Book Of Norm

This is the Big Wind - a polish tank which is a T-34 chassis (old - as in WWII old) with two jet engines from a Mig-21 mounted on top. This time, it was used to blow water or other fire fighting liquids. I was used fighting the oil well fires Saddam set in Kuwait, and is featured in the IMAX documentary, which I saw years ago. Needless to say, I want one.

Well, booty in the sense that you can now download the personal information of 100million people. Basically, someone went and took all of the publicly available information from the 1/5 Facebook users who don't change the default settings, and put them up on TPB to download. ahh the irony.. The interesting thing here is that this has gotten privacy experts all upset. It shouldn't. Facebook is what should get them all upset, whoever posted the torrent to TPB is just showing how royally screwed up Facebook is. This is like safety experts getting mad at the guy who points out that Toyotas are crashing all over the place. In addition, this is all information which Facebook sells to anyone who can deliver human souls pay. Facebook of course has roughly the same level of morality as Uday Hussein. The issue here is that Facebook is a public menace and a dangerous company that too many people trust with too much information. Likely including me in that last one. The reason is of cours...

First, let me point something out. Preventing illegal immigration is not racism. We allow very few Europeans to immigrate to the US, not counting work visas and marriages. Honestly, I think the number of permits given to most of the Eastern European countries are less that 50 people a year, or some similarly abusurly low number. I was told 13 from the Czech Republic. Anyway, what we are dealing with here is illegal immigration. In case anyone has forgotten what illegal means, it means not-legal. As in you can get arrested for it, and it is against the law. As in we, as a country, as a democratic people, have passed laws which make it unlawful to enter this country, especially with an intent to reside here, without properly applying to do so. Becoming a citizen of the US is difficult for anyone, including family members of mine coming over from the UK. Allowing illegal immigration supposes that becoming a member of US society should be difficult for everyone except the illegal immigrant...

So, the $189 Kindle already seemed like a pretty good deal. Now, Amazon has announced a $140 Kindle, all it is missing is the 3G connection. Which is actually rather a big deal, because probably the killer feature of the Kindle is the free and wherever-you-go access to content, forever. So $40 less now... but most likely not worth it in the long run. However, it does bring the Kindle closer to the impulse buy and family christmas present price point, and that is a big deal. Because if Amazon can get the price of the Kindle down enough, it does start to make sense as a just buy one already kind of thing. You see, my original issue with the Kindle was the cost - you paid a lot up front, and for your trouble, you paid a lot for books. Amazon and independent authors have long since dealt with the cost of the books issue, but there just remained that buy-in initial hurdle. The lower that is, the better for the kindle. Still, I don't think I will be buying one soon. The Kindle is great f...

I promise - this is a real tank: Yeah.... It looks like should be from some computer game, or Hollywood action movie, but it isn't. Its from... you guessed it: Russia. Where shit just be crazy. What we have here is actually a MIG-15 jet engine mounted onto the top of a T-54 tank - so basically combining two of the stalwarts of the early Cold War into Russian indestructible awesomeness. All you have to do is mix in a AK-47 and a Soyuz capsule and you would have an epic shrine of Russian do-it-cheap-dirty-and-reliable engineering. What was it used for though, other than scaring the living bejesus out of the West Germans to stop them from defecting to Russia (this is why, according to the Russians, the Berlin Wall was built after all). Well - this here is a mine clearing tank. You take the thrust from the jet engine and vector it out of that contraption which looks like a sci-fi death doom tank I would have imagined when I was 7, and you blow it against the ground in order to clear aw...

Nope, not libido, albedo. Specifically, whitening the worlds cities. And before you start thinking crazy thoughts, no, this is not going to be about race either. Albedo is the measure of light reflectiveness. The more light Earth reflects, the cooler we are (its why you put the shiny Garfield sunshade on the dash of your Buick). And a new study shows that unless we all start buying Toyota Priusis, eating food from Whole Foods, and wearing Bono approved jeans, the world is going to end. Err, no. Actually, the study showed that if you covered the roofs of all the buildings in the cities of the world (and the city streets), you would... well... they said it best: "If all roofs were converted to white or cool colors, they would offset about 24 gigatons (24 billion metric tons) of CO 2 , but only once. But assuming roofs last about 20 years, the researchers came up with 1.2 gigatons per year. That equates to offsetting the emissions of roughly 300 million cars, all the cars in the worl...

