Mark Maynard has an explosive post on the true identity of Ken Ham, one of the major proponents of unintelligent design. I think you will find his investigation very enlightening. We are definitely talking Pulitzer Prize work here!
If you have never been to Japan, it is a very different place. You can literally get virtually anything from a vending machine. And these vending machines are everywhere. I jsut spotted this item over on engadget
You can buy almost anything from a vending machine in Japan. So it’s no surprise to find a machine fashioned after the old UFO catcher crane-and-claw-based arcade games vending live lobsters in Sapporo. 100 yen (less than a buck) is a bargain price for a potentially tasty dinner — not to mention the hearty guffaws to be had watching children (and Alec Baldwin) scream in horror.
Doug Kaye the amazing guy behind IT conversations posted a picture of the nose landing gear of the jet blue plane that made an emergency landing at LAX last week.
In case you missed it this plane was on approach to Los Angeles International airport last week and upon lowering the landing gear, a fault was detected with the nose gear. It turned out the wheels where stuck turned 90 degrees from the direction that the plane was supposed to be going. Observers in other planes and on the ground confirmed the problem so the plane circled around until they burned off all the fuel on board and then landed.
Since the wheels where stuck pointing in the wrong direction they just scraped along the runway until the plane stopped. Thankfully everyone was okay. The Fly with me podcast has some audio of the air traffic controllers talking to the pilots.
We just went to see The Corpse Bride. It was another brilliant movie from Tim Burton. If you like The Nightmare Before Christmas, you will love this one. The visuals are stunning, the voice acting is great and Danny Elfman did another great job on the music. This film was done with the same type of stop motion animation used for nightmare but this time it was shot digitally. Instead of using traditional film cameras, they used Canon EOS-1D Mark II digital slr still cameras. This style of animation takes a lot of time, they get about 2 minutes of footage per week. The look is pure Tim Burton and the writing was great. It is a really sweet story without being sappy. There were some really funny scenes and the ending was very fitting. It was very enjoyable for both the adults and the kids. I highly recommend it. It is not often these days that adults can go to a movie with their kids and everyone can enjoy it. That’s two in one year for Tim Burton!
The leaders of the film industry have again proved that they are utterly clueless about the 21st century. Instead of rethinking spending upwards of $100 million on crap like war of the worlds, and going out and relearning how to tell stories with films, they are going to flush a bunch of money to try to make their own copy protection. From techdirt.com:
If the studios would focus on creating movies that people actually want to see that for a price that they are willing to pay. Who wants to pay $10/person to seek drek like the fantastic four and so many other hollywood failures. The likes of Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts and others don’t need to be paid $20million a pop. Movies like 28 Days Later are shot on digital video (using the Canon XL1s) and look awesome and cost a fraction of the price of many studio flicks. Screw the big studios, and their crappy blockbusters. Go with the independants and find stuff that is really worth watching.
Here are links to 10 great recent autoblog posts. I read autoblog everyday because I am in the auto industry and this site has by far the most complete and up to date car news. These guys have more news any other automotive site I have found and the news keeps coming seemingly real time as it happens.
1. From the 2005 Frankfurt auto show some pics of the new car bodies from former Aston Martin chief designer Henrik Fisker . These designs are classy and have some elements of previous Fisker designs.
2. An interesting article on aerodynamics in Formula 1. This gives you an idea of where some of the insane sums of money spent on F1 go.
3. Volvo is a company long renowned for the safety of their cars. Are they covering up some serious safety problems right now?
4. As more and more technology is being added to our vehicles the ability to monitor what you do and where you go and how fast you get there is increasing. Is this what you really want?
5. Pretty much all of our clothes, toys and consumer electronics are made in china now. Are you ready for cars? The auto industry is one of the few remaining sources of high paying manufacturing jobs left in North America, but not for long.
6. From Opel comes the next generation of the Saturn Vue, easily one of the more uninspired designs on the road today.
7. Hyundai wants to cut their product development time down to 18 months. I have seen many of these initiatives over the years. What they generally amount to is rederining the time when you start counting. Designing a car is a very time consuming process because of the need to coordinate all the different suppliers, and systems and the car makers insistence on tweaking all kinds of things just the way they want instead of following standards, especially for communications.
