Follow the Signs
Camera geeks are getting excited over some mysterious cards that have been showing up in their mailboxes. First I'll explain what's on the cards and then I'll explain what people are surmising, just because it'll be funnier that way. The first card was all black, with the number "8" on one side inside a burst of yellow, with the words "I am" on the back. The next day, a similar card with the number "7" was mailed out, with the words "I am fun" on the back. Now for the theories: yellow and black being Nikon's colors, people are thinking that this might be some sort of cloak and dagger lead up to the unveiling of Nikon's first micro four thirds camera, or perhaps NIkon's rumored EVIL line of gear. The could be reading into the cards a little too much, but when you extend the daily countdown it ends on March 8, the same day a Nikon press event is scheduled in the UK. At least this rumor has a definite expiration date. [Engadget]

Lifting Spirits
There's only one thing that's better than a cat elevator, and that's a cat elevator that is entirely operated by the cat itself. Though you have to wonder if this type of cat-tech retards the development of their natural abilities to leap from crazy heights and not be injured. Because if anything that's a super power we need to be cultivating, not discouraging. [Neatorama]

DoubtsCast
We'd love for a Mitsumi's new TV-enhancing miracle chip to be real, but we find it very hard to believe that any chip is improving LCD black levels as well as is shown in this photograph. The company claims they hope to commercialize the chip this year, but I wouldn't hold your breath—or hold on to your crappy LCD TV—waiting for it. [CrunchGear]

Punk'd
What was Eric Schmidt up to back in 1986, before he became the overlord of the internet-age empire we know today as Google? Getting pranked by his employees, of course. For April Fools Day '86, his Sun Microsystems underlings put a Volkswagen Beetle in his office, to which the bespectacled Schmidt probably responded by slapping his knee and snorting out a "Gee golly!" In any event, the video is a nice trip back to the mid-80s, a time before pranks were invariably cruel and back when the economy was so good that extra cars were always just kicking waiting to be disassembled and reassembled in someone's office. Ah, sweet nostalgia. [TechCrunch]

Light On Ideas
I love LEDs and I love cool furniture design, but this LED table sort of makes my blood boil. It costs $24,000. It shows just about zero imagination when it comes to implementing the lights. It has to be plugged in at all times. A waste of money, a waste of energy, a waste of LEDs! Did I mention it costs $24,000? Forget that noise, just make your own. [UberGizmo]

Pew Pew
A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project revealed that more Americans get their news from the internet than from print media. No surprise there—if anything it's surprising it didn't happen sooner—and the internet is still behind national and local TV when it comes to how Americans stay up to date, so don't get too worried about the internet subsuming everything in it's path. Not yet anyway. Still, this is one step closer to the future we envision in which Gizmodo is the nation's primary source for all news, gadget and otherwise. (One surprising bit from the study: 21% of internet news-gatherers get their information from a single site. So, seriously, get ready for the Gizmodo News Network.) [Ars Technica]

Print Rules
Five huge print publishers—Time and Conde Nast among them—have banded together on a $90 million crusade to remind us why magazines rock so much and why we should shell out $3, $4, $5, $6 a month to buy them. "We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines," reads one of the campaign's ads that's going to run in ESPN The Magazine. Sure, whatever, we might be swimming in magazines, but the magazines themselves are drowning. Drowning so bad that they don't know which way is up and it seems like a good idea to throw tens of millions of dollars into a lame ad campaign. Drowning so bad that they think it's a good idea to try to put their customers' internet consumption and magazine consumption at odds when they could be working on models that combined the two and made everyone happy. Drowning so bad that they're trying to convince people that growing 11% over the last 12 years since Google came on the scene is some kind of great accomplishment. Just make sure the New Yorker looks really good on the iPad and we'll forget this campaign ever happened, OK? [WSJ]

Screen Shots Fired
Some fat-fingered Dell employee accidentally made a typo when entering a new Ubuntu netbook into the system, resulting in this price of $100,278. That's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is this particular type of fuck-up—the accidental astronomical price—and if we will find anything quite so amusing. I've heard some people say that the Aristocrats is the funniest joke ever told, but surely the accidental astronomical price is better. Knock knock. Who's there? A hundred thousand dollar. A hundred thousand dollar what? A hundred thousand dollar netbook from Dell. Oh that's good! OK, maybe that's going too far—I like a good goofy pricing error now and again—but the internet is treasure trove of typos. Maybe it's time for us to branch out. [CrunchGear]

An assortment of winches, dollies, and something not unlike courage helped these workers send the car on its 1394-foot journey up the Shanghai World Financial Center, leading to this set of photos that looks more like a behind-the-scenes diary for a set in Die Hard V: Die Die Die Die Die than preparations for a trade show. Check the full gallery here. [WCF via Jalopnik]

[Space Elevator Blog]