So, the Chevy Volt has been priced - $41,000. But really, it costs much less, because of state and Federal incentives, most likely setting you back about $33,500. Which, really, is not that much for an electric car with *unlimited range. *unlimited meaning you can fill it up at gas stations which are conviniently located, well, basically everywhere. This amazing development lets you drive virtually FOREVER. You know, like you can in a Hummer. Again, whats sad isn't what it is: But what it isn't.

I cant stand the fact that Apple's response to its own internal problem - the iPhone 4 debacle - is try and say that every other phone, or at least lots of them, suffer from the same issue: the don't, or certainly not to the degree the iPhone with it idiot antenna does. They have released a number of misleading movies about other phones from other manufacturers, saying they have the same issue if you hold them in a certain way. Usually this involves something incredibly awkward, like pressing you palm against the back of the phone (the back middle being where intelligent companies usually put the antenna). But the videos always show it from the front, so it looks very similar to the iPhone issue (holding the side of the phone with your fingers... like almost all humans do to hold a phone). And yet - Apple gets away with this, because it is the friggin Obama of the tech world (or is Obama the Apple of politics? Not sure).

Yeah, you just have to read this from the BBC . It speaks for itself: Wife questions Japan PM Naoto Kan's ability to govern By Roland Buerk BBC News, Tokyo Wife questions Japan PM's ability Naoto and Nobuko Kan have been married for 40 years The wife of Japan's prime minister has written a book publicly questioning her husband's ability to lead the country. Called "What on earth will change in Japan now you are prime minister?", it was published this week. Naoto Kan became leader of the world's second biggest economy last month, following the resignation of Yukio Hatoyama. He has been married to his wife, Nobuko, for 40 years. Poll drubbing Many wives of successful men may privately wonder how their husbands made it to the top, but few are as public about it as Japan...

Yeah, this thing is just crazy, and I have never heard of it. It is freaking huge, yet lives in rivers. It might be the largest freshwater critter, at least in terms of length (though 1000+lbs is nothing to cough at)... From NatGeo: Fish experts believe the giant stingray, such as this one in Cambodia's Mekong River, is the largest freshwater species on Earth. This specimen measured more than 13 feet (4 meters) long. Photograph courtesy Zeb Hogan Map Giant Freshwater Stingray Range Fast Facts Type: Fish Diet: Carnivore Average life span in the wild: Unknown Size: Up to 16.5 ft (5 m) Weight: Up to 1,320 lbs (600 kg) Did you know? The giant stingray, sometimes called a whip ray, is a relatively unknown animal ...

I picked up one of the $200 netbooks on sale this week at Target - and I am really impressed with the build quality. This is not a cheaply put together little machine (well - it is - it just does not feel that way) - it looks great with a shiny navy-blue to black fade on the lid, there is not a lot of flex to the keyboard or wobblyness to the laptop in general. If you are looking for a nice little laptop, and be aware it is little - typing is not as easy as a full-sized laptop, this is a very nice, very cheap, and very capable machine. Normal readers can leave at this point - because now I am going to explain how to get XP onto an Acer Win7 netbook - for those people like me who frustratedly searched the web only to find solutions like custom wrappers for XP install disks and "buy a USB floppy disk drive"... yeah. Sure. Right after I figure out how to get Windows 95 installed on my smartphone. Turns out that Acer has a great support site for all the XP drivers, so you can get...

