Everyone needs a vacation every once in a while. It’s healthy and you should take one if you haven’t this year. Beach? Sure. Europe? Go for it. Hell, pitch a tent in your own backyard and don’t talk to anyone for a weekend if that’s all you can manage. But a vacation isn’t a vacation unless you really really get away from the minutiae of your everyday existence. Question is, how do you do that without also stripping out the conveniences of technology?
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Ben Huh is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cheezburger. He will be speaking at Expand NYC this November.
Unidentified internet humor company founder planking during a flight.
Plenty of people travel more miles than I do, but in 2012, I spent 171 days on the road. 2013 so far? 120 days. When I started Cheezburger, I didn’t expect to travel this much, but my role has increasingly become chief evangelist, recruiter and promoter.
Technology’s impact on travel can be felt every step of the way, starting with weight-saving undergarments to the constellation of GPS satellites we take for granted watching over us. Everyone is used to complaining about air travel: Food is terrible (if there is any); the TSA is getting worse; seats feel smaller; we’ve suffered a string of computer-system-generated delays; horrific crash photos make the rounds on social media like wildfire; and airlines are charging fees, fees, everywhere.
Having traveled intensively pre- and post-9/11, the air-travel experience has actually gotten much better. Yet we live by the Louis C.K. Rule: Everything’s amazing, and nobody is happy. Let me count the ways from front door to hotel door.
Filed under: Transportation
How bad is the air pollution in Hong Kong? This bad: tourists who want to take photos of family and friends with the coastal city’s famous skyline have been forced to use fake backdrops featuring the skyline captured on a rare, pollution-free sunny day.
Sure, we would all love to travel around the world and do stuff
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It goes without saying that modern methods of travel—planes, trains, and automobiles—are a hell of a lot better than ye olde horse and buggy days, but convenience has a cost. Many hours of remaining sedentary exact a serious tax on your body. While nothing you do can make a long trip a zero-impact affair, there are some things you can do to mitigate the stresses you put on your physique.
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One of the most tedious parts of air travel is waiting for your bag to arrive on the luggage carousel after a long flight. But in Japan, the wait is far more bearable because the luggage carousels are covered in fun 3D advertisements humorously selling you everything from sushi to the local produce. So here’s yet another reason to complain about the airports in the US.
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Elon Musk is into transportation, whether it’s an electric car or a spaceship. Today, he detailed a plan to revolutionize a portion of public transit. It’s called the Hyperloop, and it’s meant to get folks from SF to LA (or any two cities less than 900 miles apart) in 30 minutes seated in aluminum pods that are hurtled to and fro at 800 miles an hour in a pair of steel tubes. To keep things safe, pods will be spaced five miles apart so that they can stop without running into each other, which means a total of 70 pods could operate simultaneously.
Of course, the real question is how to get the pods moving at those speeds? One main issue with such transport is wind resistance (and associated friction) that increases as the speed of the pods inside the tube escalate. Naturally, one could operate the tubes in a complete vacuum to eliminate the problem, but keeping such a system free of air would be difficult over such long distances. Instead, the proposed Hyperloop system works as a low air pressure environment that is easily maintained with standard commercial compressors. Additionally, “an electric compressor fan on the nose of the pod that actively transfers high pressure air from the front to the rear of the vessel” is there to relieve what air does build up at the front. This compressor fan would also generate an air bearing around the pod to keep it suspended in the middle of the tube, much as an air hockey table suspends a plastic puck. As for power? Well, that comes from external linear electric motors positioned every 70 miles to keep the pods humming along at subsonic speeds.
Filed under: Transportation, Science
Source: SpaceX
I love traveling. Who doesn’t? What I don’t love as much, though, is how I usually go over the budget that I had initially set for myself. Apparently, this is a pretty common problem that most of my travel buddies share.
It’s easy to forget (or ignore) your budget when you’re out and about in a new city. Where can I buy this? Where else can I experience this?, you might think, before handing over your credit card. The full extent of how much you spent usually hits you when you’re back home.
Don’t let this happen to you again. It’s easy to get sidetracked when you’re on vacation, but a tool called TripSaver might just be the thing you need to budget better.
It’s essentially a travel expense tracker that features a neat and easy-to-use layout. I especially like the counter that shows just how far or how close you already are to spending your daily limit.
All you have to do is fire the app up and enter any expenses you incurred throughout the day. The app draws up attractive pie and bar graphs of your spending so you can gauge your spending quickly and easily.
The TripSaver app is currently up for funding on Kickstarter, where a minimum pledge of $1 gives you access to the app before its release (and at half of its $1.99 retail price). TripSaver has already surpassed its funding goal, so it should definitely be released.
Smartphones are everywhere. We not only hear this (often with a negative connotation) in our everyday lives, but we witness it, too. It doesn’t matter where you go: to dinner, to the theater, to the bus stop, to the checkout line. It seems every hand holds a smartphone, and every eye is perpetually fixated upon […]
This is insane. Well, only insane because I’m insanely jealous of amazing world crusader Graham Hughes. Hughes traveled to all 201 countries in the world plus 15 assorted territories without even flying. Even better, Hughes recorded a quick video of every single country he visited so we can all see what it’s like to truly travel the entire world in 4 minutes.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
