessed with New England whaling history and accoutrement. Kahn’s has an amazing selection and knowledge of the arena, so much in fact that the antiques certainly carry a price. Even so, it is always nice to escape into the 1800s (1600s?) with a visit to their shop. In a pinch you can just peruse the goods like the items pictured here in via the store’s website. Some of my favorites below.
Antique Ship-in-a-Bottle Circa 1900.
An American 13 Star Yacht Ensign Made by Annin & Co., New York, circa 1865-1870
A fine Cased Pair of Over and Under Boxlock Percussion Pistols by John Blisset, London, c. 1840
Hand Carved Eagle made by J.P. Uranker of Martha's Vineyard
An early 19th century Dovetailed Sailor's Chest with Wonderful Ropework Beckets
Leather Shotgun Case
Leather Shotgun Case
75¢ extra for your lady friend
Early 20th century English Pond Boat
Set of Sperm Whale Teeth
Late 19th century English Leather Officer's Boot Trunk circa 1875
An English Ship Builder's Style Half Hull Model
Civil War Era Scrimshawed Whale Bone
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
2008 Porsche Design Edition 1 Cayman S
---- Specifications ---- |
Price | -- | Production | -- | ||
Engine | 3.4 liter boxer-6 | Weight | 2954 lbs (stock) | ||
Aspiration | natural | Torque | 252 lb-ft @ 4400 rpm | ||
HP | 295 hp @ 6250 rpm | HP/Weight | 10 lbs per hp | ||
HP/Liter | 86.8 hp per liter | 1/4 mile | -- | ||
0-62 mph | 4.8 seconds | Top Speed | 171 mph |
(from Porsche Press Release)
Monday, October 26, 2009
Mercedes 2010 E-Class: technology evolved « Boy Genius Report
Mercedes 2010 E-Class: technology evolved
by Boy Genius on October 26th, 2009 at 6:57pm
Filed under: Bluetooth, Cars, Featured, Reviews 28 Comments
Recently I visited Mercedes-Benz’s headquarters in Montvale, NJ to see their all-new 2010 E-Class vehicles. You might be thinking we’re pulling an Autoblog, but we’re not. If you knew the amount of technology and engineering in the new E-Class… well, you’re actually about to.
When you begin to look at how much effort, planning, design, testing, and money goes into creating a line of cars, you realize it’s not an easy task. Forget about competition from other manufacturers, just hearing and seeing the process of how it’s done was an incredible experience for me. We’re going to focus on just some of the technological features in the E-Class which is more than we could ever imagine, so once you add that in with every other component in a car, it’s really amazing. I was lucky enough to get a whole sense of how the process works and how it’s executed. I also test drove two 2010 E-Class vehicles, the E550 Coupe and the E63 AMG Sedan. Read on for my experience and an overview of some of the amazing stuff in the E-Class.
Disclosure: Mercedes-Benz North America is a past and present advertiser on BGR.
The E-Class has a feature called ATTENTION ASSIST which is amazingly cool and incredibly brilliant. Mercedes told us that people who drive when they are tired and drowsy get into car accidents roughly 100,000 times a year, almost as much as driving while intoxicated. What Attention Assist does is monitor around 70 different parameters to get a baseline of your habits and then compare it in real-time to your current driving habit. So, you turn on your car and go off for a drive on the highway. For the first 20 minutes, the intuitive system automatically is monitoring different things that you do. Stuff like how aggressive you are with the steering wheel, braking patterns, and much more. Once that baseline is measured, the system then can decide if your patterns changed for the worse and it wants to alert you. There’s an audible alert as well as a visual one in the instrument cluster.
Mercedes told us that in testing, Mercedes drivers typically have a heart-rate that’s reduced by 5% compared to other drivers of other brand vehicles. The reason they said is because of how much attention they pay to the cabin and the entire experience of making the driver feel like a driver, and a driver that’s driving comfortably.
Something else intelligent the new E-Class does is called Adaptive High Beam Assist. It uses a camera that sees oncoming headlights and taillights of cars in front of you. It then automatically softens the headlights as cars pass by you to ease the lighting and not blind them. It will even switch between high-beams and low-beams automatically. But the best part is that it’s all automatic and will auto-adjust your headlights to compensate for 1,000ft of road (including vehicles) in front of you.