So… ever since splitting out GMAC (now Ally bank.. after getting bailed out itself and sucking down a few billion), GM has been without a lending arm. They approached Ally, but Ally wanted not a goddamn thing to do with them and their subprime lending. Which is troublesome for the company, because its dealers have had to use third party banks when financing new car sales. The trouble with those third party banks is that they don’t like lending to subprime borrowers. I don’t really know why they don’t like subprime borrowers, it’s not like there has ever been an issue with defaults on subprime debt. Statistically subprime borrowers are hale and hearty investments. For instance in the US housing market… well I mean look at Greece and developing countries… aww shit. Anyway, Obama/GM/The Czarina of Autos decides that it needs a new lending arm so that it can it can create a new asset bubble by offering below-cost loans to borrowers who should be buying used Volvos, and are highly likely to...

Personally, I really like the idea of algal biofuels. Why? Well - the process is basically what humans have done for all of known history: farming. You take an organism which lives off sunlight, grow that. If you get all fancy, you can grow things that eat those things. Whooeeh. Back to the green goop. A little while ago I did research on algal fuels, because if they ever came to pass, they would have a big impact on the refining industry. And not just because of the obvious reason that they would eventually replace a lot of it, but because in the earlier stages they would have an economic impact on anything with concentrated CO2 emissions. Because the two things the little buggers love are sunlight, and CO2. Yes, that nasty evil CO2 your neighborhood hippie has been telling you that you are killing the planet with. Every time someone gives me shit about my ( hybrid.. .) Tahoe, I'll tell them that I am just feeding the trees... Anyway, the last time the DOE gave algae a go, they th...

This clip got the woman fired and is currently a massive issue. You see, she goes on to say that she learned her mistake and became friends with the man, and all of that happened while she was working for a non-profit, not the US govt. However, after this video came out, the Obama Administration right away forced her to resign, as their #1 priority is covering their ass. The NAACP also issued a statement against the woman... but now is trying to turn it around and say that they were tricked. Tricked by what I have not a damn clue - because this happened at one of their meetings.. Anyway, seems to me that even discussing something like this in this manner "I took the black guy to one of his own, because I did not want to deal with him" would be enough to get a white person fired. Irrespective of whether a) they later became friends or b) they should get fired. Personally - do I think there is a double standard in this country? Yes. Absolutely. Is that justified? No. Now - peop...

We like our computers. And we like them close. Two days ago, I bought a netbook, a little Acer Aspire One with an atom processor, a 10' screen, and a 160gb hard drive. I love it. Not as much as my phone, which has become something I would never want to live without, but it achieves a very useful goal: fully portable, fully capable computing. They call them "netbooks" - but it is not simply a netbook. It is a laptop, but a small one. It is more capable than most of the computers I have owned in my life, all of which I have done a lot more with than just surfing the internet. The big advantage of this over a smarphone (or the oversized smartphones now being sold as "tablets") is that it is a full computer - just small and portable. It has usb ports, it can get pictures off my camera and save them, it can charge my usb electronics, it can keep everything I want on it, and do so for only $200. And damn is it small and light - its like carrying a small book around. ...

This is taken from an article posted over at http://thefourpartland.wordpress.com/ - a good source of space news and related matters. It turns out that all major extinction events over the last 500million years - pretty much all of the time that we have any kind of a fossil record for - happen on a set cycle: from http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25420/ "The periodicity is a matter of some controversy among paleobiologists but there is a growing consensus that something of enormous destructive power happens every 26 or 27 million years. The question is what? In this blog, we've looked at various ideas such as the Sun's passage through the various spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy (it turns out that this can't explain the extinctions because the motion doesn't have had the right periodicity). But another idea first put forward in the 1980s is that the Sun has a distant dark companion called Nemesis that sweeps through the Oort cloud every 27 million y...

This is news in the same way as announcing that Pamela Anderson had a boob job, but so it goes. There was a liberal media listserv which has gotten the tea-party, Fox News, and conservatives in general all excited because it shows that a number of moderately influential liberal writers and eggheads conspired to try and support and elect Obama instead of merely reporting the news. Related stories include: Crocodiles have sharp teeth Russia is crazy The ocean is blue Anyway, here is the article, which is an interesting read: A group of liberal journalists used a now-defunct listserv to debate the merits of whether the federal government should forcibly shut down Fox News, according to a report in The Daily Caller. The online publication earlier reported that the journalists in the private group discussed ways to shield Barack Obama from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal when Obama was a presidential candidate. The latest article showed that several members of Journolist aired complaint...

