The Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum has landed a NASA space shuttle!

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will announce later Tuesday that the prototype Enterprise shuttle has been awarded to the Intrepid, sources said.

The decision follows months of aggressive lobbying from Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.

Bolden, a four-time astronaut and retired Marine major general, will also announce where the retiring Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour shuttles will go on display Tuesday afternoon.

The Intrepid plans to house the shuttle in a glass enclosure – and hopes that the exhibit will bring in more than 1 million visitors. NASA estimates the cost of preparing and delivering the shuttles at $42 million each – cash the Intrepid hopes to raise through fund-raising efforts. The shuttles are slated to be delivered sometime next year.

The Enterprise shuttle was a test model that flew, but never orbited space. Built in 1976, the Enterprise was initially set to be named the Constitution. Star Trek fans inundated then-President Gerald Ford, pleading for a change to the Enterprise.
Ford, who served aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise supply ship during World War II, never mentioned the Trekkie effort in overriding NASA officials.

The Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum on the Hudson’s Pier 86 was up against tough competition from 20 other cities and institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

But "as the cultural and economic capital of our nation, New York City has the right stuff to best exhibit the shuttle," Gillibrand said.

via the NY Daily News

While audiences at Broadway‘s “West Side Story” thrill to the on-stage drama, musicians in the orchestra pit are fighting a battle every bit as vicious as the Sharks-Jets rivalry.

This is gang warfare of a high-minded sort, pitting some of New York’s best live musicians against a synthesizer they fear will usurp the job of playing Leonard Bernstein‘s pulsating score.

Sophisticated synthesizers and computer-manipulated recordings are increasingly taking over orchestras. Sounding almost like real players, while costing much less, they’re especially popular with provincial or touring companies.

But until mid-July — when “West Side Story’s” producers announced that a synthesizer was replacing three live violinists and two cellists, or half the orchestra’s string section — staff violinist Paul Woodiel thought that at least the classics would be immune to the trend.

“It was the last straw for me,” Woodiel told AFP.

“I was a student and a friend of Leonard Bernstein and it’s almost certain he wouldn’t have allowed this. This isn’t dinner theater, it’s not Las Vegas. It’s Broadway and Leonard Bernstein was the greatest American musician.”

Woodiel’s own job was spared, but he caused a stir through the tight-knit Broadway world with a New York Times piece denouncing the “inert, artificial” synthesizer invasion.

The producers did not respond to AFP requests to be interviewed.

Synthesizers have in fact been around for decades, notably in pop music. What’s changing is the ability of the machines to enter the far more sophisticated domain of classical orchestras.

“The computer gives you so much more power now. There’s ridiculous stuff,” says Mike Levine, editor of Electronic Musician Magazine.

There are computer programs able to read and play back music scores — a boon to composers who can now hear their work as they write — and software allowing conductors to control the tempo of the machine, in the same way that they direct live players.

“It has gotten very, very good with something like drums and bass and strings,” Levine said. “With piano they can model almost anything.”

Levine said the growing use of synthesizers is positive for basement bands and other music industry start-ups, but a menace to jobs in large, labor-intensive ensembles like orchestras.

“It’s all about money and the producers want to make as much money as possible,” Levine said. “They always did.”

Critics see synthesizers as little better than some barbarian force trampling the classical music landscape.

But one virtual music pioneer, Paul Henry Smith of the Fauxharmonic Orchestra, says the technology will only improve and in any case cannot be stopped.

Smith’s system uses so-called digital sampling, feeding from a store of more than two million individual notes recorded in an almost endless variety of tones and styles. “It’s kind of insane,” he says.

“We don’t quite know what’s going to happen with this, but computer technology is just so malleable that the likelihood of it going away is probably nil.”

Like many new technologies, virtual music poses growing ethical questions.

New York Post arts writer Barbara Hoffman says using a synthesizer in “West Side Story” amounts to cheating theater-goers.

“When you pay over 100 dollars a ticket you should hear real music the way Leonard Bernstein intended it,” she said. “Something as sacred as that score, one of the most beautiful scores ever written — it’s blasphemous.”

