Brits complete London to Cape Town drive in record time.

by Kraig Becker on

Awhile back we posted a story about three adventurous Brits who had set out to drive from London to Cape Town in the hopes of setting a new speed record for that route. Their road would take them across three continents and 20 countries, covering more than 10,000 miles in the process. Late last week they completed their mission, arriving at the finish line nearly two days ahead of the previous record.

Mac Mackenney, Chris Rawlings and Steve Mackenney drove their Land Rover Discovery into Cape Town last Thursday, arriving 11 days, 14 hours, and 11 minutes after they had set out. That time beat the old mark, which was set by Eric Jackson and Ken Chambers back in 1963, by 1 day, 18 hours, and 37 minutes. Perhaps even more impressive is that the trio had to average approximately 870 miles per day, in a wide variety of conditions, to arrive when they did.

The three men took turns driving, navigating, and resting, staying on the go nearly all the time. They did blog about their journey on the Max Adventure website, where they told tales of harrowing border crossings, interesting encounters with locals along the way, and the blur of countries they passed through as they sped toward the finish line.

While Mac, Chris, and Steve were certainly hoping to break the speed record, they were also hoping to raise some money and awareness for the Help The Heroes organization, a charitable foundation that helps wounded British soldiers to recover and get on with their lives. The team hoped to raise £10,000 through their adventure to donate to this very worthy cause. As of this writing they’ve raised about a third of that.

Personally, I applaud the boys for setting the new record, but this certainly isn’t the way that I would like to make that same journey. Give me that same Land Rover and I’ll take six months to explore the route. Seems like the ultimate road trip to me!

[Photo credit: Max Adventure]

The Domesday project – or how we did computer mapping in 1986

by Scott Carmichael on

When Google launched its Street View map service in 2007, viewing maps as we knew it changed forever. The foundation for a lot of the thinking behind this handy tool was actually laid back in 1984 when the BBC, Acorn Computers, Logica and Philips teamed up to create the Domesday project.

The Domesday project was an ambitious idea, designed to create a computer based survey of the United Kingdom, using their 1981 census, maps, color photos and video – long before anyone had heard of the term “multimedia”.

In total, over one million people participated in creating the content. To browse the country, you accessed data off a Laserdisc, quite revolutionary for the time, especially since it stored a whopping 300MB – a lot of data when the average hard disk at the time was no larger than 20MB.

Controlling the Domesday system was done with a trackball, and users could select portions of the country, view photos and load video segments. The video even included some virtual reality features, another phrase nobody was using at the time, and long before virtual reality became a common term thanks to the 1992 movie “The Lawnmower Man”. Unlike current online mapping tools, the Domesday Project only displayed a couple of photos per mapped grid of the UK, but it was still more than anything anyone had ever done before.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the whole project is that it shows how vulnerable our data can be – in 2002, fears arose about the future of the Domesday Laserdiscs, and a project was started to transfer the content to a more reliable storage medium.

As fascinating overview of the technology and its challenges can be found here.

[Photo from Flickr/ljw]

Tarantula cocktail at the Langham London – yes, an actual tarantula

by Annie Scott on

It’s a Scorpion & Oven Baked Tarantula Tea Punch, to be exact. Happy Halloween, right?

Actually, it has nothing to do with Halloween. This unprecedentedly creepy cocktail is the result of the Courvoisier Spirit of Punch Masters competition this year, and was created by the Langham Hotel‘s very own Francesco Orefici and Alex Kratena. They decided to infuse the cognac with a real tarantula and scorpion. They won.

From their creepy recipe:

“Tarantula is baked in primitive fire heated oven. It is traditional and delicious snack, which if infused in spirits gives nice smoky, woody and tobacco notes. Scorpion, according to old legends, is known for healing properties as well as stimulating ones libido.”

This is starting to sound pretty good. They combine 50mL of the VSOP cognac infused with tarantula and scorpion with …

  • 25ml Poire William eaux de vie
  • 25ml Velvet Falernum
  • 25ml Freshly squeezed lemon juice
  • 1 dash Angostura Bitters
  • 1 dash Regans Orange bitters no.6
  • 50ml Sencha tea
  • 3 pcs allspice
  • 3 tbspoon Mandarin peel infused sugar

… and serve it to you like it’s totally normal. Who knew tarantulas and scorpions created tobacco notes? What are these creepy-crawlies up to on their breaks?

[Photo by mikebaird via Flickr.]

Al Qaeda Yemen connection suspected in cargo plane bomb scares

by Tom Johansmeyer on

The simultaneous bomb scares in Newark, Philadelphia and London are now being linked to al Qaeda activity, according to the latest reporting from CNN. On its live blog covering the suspicious item discoveries, CNN reports, “U.S. officials believe that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was behind the plot that caused a security scare at English and American airports on Friday.”

In Washington, a diplomat from Yemen has said the government there is opening a full investigation into the alleged bomb, adapted from a toner ink cartridge, that was discovered in the United Kingdom at East Midlands Airport.

Look for tighter security all around at airports in the United States, some of which, according to CNN, will be “visible and passengers should expect a mix of security techniques.”

[photo by redjar via Flickr]

Hotel death undiscovered for two weeks: do not disturb

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Be careful when you hang that “Do Not Disturb” sign from your hotel room doorknob. It may take people forever to find you. This is exactly what happened to Kieran Toman at the Hyde Park Towers Hotel just north of London. On July 9, 2010, he left that instruction on his door.

Unfortunately, the 39-year-old starved to death after doing so. His body, described by The Daily Mail as being in “an ’emaciated’ state,” wasn’t found until July 23, 2010. The staff was instructed not to enter without his permission, but the awful smell caused a maid to check out the cause.

Toman had booked a five-month stay at the spot, once home to Jimi Hendrix, but after those first two weeks, the remainder of his reservation was moot.

[Via Business Insider, photo by R.B. Boyer via Flickr]