But seemingly, not on purpose. Pretty crazy story, though the first picture is really the best part... also, glad that the couple have taken the whole thing so well. Whale of a tale for couple yachting off Cape Town This picture taken from a nearby boat appears to show the moment the whale breached A couple on a whale-watching trip off Cape Town, South Africa, say they had a lucky escape when a 10m (33ft) specimen leapt on to their yacht. The southern right whale, a species known for poor eyesight, snapped the mast before sliding off back into the water, said Paloma Werner. She and her partner had just seconds to take cover, she said. A nearby tourist apparently caught the moment on camera. "I still like whales!" Ms Werner told the BBC afterwards. The southern right whale navigates by sound, leading Ms Werner to suspect it was an accident. ...

First off, let me say that I am not in general a fan of Governments handing out money in order to "create jobs" or bailout companies that have failed. I think the last two years have seen more money wasted than any of the excess military spending of the Cold War. I would rather put a $1 billion bomber in the sky than make sure Golden Ballsachs gets its bonuses. But aid to developing countries, specifically aid directed at solving illness and medical hardship rather than development spending, should be one of the highest US priorities. Argue all you will about giving money to Africa - it usually does nothing, often does harm - but money spent on human illness is another matter entirely. This, along with a number of other reasons, is why President Bush was adored in Sub-Saharan Africa, a fact which was rarely mentioned by any of the US media. He is still hugely looked up to - white, bible-thumping Texan and all. President Obama, who as the first black President not to mention o...

This is classic. And completely legit. Well actually, not legit at all, in any way, other than the fact that the story itself is legitimate, as told by CNN. When Mexican authorities searched a man who had a suspicious bulge under his shirt at the airport, it turned out that he had 18 monkeys under his clothes. The man had flown from Lima, Peru with 18 tiny titi monkeys. Sadly, 2 of them died on the trip to Mexico, before they were found by authorities attached to a belt under the mans clothes. The genius had originally been carrying them in his hand-luggage, but then but them on the belt - in pouches - so that "they would not be harmed by the x-ray machine." As is so often the case, the Titi monkey is a protected species. Though the man says they were going to be his pets, who knows what rich idiot they were destined for. Basic life tip her folks: don't be the asshole who keeps endangered species as pets. A second tip is don't be the asshole who releases invasive spec...

Today, very quietly, Google announced that it was killing off the Nexus One. It's attempt to remake the cellphone landscape was a complete failure. But it has also been a stunning success. You see - Google thought the Nexus One would reshape how people bought an paid for their cellphones, breaking down the carrier-tied subsidy model. It didn't. And they thought it would not affect their relationships with other manufacturers. It did, but in the end they did not care because the phone was a flop. However, what it did do was make the world aware that the best phone in the world just might not be the iPhone, and more than that, it branded "Android" as "Google". On the first point, the Nexus One never really took the title of the best phone in the world, due to a number of issues. But its progeny have. The Droid Incredible, EVO 4G, and a number of other phones are all developments of the Nexus One built by HTC. And they are the best phones in the world right now...

webOS will, it seems, be available later this year on a pretty tablet, courtesy of their new overlords, HP. This is a good thing. I would love a webOS tablet. With one big exception. I am planning on buying a netbook. Probably later today. You see, on this netbook, I will load up my copy of WinXP Pro, some office 2007 goodness, iTunes 6 (before it went all big and crappy. Or I might stick with winamp, for even less-processor-taxing goodness) and then, instantly, be able to do all kinds of regular computer things. Like play starcraft and diablo II (albeit really really small), play any flash game online that I want to (armor games being my go-to these days). You want apps - there are billions of them. More storage? Get a usb hard drive. And windows XP works with every peripheral ever made. Not to mention I might even just install linux for the heck of it, and dual boot, for the purpose of even better power management (linux runs cooler/lower power than windows). The one, singular thing,...

