Baltimore

Having decided the city needs more public art, Baltimore is currently installing whimsical crosswalks around the city. This giant zipper by artist Paul Bertholet and a hopscotch-inspired piece by Graham Coreil-Allen are already up, and two more creative crosswalks are on the way. Any interesting crosswalks in your town? Drop some pics in the comments.…

Would Edgar Allan Poe have made a great astronaut, or the greatest astronaut?

“The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true. In space.” — Edgar Allan Poe (Except that last bit about space. That was us. But that’s what he probably meant, so just go with…

Mother Arrested After Not Wanting Her Daughter to Get Groped By the TSA

A mother and daughter’s trip was put on major hold this past Saturday after the mom, 41-year-old Andrea Fornella Abbott, was arrested for throwing a fit with the TSA. Given the organization’s track record for “inspecting” kids, wouldn’t you? https://gizmodo.com/tsa-harasses-9-yo-boy-and-other-train-passengers-after-5768805 Abbott and her daughter were trying to get up to Baltimore from Nashville International Airport…

Most Depressing WiFi Hotspots in Baltimore, MD

Baltimore is known as many names—Charm City, The City That Reads, The Greatest City in the World, That Place from The Wire—but when I lived there for a few years, I sure never remembered the awesome WiFi. -SB Stingray Tank at the Baltimore Aquarium Aquarium volunteers have discerned that organisms accessing WiFi from within the…

Baltimore college is schooling undergraduates in the undead

This semester the University of Baltimore is offering English 333, a.k.a. the pop history of zombies. Sadly, Spam and fruit cocktail hoarding does not appear to be on the syllabus. The class is taught by Arnold Blumberg, the curator of Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore. Here’s a snapshot of the curriculum: Students will watch 16…

Computer Predicts Prisoners’ Chances of Murdering Again

A university professor has invented a computer program with crystal ball powers, only its channel is tuned purely to predicting the probability of murders—specifically, if inmates at a Pennsylvanian prison will ever kill again. Richard Berk, the University of Pennsylvania professor, has successfully placed it in the probation departments of Philadelphia and Baltimore police departments,…

Rainbow Trapped for First Time, Using Convex Lens and Glass

Baltimore citizens aren’t just dealing drugs and installing wiretaps, some of them are busy using convex lenses to trap rainbows, which could be put to good use with optical computing—making hardware faster! Stronger! More powerful! And pretty on the inside. University professors coated one side of a 4.5 millimetre diameter lens with a 30 nanometre…

Sprint Dual U300 Modem Will Connect to Both EVDO and WiMax

Sprint’s partnership with WiMax provider ClearWire looks to be bearing some hardware fruit, with the release of the first dongle to combine 3G cellular and 4G capabilities. https://gizmodo.com/sprint-and-clearwire-marriage-official-wimax-network-b-5100394 The modem, called the U300, will be first available to customers of the Sprint/Clearwire “Clear” WiMax network in Baltimore, where their pilot program is under way. The…

Acer 14-inch, 16-inch Aspires Are Built for WiMAX

Now that the Baltimore’s XOHM network is up and running, companies are scrambling to release WiMAX-enabled notebooks to capitalize on faster-than-EVDO internet. One of the first out the door is Acer, with two new WiMAX sporting Aspires. The Aspire 4930 comes with a 14.1-inch 1280×800 resolution CrystalBrite screen, 3GB RAM, a 320GB hard drive, a…

Xohm Tested Out in Baltimore: Beats EVDO, Unsurprisingly

Laptopmag went ahead and tested out Xohm WiMax goodness, now that it’s live in Baltimore. They jammed an ExpressCard Xohm into a Sony Vaio laptop, and compared it to a Kyocera EVDO card running on Verizon, at a spot where both signals were strong. The conclusion? Xohm beats EVDO for speed when doing intensive downloading,…

Sprint XOHM WiMax Quietly Goes Live In Baltimore

Just over a week ago the word was that Baltimore, the first city in a pilot program for the new wireless tech, might not see WiMax until October. With a minimal announcement and little fanfare, though, it looks like the service has gone live in select parts of the city. The pricing options are interesting…

The Public Transit Projects that Should Have Been

Urban history is littered with the dead bodies of scrapped public transit projects. When eager commuters and car companies turned the automobile into the most popular form of transit in the world in the twentieth century, many cities set aside plans for expanding their public transit systems, such as the electric tram system planned for…

Sprint’s XOHM WiMax Service Launching Soon?

According to Phone Scoop, residents of Chicago, Baltimore and DC will be able to get online via Sprint’s XOHM WiMax initiative some time in the next few days. It’s going to be a soft launch, with not too much promotion, with an official wide launch in the second quarter of 2008. Chicago and Baltimore are…

Baltimore Teaches Streetlight Cameras to Shout At, Take Pictures of Anything That Moves

Bold thievery runs rampant in the streets of Baltimore, where 136 streetlights have been stolen in the past few months. How to deal with this larceny? That’s easy, do something indiscriminate and stupid. Train five solar-powered cameras on the remaining streetlights, and teach those cameras to cry out when they see anything moving around them.…