But it remains unclear whether audiences around the country realize what’s going on, or necessarily care.

Sarah Franklin, a talented 24-year-old violinist, joined a five-month North America tour for a revival of the musical “Camelot” with an orchestra of just four people.

“There was me on the violin, one cello, one French horn and a conductor with a computer,” she said. The computer, using a software called Notion, played the rest of the semi-virtual orchestra.

Frequently the program crashed, abruptly leaving the three live musicians to play by themselves. But despite the glitches, most audience members were none the wiser, Franklin said.

“When people saw us down in the pit afterwards, they’d say, ‘It sounded like there were so many more of you!’”

The musicians would wriggle out of the embarrassing situation by pretending that the rest of their colleagues had quickly left the theater.

“We got fed up with explaining and we didn’t want to ruin it for them. They didn’t need to know,” Franklin said.

True aficionados can immediately tell the difference between real and manufactured music.

Woodiel compares playing alongside a synthesizer to “making love with a corpse.”

Even Smith readily concedes that today’s virtual instruments cannot match live string players “by a long shot.”

But advocates argue that axing salaried musicians in favor of a machine during today’s economic uncertainty can extend the life of a flagging production, thereby saving many other jobs.

Smith, who studied with Bernstein and researched digital sound at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the most important benefits are subtle.

He sees virtual orchestra programs as a new instrument in their own right, as well as a tool for composers to “get their ideas into sound” and bring new material to human orchestras — thereby creating work.

“It’s not always a bad boy,” Smith said. “It’s a branching out and expanding of possibilities.”

Peter Reit, who plays French horn in Broadway’s “Phantom of the Opera” — where two strings players have been replaced by a synthesizer — has a more gloomy prognosis in what he calls the “corporate” music landscape.

“You get the feeling that if they had their way, ideally, they would have an entire virtual orchestra,” he said.

“They would have all of us replaced with one electronic instrument, then feed that to the public and make more money.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – What’s the value of a pint of beer? Let the market decide, says a new restaurant in Manhattan where prices for food and beverages will fluctuate like stock prices in increments according to demand.

The Exchange Bar & Grill, set amid the bustling shops and pubs of the Grammercy Park neighborhood, is replete with a ticker tape flashing menu prices in red lettering as demand forces them to fluctuate.

Customers can move prices for all beverages and bar snacks such as hot wings ($7 for 6 pieces) or fried calamari ($9). The prices will fluctuate in $.25 cent increments, but will most likely plateau at a $2 change in either direction.

A glass of Guinness starts at $6 but could be pushed to a high of $8 or a low of $4, depending on popularity.

So if one drink is in heavy demand, its price will rise, causing the cost of other equivalent drinks to drop. A rush on a particular beer would increase its price, and cause other beers to drop.

The Exchange Bar & Grill has a long bar facing the ticker tape — and flat screen televisions — as well as a few tables in the back where patrons can eat in greater comfort.

Restaurants in New York and across America have had a tough year because consumers have slashed discretionary spending in a tough economic climate. New York has about 23,000 restaurants, with about 4,400 opening each year according to the city’s Department of Health, which tracks establishment licenses.

NEW YORK — State-of-the-art new rides including a roller coaster and a pendulum will open this summer at Coney Island to jump-start the resurgence of the famed Brooklyn amusement park, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday.

"Coney Island is coming back, big time," Bloomberg said at a news conference near the boardwalk where the decades-old Astroland rides were dismantled in 2008.

The new rides are being created by Zamperla, the world’s leading manufacturer of mechanical rides, based in Altavilla Vicentina, Italy.

Luna Park at Coney Island will open on Memorial Day weekend with 19 rides. Among them will be the Air Race, which sends riders swinging and soaring around a control tower. It will be the ride’s global debut.

Also promised are games, live entertainment, and concessions including Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand, which opened in 1916, pioneering America’s concept of fast food.

By the summer of 2011, Scream Zone at Coney Island will offer two roller coasters, go-carts and a human slingshot launching people more than 200 feet into the air.