The first part is pulled directly from jalopnik.. and it is hilarious: U.S. President Barack Obama gets out of a Chevrolet Volt following a groundbreaking ceremony in Holland, Michigan today. He reportedly asked "When can Americans buy one?" We already did, Mr. President. We already did. I also think there is an interesting comparison here to a picture of the first people's car..

On the same day that the sweeping financial reform bearing his name, it comes out that Senator Chris Dodd also received a preferential mortgage from Countrywide under a "VIP" program. The mortgage was set at rates much lower than those available to the general public. Usually, these rates were for Countrywide employees, but a few VIPs were given these kickbacks bribes payoffs rates also. The mortgages were of course then packaged and sold to Freddie and Fannie. Oh the irony, I am rolling around in it like a warm mud bath, trying to protect myself from the little mosquito which whispers "it would be funny if were not true." At least it makes me feel a tad better and lets me ignore for a little bit how these idiots are destroying the potential future and growth of this country.

The NYT has gone so far downhill I don't even know where to start. My step-Dad, a born-and-raised New Yorker who long loved the NYT, is much more the expert on this than me, but even in my time I have seen such a degradation of that paper it is truly saddening. The NYT took an open decision to allow editorializing into its articles in order to try and increase circulation, in the face of popular and opinionated news and website which now dominate individual's consumption of information. What this has meant is that almost every social and political article in the paper is written with a massive spin and tilt. And not the gyroscope kind of spin and tilt, more like the tilt-a-whirl of misrepresentation. It has become more or less the voice of the administration and its style of policies and politics: openness means attacking your enemies, truth means spewing hate and spinning reality, greatest good means people are too stupid to take care of themselves, and the very concept of obj...

Sorry for the news review today - but a lot of stuff I want to write on where I think it is worth reading the articles. The "Bush Lied, People Died" always pissed me off. Pretty much in the same way that "Blood for Oil" did. Both were false. Both played on popular misconceptions of truth. In other words, both had a truthiness to them that people found appealing, that those with an off-kilter view of the world found easy to accept and believe, but that was really only tangentially related to reality. Which, come to think of it, is true for the majority of political and social beliefs people hold. Anyway, this piece by Karl Rove is well worth the read: OPINION JULY 15, 2010 My Biggest Mistake in the White House Failing to refute charges that Bush lied us into war has hurt our country. Article Comments (356) By KARL ROVE Seven years ago today, in a speech on the Iraq war, Sen. Ted Kennedy fired the first shot in an all-out assault on Pre...

The Obama administration is the dirtiest, must underhanded and scummiest administration Washington has ever seen. Which is hilarious, considering his campaign and "ideals." Of course, demagogues posing as defenders of democracy were pretty much the norm as far back as the Romans, and Greeks before them. You end up hearing a lot about them in the history books because a) they were very charismatic and b) they normally royally screwed over the nation. So - pretty much what we have now. This though... this is just despicable. Hell - even Democrats were surprised that Obama would do this as a recess appointment. Read on - but some of the quotes are downright scary. Hell, most of them are. Obama knows this guy would get torn apart, and show what the real objective of Obamacare - which along with the bank bill and his spending go a long way towards completely ruining this country. Obama is the moment in time when America has peaked, and starts to decline. Not the recession. Recessi...

No - not the mountain. Synthetic marijuana. I had never even heard of this - then again I know pretty much nothing about weed in general - but seems like it is a legitimate case where regulation is needed, not something I would usually support. Read on - but two things sum up the article to me - the girl's reaction to the ban, and the meth-lab nature of the manufacturing: Synthetic Marijuana Spurs State Bans Dan Gill for The New York Times Julie Meyers, 20, smoked synthetic marijuana at Petra Cafe and Hookah Bar in St. Louis days before a ban was signed into law. By MALCOLM GAY Published: July 10, 2010 ST. LOUIS — Seated at a hookah lounge in the Tower Grove district, Albert Kuo trained his lighter above a marbleized glass pipe stuffed with synthetic marijuana . Inhaling deeply, Mr. Kuo, an art student at an area college, singed the pipe’s leafy contents, emitting a musky cloud of smoke into the afternoon light. Related Times Top...