The silhouette of the Eiffel Tower is the icon of Paris. It is familiar and definitive. This, however, may change as the top of the tower is to be reshaped in to the form pictured above. Yikes!

Serero Architects of Paris has won the competition to redesign the structure’s public viewing platform and reception areas. The winning design (above), which will be 276 metres (905ft) above the ground, will not require any permanent modification of the existing structure. It will double the capacity of the public viewing area on the tower’s top floor.

The new platform will be bolted onto the tower using a web of Kevlar, an extremely strong and lightweight carbon fibre used in the construction of racing cars and body armour. The new platform will use a cantilevered design similar to the way that an aircraft’s wings are attached to the fuselage.

What do you think of this change?

via The Guardian

In the model that researchers studied, transmissions from the defibrillator to the bedside monitor are not encrypted, which means someone intercepting the transmissions could retrieve such data as the patient’s birth date, medical ID number and, in some cases, Social Security number.

As the technology spreads to more medical devices, including pacemakers, spinal-cord stimulators and hearing implants – and as the range of the devices’ radio signals increase – the researchers predict patients’ data will face increasing risks.

While the chance of such an occurrence taking place may seem remote – it would require a quite nefarious individual’s desire to wreak individual havoc – why should this risk be deemed acceptable? After all, is that expensive to encrypt? Me thinks not.

To the uninitiated, the idea seems so strange — doggie discrimination? But among those in animal rescue circles, the phenomenon is commonplace enough to have earned its own name: “black dog syndrome.”

“There’s not a lot of that type of statistics on many aspects of sheltering,” says Kim Intino, the director of animal sheltering issues for the Humane Society of the United States. “But I think that every person that has worked in a shelter can attest that in shelters animals with black coats can be somewhat harder to adopt out — or to even get noticed.”

via pop candy

The differences between the groups aren’t great, but the results do go some way in explaining the Yahoo conundrum. Although a distance second in search, Yahoo has remained the number one traffic destination online ahead of Google, so you’d think with more traffic Yahoo would convert that traffic into similar returns to Google. But alas we know that not to be the case, and that would appear in part to be related to people using Yahoo not spending as much online and being in poorer demographic categories than Google users, providing a lower return per user.

via Smart Mobs

The controversial clause has been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbids them from making any political comment about countries staging the Olympic Games.

It is contained in a 32-page document that will be presented to all those who reach the qualifying standard and are chosen for the team.

From the moment they sign up, the competitors – likely to include the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips and world record holder Paula Radcliffe – will be effectively gagged from commenting on China’s politics, human rights abuses or illegal occupation of Tibet.

This is simply astounding.

A man who claims to have reduced his waste to nearly nothing out of concern for the environment now faces a lawsuit from San Carlos for canceling his garbage-collection service.

Eddie House, 53, says he was shocked when he was served with a lawsuit Sunday at his Cedar Street home.

The lawsuit, filed by San Carlos Deputy City Attorney Linda Noeske in San Mateo Superior Court on Jan. 22, seeks a permanent injunction forcing House to maintain garbage service. City officials are also seeking to recoup from House the costs of the lawsuit.

As reported in the Examiner. (via celsias)

Remember what the early web looked like? If you’ve forgotten, you could use Archive.org’s Wayback Machine to time-travel to 1996, when Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice and amateur web enthusiasts were still publishing “home pages.” Or you could roam today’s web, where designers are increasingly embracing the values and aesthetics of the Clinton-era internet.

This atavistic impulse is most apparent on the sites of a loose network of art geeks- including the programming ensemble Beige (www.post-data.org/beige), the artist collective Paper Rad (www.paperrad.org), and the web art club Nasty Nets (www.nastynets.com)-with a shared interest in reclaiming obsolete technologies. Their aesthetic, sometimes referred to as “dirt style,” is visually hyperactive and almost willfully antagonistic: a riot of animated GIFs, tiled backgrounds, underlined blue hyperlinks, images with borders, and old-school blink tags. Used now, the graphics evoke the noisy amateurism of the early web, but they’re also a rejection of today’s glossy, professional site design, which tends to efface the medium rather than celebrate it.

Why, we ask, is this happening?

But when used on purpose, Lialina observes, primitive sites can be especially successful in “sending a message to those who know”-broadcasting to other insiders an air of conceptual playfulness for artists, a DIY ethos for musicians, a deconstructed avant-garde aesthetic for fashion houses, or a stripped-down simplicity for designers. It’s fundamentally a message that communicates that these creators exist “outside the neutral palette of web design,” Lialina says.

I for one will not miss the marquee scrolling text of early Internet Explorer designed sites.

Al-Qaida’s media arm, Al-Sahab, announced in December that al-Zawahri would take questions from the public posted on Islamic militant websites and would respond “as soon as possible.”

More than 900 entries — many with multiple questions — were posted on the main Islamist website until the cutoff date of Jan. 16. After the deadline, the questions disappeared from that site and no answers have yet appeared.

One thing is clear from the questions: Self-proclaimed al-Qaeda supporters are as much in the dark about the terror network’s operations and intentions as Western analysts and intelligence agencies.

The New York Observer reported recently that erstwhile heartthrob Val Kilmer is “shopping” for labels to release his album of original recordings. Apparently titled Val Kilmer: Sessions With Mick—as in Val’s pal and partner-in-musical-crime Mick Rossi, not Jones or Jagger or even Fleetwood—the newspaper warns the song cycle “run[s] the gamut from foot-stompin’ rock to moody, guttural ballads,” and even includes a Christmas ditty.

But the Observer isn’t the first to weigh in on this development. Inexplicably, back in October The Solano Tempest posted a review, complete with a (similarly inexplicable) photo of the disc itself. This can only mean that distributing promo CDs exclusively to community colleges is the new pay-what-you-want.

Or maybe it means that even his publicist can’t get behind lyrics like these, via the Observer: “I’ve been growing sideways / I’ve been growing thin / I’ve been a zombie all day / I’ve been preventing sin / Noobadaba dootoo / Noobadaba dootoo.”

See Kilmer’s musical myspace page here.