#sklender

Another way of summing up George Carlin's brilliant take on us.

Flare is a Mac application by the talented people at Iconfactory. It’s available on the App Store.

The best way I can describe Flare is that it has the ability to turn throwaway photos into keepers through the use of Presets and editing. And it’s got a beautiful Mac interface to boot.

Here are 4 free presets to add to your collection:

Original photo

A Grainy B&W World

The Gods in Stained Glass

An Old Shoebox of Memories

A More Vibrant World

Vol. 1 is a great movie.

We all experience the Coriolis effect, whether watching water swirl counter-clockwise down a drain in the Northern or clockwise in the Southern Hemispheres. Big ass navy ships have to take the effect into account when they lob things the size of VW Beetles  at unfortunate spots miles away. Take into consideration the size of the earth —  24,901.55 miles (or 40,075.16 kilometers) at the equator — and you end up with a pretty big place. But you already knew that there was plenty of room to move about. I bring this up because I was recently in Ecuador and the tour had us stopping at the outdoor equator museum. “Oh joy,” I thought. “How exciting can a You Are Here sign be?” Turns out the equator is without a doubt the strangest damn place.

The actual line is a little anticlimactic, as shown in the picture. It’s just a four-inch red stripe. Yay! I have one foot in the North, the other in the South, and Big Jim & the Twins are hanging down on the line. But then it got weird. The first proof was a learning station that proved that the red line was not a mere guess but the actual equatorial line: a portable, water-filled basin straddled the line with the plugged sink hole directly in the center. “What,” asked the guide, “do you think will happen when the plug is pulled.” “It’ll go straight down,” I said. And so it did. Hand clap to me for remembering 6th grade science. He then picked up the basin and moved it five feet to the North. “Now what will happen?” 25,000 miles in circumference, I thought. That’s pretty elfin’ big. “It’ll ever so slightly circle counter-clockwise when you pull the plug.” He smiled as I smugly fell right into the trap. He reached down and pulled the plug. Almost immediately, a full-on counter-clockwise vortex formed, as strong as any bathtub I’ve seen thousands of miles away to the North. WTF? I thought. The Earth is freaking huge and he simply moved it five feet! And just to seal the deal, he moved the basin five feet to the South of the painted red line and another full vortex of water was sucked down spinning the other direction. “All right,” I thought, “the red line is the real deal.” The next station was a stone pillar erected directly on the line. A flat area on the East and West sides had a nail each driven into a base of wood, so the head was perfectly flat over the red line. Because there is no Coriolis effect on this spot, its pretty much the only time you can ever balance an egg standing up on the head of a nail. And with a practiced hand, the guide balanced the egg in a few seconds flat.

OK, I get that. Difficult to still do, but doable. The next station was a physical test that anyone can do. He had me standing directly on the line with one foot in front of the other along the equatorial line.