Driving, or walking? John Tierney stirs up a hornet’s nest of vegans and other morally overrighteous high-horse riders (see comments). I mean, to question Ed Begley, Jr. Isn’t that just the height of apostacy?
This reminds me of a piece that I’ve been thinking of writing about overall energy and fuel costs, including human fuel. With the ethanol boondoggle, we’ve gone back to the point at which we’re using crops for transportation (something we largely left behind at the end of the nineteenth century) and we now have increasing prices in both food and fuel as they compete with each other for the same farmland. This isn’t a good trend for the Third World (consider that one of the effects of the ethanol subsidies has been a dramatic increase in corn and tortilla costs in Mexico, making a poor country even more so).
AOL is pulling the plug on Netscape. I think that the beginning of the end was when they acquired it. But it lives on, really, in the Mozilla products.
Oh, and so much for the naysayers who said it wouldn’t work. Wishful thinking, one suspects.
They’ve been poo-pooing this since the eighties, going back to Tsipis and Garwin in SciAm. A good example of Clarke’s First Law, about elderly and distinguished scientists.
A defense official says a missile launched from a Navy ship in the Pacific hit the U.S. spy satellite it was targeting 130 miles above Earth’s surface. Full details are not yet available.
Presumably, we’ll find out just how successful it was in the coming days.
Sharper Image has filed for Chapter 11. I wonder if they’ll be able to reorganize?
I always thought their stuff was overpriced, and apparently a lot of people agreed with me. They also spent a lot on sending out all the catalogs. I wonder if their business model even works any more, what with Amazon and all.
The folks at AGI have attempted to model the satellite break up. Unfortunately, they need more data to have much confidence in it. But even still, I doubt if my free version of Satellite Took Kit would be up to the job that they’ve done.
This seems like a pretty big exclusion area for the satellite shot on Thursday. Is it going to disrupt airlanes? I’d be pretty annoyed if my trans-Pacific flight was delayed for it.
First you push the ALARM SET button, and you should get our old friend, Mr. Blinking Twelve. But no. You press SOURCE to select iPod or FM tuner. Repeatedly pressing this button just makes the iPod option flash on the display, though, and you figure you’ve done something wrong. So you turn the device OFF.
And the display face lights up. This is the first indication that the device was designed by the American Union of Nonintuitive Interfaces. These guys get a lot of work nowadays. You start again. SOURCE. You get the flashing iPod option. Ah hah: here’s another on/off button; let’s try that. It turns everything off and powers down the unit. That’s an option you’ve never had on an alarm clock before; if we had world enough and time, we could consider the possible scenarios in which one would want to power down the alarm clock. None come to mind.
Speaking of roosters, having spent some time in tropical climes where they run around wild, I can attest that the notion that they crow at dawn is a myth that has been foisted on city slickers like me. Or rather, that they only crow at dawn. I hear them crowing at dawn, at sunset, at lunchtime, at 2 AM. They may be good at waking you up, but not at any particularly useful time.
Well, I don’t think so, at least not intrinsically. But apparently a lot of people do. I wonder how the results would come out if you said “molecular manufacturing” instead?