Whell Met My Friends

Motorcycle helmets come in many shapes and colors.  The folks from Hatari Helmets may have come up with the most interesting helmet of all.  These helmets display video loops on the back surface.

Supposedly.  I am a bit skeptical.  The video shown on the helmets does not look like they have a working model.  Their websites are via a couple of 'free' website builders.  Something does not smell right. 

I hope I am wrong as wearing one of those would be very cool.

Link via the Discovery Channel.

Classic Movie As Propaganda?

A curiosity in the history of film; the CIA funded the animated movie adaptation of George Orwell's "Animal Farm".  I am certain that some folks will find this situation to be dripping with irony under the believe that the CIA is a fountain of propaganda that should never be trusted.

Trusting the government is always risky business.  The CIA certainly has a track record that should urge caution.

However, CIA funding should not be enough in an of itself to undermine Mr. Orwell's central theme; that tyranny, oppression, communism and socialism are synonymous and denigrate the human condition.  They are a creeping, poisonous vine revealed at the moment whenever a "committee" is formed to "run things".

Drudge - THE American Editor

This is a story from last month.  Matt Drudge's website on 9/11 led with a banner showing various police agencies and the quote “These past 10 years have shown that America does not give in to fear.”

He presents precisely that sort of insightful juxtaposition on a routine basis.  It is the sort of thing that makes his website the 'go to' resource for news and current events.

I do have to agree with one commenter that voices some frustration with following links from Drudge only to find that the story did not mesh well with the catch phrase shown on Drudge's website.  It is a frustrating form of misdirection.

Rotten Applies

How does one describe a situation were a person works for the government, pledges to not get involved in negotiations between his department and applicants, is married to someone that is a partner in a law firm working for an applicant, writes emails to other government agencies with oversight responsibilities to push for release of funds that will ultimately go to that applicant, and who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on behalf of a Presidential election campaign?

Do you suppose that there is some corruption in there somewhere?

“Any word from OMB?” Spinner wrote to a DOE staffer in reference to the Solyndra loan, which was awaiting approval from the Office of Management and Budget. “I have the OVP [Office of the Vice President] and WH [White House] breathing down my neck on this.”

Spinner was one of several department officials pushing to get a final decision on Solyndra in August 2009, ahead of a scheduled press event at which Vice President Joe Biden praised the company as “exactly what the Recovery Act [stimulus package] is all about.”

“How f***ing hard is this?” he wrote to another department official on Aug. 28, 2009. “What is he waiting for? Will we have it by the end of the day?”

Disappointing....to say the least.   Given the many allegations of corruption against the Bush administration, why on earth is Mr. Obama's administration making the Bush administration look like amateurs?

And if you have not heard of Solyndra, then perhaps you ought to ask the somnolent "main steam media" what sort of watch dog they really are.

Ever See A Real Flying Carpet?

I have.  Sort of.

Watch the video.

Accurate...Now

This David Horsey political cartoon was premature when it was created back in 2009.

Not any more.

Just......Stop.....Please

This story is from a couple weeks ago.  Hank Williams Jr. decided that he would make the comparison between President Obama and....

A Leak For Science

They haven't perfected it yet, but it looks like we may someday be able to turn urine into rocket fuel.

Scientists on Sunday said they had gained insights into a remarkable bacterium that lives without oxygen and transforms ammonium, the ingredient of urine, into hydrazine, a rocket fuel.

 

So-called anammox -- for anaerobic ammonium oxidation -- germs caused a sensation when they were first identified in the 1990s, but uncovering their secrets is taking time.

In a letter published by the British science journal Nature, researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands reported they had identified the molecular mechanism by which the bugs do their fuel-trick.

Sort of makes renting your beer on Friday night seem as if it is almost worthwhile!

Sort Of Like A Matryoshka Doll

So we invented the PN junction.  In turn we invented transistors.  We figured out that transistors made great electronic switches.  They can be included in circuits so they are either on...or "1"...or off...or "0".  A basic, stable, two-state electronic circuit.  We miniaturized transistors until we had very complex circuits all present on a very small computer chip.

And thus the computer was born.  A computer is nothing more than a sequential command reader that looks at a row of data (1110010110001010) and seeing some positions on and others off, then changes holding locations known as registers.  Those registers can then do other interesting things.

Say for example, one register can identify a single pixel on your screen.  It can also determine the color of that tiny pixel.  In the beginning, pixels didn't have color.  They were either on, or they were off.  And they were HUGE!! By changing pixels, you could create the world's first video game. Pong!

After a couple decades, pixels had gotten a lot smaller and they had gained the ability to be any one of 64 colors.  And we developed cool games like Duke Nukem.

Then we took Duke into 3D land so you became Duke instead of walking him around on the screen.  That led to a bunch of other "first person shooters" like Quake, Halo, and on and on and on.  Surfaces became more detailed, and more granulated.  Colors shot up from 64 to millions of colors. 16 to 32nd power or some such thing.  A lot of colors!  And the pixels were getting pretty tiny, too!

But all that variation, all the attempts to mimic reality, are just too much for some folks.  Which is why the good folks at Mojang Studios came up with Minecraft.