Central Amusement International of Parsippany, N.J., is investing about $30 million to build and operate the park. The company signed a 10-year lease for about 6 acres of land including the former Astroland site, paying the city $1 million plus part of gross receipts.

"We will have rides that will flip you, turn you, launch you, drop you, splash you and make the mayor want to lose his lunch," said David Galst, a CAI spokesman.

Not all of Coney Island’s old amusements were scrapped.

The 1920s Cyclone roller coaster is landmarked, as is Deno’s Wonder Wheel. Both will continue to be operated by their current management.

Deno Vourderis, whose family owns the Wonder Wheel, said the Ferris wheel that opened in 1920 will be updated with solar panels on its cars and retrofitted with a lighting configuration resembling the original one.

The city bought 6.9 acres of Coney Island property in November from developer Joe Sitt for $95.6 million.

That followed years of wrangling between the city and Sitt, whose vision for Coney Island was not in line with Bloomberg’s.

Sitt, who still owns about as many Coney Island acres as the city, released a statement Tuesday saying his firm is "beyond pleased" by plans for this summer and is "looking forward to … working shoulder to shoulder with the city."

The mayor, who won a third term in November, has touted the renewal of Brooklyn beachfront as part of his political and economic agenda.

"Coney Island remains one of the most known and beloved neighborhoods around the world, but for decades its famed amusement park has dwindled to just a tiny fraction of what it once was," the mayor said.

Once dubbed the People’s Playground, the peninsula on the Atlantic Ocean drew working-class Americans for more than a century with its tacky splendor and low-cost fun.

But in recent decades, while visitors crowded the boardwalk, scarfing down fast food and letting out screams on thrill rides, life for many of Coney Island’s 65,000 residents had become a drug-fueled hell amid a double-digit unemployment rate, crumbling housing and a skyrocketing crime rate.

Seth W. Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corp. that spearheaded the Coney Island project, said he expects this summer’s activities to reverse "years of decline and disinvestment."

Plans are in place to turn the run-down beachfront into a 27-acre, year-round amusement and entertainment district with restaurants, movie theaters, retail stores and hotels aimed at tourists.

Officials said the park will create 330 jobs by 2011, with emphasis on local hiring. In coming years, the rest of the revival is expected to generate more than 25,000 construction jobs and 6,000 permanent ones, along with billions of dollars in economic activity.

The city has promised to invest about $6.5 million toward improving the neighborhood’s rotting infrastructure in preparation for building more than 5,000 housing units, including 900 affordable ones.

The May opening of Luna Park is to be toasted with a new beer called the Coney Island Luna Lager, made by the San Francisco-based Shmaltz Brewing Co.

City Councilman Domenic Recchia, who represents Coney Island, called the renewal "a dream come true."

NEW YORK (AFP) – New Yorkers are used to fighting each other for space, but there may be a new contender in town according to a Rockefeller study that appears to have uncovered a new species of cockroach.

“The cockroach is genetically modified. Species don’t differ more than one percent, this cockroach is four percent different, which suggests it is a new species of cockroach,” Professor Mark Stoeckle, an expert on genomics and DNA barcoding at Rockefeller University, told AFP.

“We think that the museums of natural history in Paris or New York could be interested.”

The previously-unidentified creepy-crawly was uncovered as part of a project undertaken by two high-school students, Brenda Tan, 17, and Matt Cost, 18, under Stoeckle’s supervision.

In their roles as “DNAHouse investigators,” the pair trawled New York apartments, stores and street, collecting 217 specimens between November 2008 and March 2009.

They took samples from supermarket food, the remains of an insect found in a box of fruit, a feather from a duster, dried dung and a cockroach and matched DNA sequences using the Barcode of Life Database and GenBank.

The American Museum of Natural History laboratory identified 170 genetic codes, leading the researchers to identify 95 different animal species, including some that were unexpected.