8. An excellent post on a Pew poll on american consumers attitudes and I agree completely that most americans are hypocrites!
9. A post about Wilbur Ross’s plan to buy Delphi and Collins and Aikmen. I am highly dubious of his chances for success on this one.
10. As a longtime lotus fan I am glad to see that lotus is finally have some comercial success with the Elise. The elise is a wonderful little sports car and I just wish I could afford one. I did have a chance to spend a significant ammount of the time with the Esprit and early nineties Elan when I worked on the ABS for those vehicles on a previous job. I had one particularly memorable high speed drive in an Esprit from Milford to Sault Ste Marie that I will always cherish.
I am copying the following post from Geeknewscentral.com because it is important if you don’t want the recording industry controlling what technology you use and what you hear.
The RIAA trying to reduce the quality of future Radio Reception
CALL TO ACTIONThe RIAA has decided that the makers of next generation of Digital Radio Receivers need to legislated so that you will not copy music that is being broadcast over the digital airways.
They are asking congress to build restrictions into these digital players so that they cannot have material copied out of them and also to reduce the quality of the music.
From the EFF “In other words, the music industry is basically saying that, where recording from next-generation radio is concerned, government must step in and freeze innovation to ensure that you can never do anything that you couldn’t do with an analog cassette deck in 1984. This, despite the fact that Congress specifically approved of digital recording off the radio in the Audio Home Recording Act in 1992. So this is about stopping music fans from doing things that are perfectly legal under copyright law.”
I encourage you to read the entire article by the EFF and visit the associated links. Join the letter writing campaign to speak out. [EFF]
I just spotted this on Sivacracy. Scroll down slowly through the sequence of photos.
Shrub actually actively disdain’s anyone who isn’t wealthy enough who bail him out of his business disasters or finance his political campaigns. Now in the wake of hurricane katrina he has suspended the prevailing wage laws in the affected areas. The purpose of these laws is to require government contrators to pay same wage as other companies in the wage for comparable work. For example, if construction contractors in an area are paying an average of $7.50/hr for laborers, any company doing a government construction contract must pay the same amount. Instead they now only have to pay the federal minimum wage which has stuck at $5.15/hr since the mid 1990’s. It is not clear what rationale shrub had for suspending the prevailing wage laws, other than to benefit the companies that are getting the no-bid contracts for reconstruction. Guess which company was the one of the first to get one of these contracts? You got it, Halliburton. To top it off no local gulf coast companies got these contracts.
The Army Corps of Engineers hired four companies yesterday to remove debris from parts of Louisiana and Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina. No companies from the affected Gulf Coast were awarded a share of the $2 billion in contracts, but the winners must give preference to subcontractors in those areas, the Corps said in a statement.
So bush buddies get big contracts to clean but they don’t have to pay a decent wage to the local people who need the help most to rebuild their lives. It also appears that shrub was in such a rush to screw regular laborers that he may have violated the law to do it. This from Rep. George Miller (D-CA)
The President’s pay cut affects tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of Americans who desperately need a decent income to rebuild their lives. People working construction jobs in the Gulf Coast might only have earned $7 or $8 in the first place; now, the only protection left for them is the federal minimum wage, which is a disgraceful $5.15 an hour because Republicans repeatedly refuse to increase it.
What the President has done is immoral.
If you still believe that shrub is just a regular guy (did anybody ever really believe that?) and that he knows how regular people feel, it is time for a reality check. He hates anybody who is not one of his cronies.
PS did you notice that he couldn’t line up the buttons and buttonholes on his shirt during his speach the other night?
We went to the open house at Sofia’s school last night and I was quite impressed. All her teachers seem very enthusiastic about teaching and their students. Three of her six classes are college prep. The biology teacher is actually a doctor of veterinary medicine and has practised on livestock (although I am not sure if he still practices now). Of course there was still no mention of unintelligent design. There were a lot of families there last night which I always take as a good sign. There was lots of diversity too (and not just skin color). One girl had hair that very closely matched the purple of the school colors (purple and gold btw). After the opening remarks by the principal and performance by the chamber choir, we went around to each class on her schedule and got to meet the teachers and here a bit bout what they are teaching and their class procedures.
Next week is Max’s open house and we get to do this all over again.