DEATH RACE 2011
Think you’re tough enough for the Spartan Death Race?
Dreamed up by ultrarunners Joe Desena and Andy
Weinberg and held every June in the woods of Pittsfield,
Vermont, this obstacle course and mud racing world championship lasts about 48 hours and puts runners through a
brutal sequence of natural and man-made ordeals.
Previous races have included trials such as crawling through the mud under barbed wire, splitting wood,
translating Greek, solving puzzles, and dismantling a
500-pound hiking trail bridge and carrying it down the
mountain before putting it back together.
Prospective participants have to be vetted first, to
ensure that they are physically and mentally tough
enough. To add insult to extreme physical pain, there’s no
prize money. Interested? Visit youmaydie.com.
THE 5 BEST AUGMENTED REALITY iPHONE APPS
Augmented reality may sound like something out of The Matrix, but it’s a much simpler—and quite clever—idea. By overlaying information atop a live image of the world around you—generated by the camera in your phone—augmented reality apps can create a
virtual world on top of the real one. Here are five cool ways you can put augmented reality to work today. You’ll find all five on i Tunes.
Wikitude
WHAT IT DOES: Looking
for instant fun facts? Point
your iPhone camera at Lady
Liberty and Wikitude will
overlay formatted information
drawn from Wikipedia.
PROS: This free app turns
navigating an unfamiliar
area into a game, while still
teaching you a bit about your
surroundings.
CONS: Includes far fewer
points of interest (POIs) than
you’d think. It performs better
in big cities with many POIs.
Additional services (such as
You Tube videos of passing
traffic and planes taking off)
are even less useful than
you’d expect. Sluggish to
update and crash-prone.
Star Walk
WHAT IT DOES: Look sky-
ward, young Copernicus!
Star Walk is an exhaustive,
360-degree, 3-D map of the
heavens. Just point your
phone into space and ID any
constellation. Dig deeper to
learn all kinds of star facts.
Even includes data about
passing satellites.
PROS: Bonus info includes
sun, moon, and various plan-
etary rising and setting times.
Picture of the day gives you
Hubble’s greatest hits.
CONS: Stars are free, but the
app is not (US$2.99).
Yelp
WHAT IT DOES: If you’ve ever
searched the internet for
a restaurant, you probably
already know about Yelp. The
Monocle mini app that’s part
of Yelp’s free iPhone offering
adds an on-the-ground spin
to things, overlaying your
view with reviews of every
business on a given block.
PROS: Makes picking a place
for dinner lots of fun.
CONS: Many restaurants
don’t show up even if you’re
standing on the doorstep.
Overlays don’t often line up
with actual venues.
ZipRealty
WHAT IT DOES: Nirvana for
the real estate obsessed.
Aim your handset at a listed
house, and the free ZipRealty
app brings up the asking
price and other relevant facts,
including bed/bath configura-
tion, square footage, and
value estimates.
PROS: Indispensable for
on-the-go house hunting.
Just target a neighborhood
and instantly see all the
homes on the market—plus
recent sales—without having
to head home to look it up on
a computer.
CONS: Augmented reality
view is often incomplete and
misses homes that appear on
the traditional map view.
Golfscape
WHAT IT DOES: Turns your
iPhone into a powerful golf
course range finder. Aim
it at the hole, and the app
measures the yardage around
the green and notes hazards
along the way. More than
35,000 golf courses are
included in the database.
PROS: Incredibly accurate,
fast, and easy to use. Just
punch in the course and hole,
and the app does the rest.
No extra fees per course
downloaded.
CONS: Expensive (US$19.99),
but a drop in the bucket for
most golfers.
