Book Of Norm

This is not what you normally hear about, but with Israeli assistance and without interference from the US, turns out that Palestine is in the middle of an economic boom. Go here for an interesting article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/dec/07/obama-interference-independent-palestine

Rewind a few years. We are in the middle of two wars fought on foreign soil with somewhat ill defined objectives. Terrorism is the main news story. Americans are the fattest people on the planet. The country is lead by a man that half of the country hates with a burning passion. And the American car company is owned by Europeans. Ahhh... but there is a difference. It was owned by Germans, not Italians. And one thing Germans dont like? Anyone, especially Americans, being better building cars than they are. And they rarely are. But every once in a while, something amazing comes out of the "big 3." The Ford GT40 which beat Ferrari at its own game, the Chevy Corvette which is the greatest performance bargain on the planet, and in 2004 the Chrysler ME four twelve. Almost. 0-100 in 6.2 seconds, 0-60 in 2.9, Quarter mile of 10.6 @ 136 mph The stats are staggering. That would, today, be one of the fastest cars in the world even with the horsepower wars of the last few years. And the ...

This game is fantastic. It is a physics based drawing game where you draw blocks, balls, ramps etc and connect them with pegs or pivot points to build contraptions (often involving leverage - particularly the kind of building a seesaw and then dropping a large rock on one end). It is an incredibly fun game that will waste your time keep you educationally entertained for hours. It is possible to cheat a little and build upwards under the ball by drawing lines under it, but dont do that... the objective is to win with as few pieces as possible...

An interesting military vehicle this one, built out of VW Beetle parts and F1 racing tires in order to find Soviet landmines... necessity is the mother of invention. Pulled from Jalopnik: The term " Rhodesian Pookie " sounds like it would refer to a designer dog fit only for riding in puppy purses, but no, it's a very cool VW Beetle-based, armored landmine detector created during the Rhodesian Bush Wars. Used F1-tires anyone? Ask most people where Rhodesia is and you're likely to get a blank stare. It was a former British colony in the south of Africa and has gone on to become Zimbabwe, but following its declaration of independence there was a brutal civil war dubbed The Rhodesian Bush Wars. One of the terrifying aspects of the conflict was the extensive and calculated use of landmines along huge stretches of road with the effect of paralyzing supply and trade routes. Hunti...

The US did not invade Iraq for oil. The oil is now in the hands of the Iraqis, and they are auctioning off production rights at very tight margins which only the national oil companies and some of the little guys are interested in. In other words, US companies will not be that heavily involved in oil production in Iraq. It is looking like China will get much more of the benefit of a stable Iraq that we will. Which is fine. I always thought the primary and best justification for going into Iraq was to remove a dictator who had killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens. Speaking of which, why is it always liberals who are against invasions to remove horrendous dictators? I just don't get that one. If you actually believed in helping people, we would already have troops on the ground in the Sudan and Zimbabwe. Moving on.. If you then assume that we were there to fix the country up, and then pull back when things were stable (pretty much what are objective has been), why are we ...

Back in the 1950's, visionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright (and Norm's favorite architect of all time), decided to change his perspective somewhat. He was known, and still is known, for his houses, and often for relatively flat structures designed to fit in well with their surroundings. But in the city, the surroundings are other skyscrapers, and what Lloyd Wright envisioned would fit amongst them, but would also tower over them. The Illinois. It was planned to be a mile tall. Wright believed that even with the construction materials and techniques available to him at that time, that it would have been possible to build the tower. However, major issues would have been the elevators required to service all of the floors. Even with multi-story elevators which open on more than one floor at once (Wright imagined five floors at once, Taipai 101 opens on 2) and the use of sky lobbies to switch into a different elevator (as the World Trade Center towers used) it was still required to...

Across the planet, and especially the US, there are row upon row of perfectly made seemingly natural but completely inexplicable mounds. They are called the Mima Mounds. And no one really has a good grasp on how they were created. The majority of them are found in the US, especially in Washington State and the northwest. All of the mounds, across the US and all around the world, share very similar features. They are about 3-6ft tall an laid out in very evenly spaced diagonal rows. However excavation of the mounds have shown that a) they can have very different soil structures, and b) there are no aliens or burial sites in the mounds. At least not that anyone has been able to find a trace of. this is the best of the explanations wikipedia has to offer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mima_mounds Pocket Gophers One major theory concerning the origin of Mima mounds argues that they were created by pocket gophers —small, burrowing rodents with fur-lined "pockets," or pouches, in th...

Ever dream of driving from Alaska to the Cape Horn? Crusing the Pan-American highway with the top down in your '66 Mustang? Or more realistically, cruising with the windows down in your '06 Winnebago? You can't. This came as some surprise to me actually. I would have though that you would be able to drive all the way. It would seem to make sense economically, to have a road that connected all the way. Actually, I will go one step further, what you are about to learn astounded me in the sense of its total anachronism in the modern world that we live in. There is a gap, just one gap, in the Pan-American highway. And no, the answer is not the cute one: "the panama canal." There is a heaping big bridge over that, called (ironically, since the road does not go much further) the Bridge of the Americas. No, what I am referring to is the Darien Gap. The gap is the section of land where the long thin strip of Central America links up with the continent of South America. An...

This is pulled from another site, but had to share here, damn interesting: 1. Gravity Wave The undulating pattern of a gravity wave must seem a bizarre sight, especially if you’re more used to seeing waves of the water, not in the sky. Seldom seen gravity waves are caused when air is displaced in the vertical plain, usually as a result of updrafts coming off the mountains or during thunderstorms. Photo: Unusual image of a wave cloud forming off Amsterdam Island in the Indian Ocean, December 2005. NASA A wave pattern will only be generated when the updraft air is forced into a stable air pocket. The upward momentum of the draft triggers into the air pocket causes changes in the atmosphere, altering the fluid dynamics. Nature then tries to restore the fluid changes within the atmosphere, which present in a visible oscillating pattern within the cloud. Photo: Glen Talbot Time Lapse footage of Gravity Wave: 2. Katabatic Winds Derived from the Greek word ‘katabatikos’, wh...