“A feather from a duster yielded ostrich DNA. A delicacy labeled ‘sturgeon caviar’ instead turned out to be from the strange-looking paddlefish. A popular Asian snack was revealed as giant flying squid. Bison DNA was found in a dog biscuit,” the pair wrote on the Rockefeller University website.

In fact, they found that 16 percent of food items were mislabeled, including cheeses labeled sheep’s milk that were actually made of cow’s milk, a potentially dangerous labeling error for those with allergies.

But perhaps the biggest surprise for the researchers was the discovery of “a genetically distinct ‘mystery’ cockroach that might be a new species.”

“By appearance it looks like the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) but it is genetically different from other American cockroaches in the databases,” the researchers said.

Native New Yorkers were a tad confused today when they learned that Broadway was shut down between 42nd Street and 47th Street over the long weekend. A new traffic pattern was put in place and a huge number of lawn chairs were placed to give Times Square tourists a place to sit.

Here are some neat HDR shots (mostly) that I took at Chelsea Market in NYC:

[flickr album=72157617864623406 num=30 size=Thumbnail]

Previously on C.S.I… a man found an actual card skimmer in the wild, in the flesh. Today, Gizmodo reader Sean became the card skimmer/PIN camera’s latest almost-victim. Where? Chase Bank in Manhattan, East Village.

Sean Seibel was inside a local Chase bank where he inserted his ATM card into one of two side-by-side automatic teller machines. When the machine told him it could not read his card, it took him a bit of jiggling to get his card back. He tried it a couple more times and got the same results. Before trying the other machine, he inspected the slot of the current ATM he was using and realized that it had a false plastic cover attached to the slot. The amazing thing about the cover was that the translucent green plastic matched the card reader slot perfectly, meaning that it was made specifically for Chase ATMs. After snapping a few photos with his iPhone, he alerted the branch manager and explained what happened.

As he was leaving, Seibel remembered reading about card skimmers having small cameras in the proximity in order to read PIN pad activity, so naturally, he went back to the ATM to inspect, which is where he found an extra mirror attached to the vandalized machine that the other ATMs didn’t have. Drilled into the mirror was a tiny pinhole with a camera inside, directed at the PIN pad. Seibel alerted the branch manager again and asked Chase why they hadn’t inspected the ATM after he had warned them the first time. Chase honestly replied that they hadn’t thought of it because they had never encountered that sort of thing before.

From the crazy amounts of feedback we received last night after we posted the first story, it seems that card skimmers are a common crime everywhere from Thailand to Mexico. But actually hearing about it happening to our very own readers here in America makes us want to help get the word out. Seibel says it best: "Take this as a warning and please inspect every ATM machine you use, no matter how secure you think the environment is."

See the full article at Gizmodo.

The Great White Way is on the fast track to becoming a pedestrian mall.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced experimental plans to close part of Broadway to vehicles.

But as CBS 2 HD has discovered, not everyone is on board.

“This midtown traffic mess is one of those problems everyone always talks about and you always say there’s nothing you can do about it, well, we’re going to try and do something about it,” Bloomberg said on Thursday.

The mayor announced an ambitious plan to actually close blocks of Broadway for pedestrians.

“We expect both travel times and safety to improve and in some cases substantially,” Bloomberg added.

The mayor’s plan, according to published reports, would be to close Broadway from 42nd to 47th streets and put chairs, benches and cafe tables where taxis and trucks usually go. The mayor’s vision would resemble last summer’s Broadway Boulevard Project below 42nd Street, which is still in effect.

See the full article at WCBS.

Broadway’s Spidey senses are tingling.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the hyped stage musical directed by Julie Taymor (The Lion King) with music and lyrics courtesy of U2‘s Bono and The Edge, will kick off what its producers hope will be an amazing run along the Great White Way beginning with previews on Jan. 16, 2010, and a Feb. 18, 2010, opening night.

The $40 million effort, reportedly the most expensive Broadway production ever, will make its debut in the Hilton Theatre, the only venue big enough to allow the superhero room to spin his way around the sprawling skyscraper sets while duking it out with various bad guys.

See the full article at Yahoo News.