The E-Class cars we saw were equipped with a bag load of safety features and it’s really great to see these things start to get implemented faster and faster on different cars from all sorts of manufacturers. PRE-SAFE Brake is another one of these technological achievements that you might wonder why it isn’t available until now. It makes use of something called DISTRONIC PLUS feature (basically think of it as adaptive cruise control that uses radar to see if another vehicle in front of you has stopped while you’re cruising at 75MPH), and what it does is actually stop the car for you in emergency conditions. We’re not talking about just slowing it down and slightly breaking, we’re talking 100% braking power. It works by sensing an impending rear collision (you about to hit another car in front of yours) and will sound about three warning tones.
If you’re listening to Bubba Sparxx too loud on your iPod and don’t hear those tones, and you don’t see the visual alerts because you’re emailing BGR a tip (not smart), the car will be able to detect that you’re a moron and apply around 40% partial braking to the car to slow you down 1.6 seconds prior to impact. But if all the aforementioned things fail, besides the fact you probably shouldn’t be operating a moving vehicle, the car will apply 100% full braking power 0.6 seconds before impact which will create an “electronic crumple zone,” dramatically reducing the impact for you. It doesn’t mean you won’t crash, but it’s an amazing safety enhancement that Mercedes is confident will reduce serious accidents on the road.
What about night vision? Well, Mercedes said they’re one of the only manufacturers to use an actual camera for their night vision implementation, and instead of detecting heat, it works as does a regular night vision product; it shoots out IR light and the IR camera captures it. We were told it enables you to see more or less 500ft in front of you which is unbelievable if you think about it. There’s also a person detection feature that will put people in boxes so you can accurately view them.
If you know me personally (funny guy, aren’t I?) or even follow me on Twitter, you’ll know I absolutely love cars. So mix that love of tech, gadgets, mobile devices, and everything else with cars and you can get an idea of why the E-Class is so interesting and incredible to me. It’s the most advanced vehicle I’ve ever driven and one of the most exciting just from the technology aspect itself. But, who are we kidding. The E63 would have had me excited if there was a rotary phone strapped to it. Just look at it.
The car can also pair up to 5 mobile phones via Bluetooth and will give you much-loved signal strength indicator in the COMMAND display as well as load in your entire phone address book if you’d please. The navigation system actually shows a lot of POI data as icons now, so you’ll literally see a Sunoco sign if there’s one close to you, or a McDonalds, or what have you. Completely unnecessary yet surprisingly enjoyable. Something else interesting is that DVD-based navigation is no longer necessary in this vehicle as it uses a built in hard drive to store everything. There is also around 4GB of free space for you to copy MP3 files to and play back at your leisure.
Another great feature for us phone freaks is that pretty much all Mercedes have dedicated phone number pads.
What about suspension? Isn’t there some tech in there, too? Definitely. There are two different suspension options on the E-Class. One is a spring-suspension system and the other is AIRMATIC suspension which lets the driver select either comfort or spots mode at the touch of a button to fine turn their driving experience. We would have preferred even more control on the suspension, maybe four modes, like some other cars offer, but oh well.
There’s literally so much technology in this car — obviously why I jumped at the opportunity to do this article — that we could go on and on for a pretty long time. If the car senses an incoming collision the seats will move automatically to a more favorable crash position to try and protect the occupants, if the car is about to roll over, the sunroof and windows close automatically, there are up to 11 airbags in the car (9 standard) and a whole lot more. What’s great about all this technology though, is that it’s configurable. We often asked if you could disable almost every new feature they briefed us on, and the answer was always yes. We’ll be following up with a video post on the E-Class that will give you a more visual look at the car’s styling and design elements as well as a nice walk-through from our friend Bart Herring who is Product Manager for the E-Class series at Mercedes-Benz.
Tags: AMG, attention assist, Bluetooth, command, coupe, E550, E63, mercedes-benz, Navigation, night vision, pre-safe, sedan
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