• As mentioned above, the Door Close button is there mostly to give passengers the illusion of control. In elevators built since the early '90s. The button is only enabled in emergency situations with a key held by an authority.
• The only known occurence of an elevator car free falling due to a snapped cable (barring fire or structural collapse), was in 1945. A B25 Bomber crashed into the Empire State Building, severing the cables of two elevators. The elevator car on the 75th floor had a woman on it, but she survived due to the 1000 feet of coiled cable of fallen cable below, which lessened the impact.
• Elevators are twenty times safer than escalators. There are twenty times more elevators than escalators, but only 1/3 more accidents.
• Elevators are also safer than cars. An average of 26 people die in elevators each year in the U.S. There are 26 car deaths every five hours.
• Most people who die in elevators are elevator technicians.
• The Otis Elevator Company carries the equivalent of the world's population in their elevators every five days.
• The New York Marriott was the first to introduce a smart elevator system that assigned passengers to elevators depending on what floor they were heading to.
• Elevators used to require a two-man dispatcher/operator team to function. The advent of navigational buttons rendered those jobs obsolete.
• The area required for personal space is 2.3 feet. The average amount on elevators is generally 2 feet.
• Elevator hatches are generally bolted shut for safety reasons. In times of elevator crisis, the safest place is inside the elevator.
• The myth about jumping just before impact in a falling elevator is just that — myth. You can't jump fast enough to counteract the speed of falling. And you wouldn't know when to jump.
• Due to the laws of physics, elevators can't be any taller than 1700 feet. Hoist ropes become too heavy after that, snapping at 3200 feet.
• 
  

And as an interesting closing note, Nicholas White, the man trapped in the elevator, received a low six-figure settlement after filing a $25 million lawsuit against the building. But in the process, he lost his job, his money and his apartment. He is now unemployed. [The New Yorker]

White got into elevator car 30 to return to his office in the McGraw-Hill building on Sixth Avenue in New York. It was an express elevator, designed for traffic efficiency, with no stops below the 30th floor, and it jammed around the 13th late on a Friday night. He tried the intercom, sounded the alarm, tried to prize the doors apart and use the escape hatch (you're thinking about Speed now, aren't you?) but to no avail.

Faced with a blind wall behind the doors, no answer to the alarm or shouting and a locked hatch, he got desperate then depressed. He smoked the rest of his cigs, and worried about dehydration. Of course, with all the modern safety features like multiple hoist-ropes and speed brakes he wasn't going to plummet to his death. He was just stuck in a box barely big enough to lie down in. Rescue finally came 41 hours later, and no one knows why the jam happened.

After getting out, White never returned to another day of work. He filed lawsuits, settled for barely 6 figures, and lost his job, savings and apartment. Some would say the event ruined his life, to no fault of his own. He stepped in the elevator a man, and left on a trajectory towards shambles.

Eight different security guards failed to spot him on the camera. Wonder what would happen in a similar situation in the Burj Dubai with it's 46 separate elevators: two being double-deckers that will go the whole 156 floors? Probably a quicker rescue, we suspect.

Head over to the New Yorker to check out the full story and the chilling video: next time you're in an elevator, particularly one of those brand new "buttonless" ones, you'll remember it! [New Yorker]

If this elevator were any faster, they'd have to strap you into a special couch like those used on the space shuttle. Going down? By the time you get to the ground from the 89th floor, your stomach will still be waiting at the top. [Sci Fi Tech]

[Deputy Dog via Spulch]

Most people catch on pretty quickly. Just a month after the Hearst Tower opened, some Hearst executives said they were forgetting to push buttons in old-fashioned elevators. "My problem has become that I keep forgetting to press buttons in the elevator in my apartment building, so as I tap tap tap on my BlackBerry, I realize minutes later that the elevator hasn't moved," says Atoosa Rubenstein, the departing editor in chief of Hearst's Seventeen magazine.

Besides being confusing to old people, the elevators cut wait time from 60 to 90 seconds down to 20 to 25 seconds in a busy hotel. – Jason Chen

Buttonless elevators have their ups and downs [NWFdailyNews via Boing Boing]

This is an odd piece of news, but Fujitec America has announced a new elevator system that it says can ease the bottlenecks of people waiting in lobbies and other "high-traffic areas." Called the Destination Floor Guidance System, it's actually working right now in the Metropolitan Park West Tower in downtown Seattle, and is meant to make your elevator trip faster by grouping people together who are going to the same floors. So basically, there are self-standing and wall-mounted kiosks with touch screens in common waiting areas and you just touch the screen to tell the system where you're going. A message will then appear to tell you which car to ride. Predictive logic software is also installed and should lead the elevators to start stopping more frequently at the floors which get the most traffic. Next up is the New York Times building in Manhattan. Good times folks, good times.

Fujitec eases bottlenecks [Theenquirer]

Tokyo to get world's first 'maglev' elevator [CNN]