Yearly Archives: 2013

Life at a startup is hard, but even failure can be rewarding

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Life at a startup is hard, but even failure can be rewarding

The last days at Fisker
Joe worked at Fisker Automotive for years until the mass layoffs at the automaker last week. He reminisces about his overall experience at the company whose future seems more dire than ever.

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It's a shame that Mazda never built this replacement for the RX-7, one of my… 5

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It's a shame that Mazda never built this replacement for the RX-7, one of my favorite sports cars of all time

I've always been a fan of the Wankel rotary engine and it would have been great to get a proper update of the RX-7. While the RX-8 was a fine machine in many respects, I'd love to get a Miata with a 13B in it. 

Here's my 2009 review of the RX-8 R3 edition http://www.autoblog.com/2008/10/08/in-the-autoblog-garage-2009-mazda-rx-8-r3-return-of-the-humme/

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Once upon a time, racing drivers had real personalities and they were about more…

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Once upon a time, racing drivers had real personalities and they were about more than just selling stuff for sponsors

As a youngster I was just becoming aware of motorsport in 1976 during the height of the rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda. They were diametrically opposite personalities that often reached the same result, standing at the top of the podium after the race.

If this trailer is any indication of the movie, I'll definitely be going to see it on the big screen. 


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Wrong answer to the patent backlog problem!

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Lowering the bar for what can be patented is not the solution to a backlog of applications. The world would be better off with a backlog and fewer high-quality patents than a plethora of bogus patents that should have been rejected. 

Reshared post from +Ars Technica

Study suggests patent office lowered standards to cope with backlog
The “allowance rate” sharply increased during Obama’s first term.

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A visit to Dresden in October 2009 1

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In album

When I went to Germany in October 2009 for the media launch of the 6th generation +Volkswagen USA Golf, we had a chance to stroll around central Dresden for a while after our tour of the Glass Factory. 

Just two months before the European part of World War II came to a close in 1945, Allied air forces firebombed the city of Dresden killing as many as 25,000 people. Among the many buildings destroyed was the 18th century Dresden Frauenkirche. The rubble of the Lutheran church remained in place for the next 49 years as an anti-war memorial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_Frauenkirche#Reconstruction

In 1994, following the reunification of Germany, the huge pile of stones was finally cleared so that the church could be rebuilt. Thousands of the fire-blackened original stones can be seen in the reconstructed shell in contrast to the newer blocks. Elsewhere in central Dresden many other buildings still bear the scorch marks of those fiery days in February 1945. 

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The Jurassic Park T-Rex was a full-size animatronic model!

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When Jurassic Park first hit the cinema screens 20 years ago, Pixar was still two years away from releasing Toy Story and Fellowship of the Ring was eight years away. The state of the art for computer generated imaging wasn't yet up to the task of creating the high-resolution digital models needed for such a movie. 

Stan Winston Studios created a full scale animatronic model of the T-Rex using a steel armature actuated by hydraulic systems to achieve the speed and range of motion required for the film.

Watch ‘Jurassic Park’ engineers build the movie’s giant mechanical T. rex
Jurassic Park may have helped revolutionize modern CG animation in movie-making, but out of the 14 minutes of dinosaurs in the movie, only four were completely generated by computers. Practical…


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