In Minecraft, every element is a perfect square that is 64 x 64 x 64.  You can look up close and see Pong sized pixels.  Or you can back away and each dot on the face of a block becomes as small as a pixel on your screen.

Like Halo and other first person shooters, you can play Minecraft as the guy, or you can look over his shoulder as you make him run around and do his/your thing.

Now Minecraft has this stuff called Redstone.  Redstone is a magical sort of substance as it responds to input to cause other things to move, or light up, or darken, or close, or open, or.....you get the point.

It wasn't long before someone had figured out how to create a circuit to pass either a "1" or a "0".  Now it is possible to transmit one bit of information with your stable two-state circuit.  And if you have enough stable two-state circuits, you have the beginnings of the modern video game.

Redstone Television!

Now that isn't really a video game.  But I'm sure that someone, somewhere is working on assembling enough Redstone circuits so that two people can play a Redstone video game while playing inside the Minecraft video game.

Now THAT is entertainment!

Why Can You Roll Eighteen Double Ought For Strength....

... but not for Intelligence?

Link love for The Order Of The Stick.  And yes, those of us that enjoy Dungeons and Dragons are an odd lot.

Excessively....odd...sadly.

Who Is A Racist?

After being subjected to two year's worth of slurs suggesting that the Tea Party is based in racism, the news of this weeks "Occupy" protest in Atlanta is spreading quickly.  The group that is/was protesting there refused to let John Lewis, civil rights stalwart and legend, speak.

Congressman Lewis (D, GA) was ready to talk to the group, but they didn't give him a chance to speak.
"I was going to say, I stand with you. I support you, what you're down," said Lewis to the media.

He said he wasn't disappointed he wasn't able to address the crowd. Several people CBS Atlanta spoke to were upset.

Michelle Williams was excited to attend the event and no longer wanted to be associated with the movement, citing how Lewis was treated.

"I am angry because this is not what democracy is all about. This is Marxist more Stalin like. Your movement, you're just riff-raff. You're an organized mob," said Williams.

I am prepared to be a bit kinder....one might suggest more civil...than many left leaning polemicists by suggesting that the decision to not let Mr. Lewis speak was probably made by whatever passes for "leadership" in this movement and does not reflect the thoughts of the many participants.

I disagree with Mr. Lewis on a long list of issues.  But even I would be interested in what he had to say.

A side note to Ms. Williams.  The "leadership".  This "movement".  Marxist.  Stalinist.

This isn't particularly new.

As Dr. Wes suggests, this group isn't particularly gifted with "clue".

Where To Cut First?

The GAO released a report earlier this year that identified $200 billion in wasteful spending.  Given our current annual deficits of roughly $1.4 trillion, cutting $200 billion in spending would represent a 14.3% reduction in the size of the deficit.

That is well short of 100%, but you take it where you can find it.

How many of those programs have the Republicans and Democrats in Congress cut?  None.

What agency was targeted to have its budget cut?  The GAO.

Demotivator - Consistency

More here.

The Grass Has A Funny Color

Via Instapundit comes the news that protesters at the DC version of "Occupy Wall Street" are not there because they support the cause.  They are there for the paycheck.

Given the number of protests with lots of professionally printed SEIU signs, and other organizations, it isn't terribly surprising to learn that this leftist "movement" is really just AstroTurf.  Again. It is as if everyone to the left of Bertolt Brecht bought stock in Monsanto.

A real movement doesn't have to pay its protesters.

A Twitter Feed Worth Considering

I don't use Twitter.  But if I did, #OccupyWhiteHouse2012 would be a tag I would follow.

The hashtag for the rest of us.

The silent majority.

The ones who pay the bills, and the taxes, and the tuitions, and the pensions, and the benefits, for the people who falsely claim to be the 99%.

The ones who did not graduate from the school of perpetual expectations and handouts.

The ones who falsely have been called terrorists and extremists and racists because they dared to object to trying the same socialist policies here that have failed everywhere they have been tried before.

The ones who showed up at the polls in 2010.

The ones who will show up at the polls in 2012.

Turning The Economic Engine On

Finally, some light in the tunnel that doesn't come from a train.

The president's decision marks the first bright economic move he has made to boost the nation's ailing economy. Dropping tariffs, opening markets and equalizing investment terms are a proven way to boost economic growth.

...

The legislative process will begin next week, and both the White House and congressional leaders say the votes are there to pass it. But they always have been - the big change is the end of the president's hesitancy to submit them and Big Labor's campaign to block it.

Now if we could just get his administration to stop demonizing "the rich" and threatening to raise taxes while minimizing cuts to the federal budget.

Moral Behavior

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

- Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein



Parenthetically, this is one of my favorite books of all time.  Ignore the movie.  Read the book.

Freedom Works, Each And Every Time That It Is Tried

Via Instapundit comes a link to an NPR story talking about the oil boom currently underway in the Big Sky states.  The US, Canada, and the nations of South America are poised to out produce the Saudis and other Middle Eastern oil producers.

As a side bonus, we are sidelining the Russians that were in the habit of using natural gas as an economic weapon against Europe.

Drill baby drill!

Demotivator - Curiousity

More here.

After 3 Years Of An Obama Adminstration...

Click the image or the link for a larger, more detailed version.