Book Of Norm

Basically, NASA is looking at sending people to MARS. And that's it: just sending, no bringing them back. This is something that has been discussed in space circles for quite some time now. The reason? It is a lot easier to send something from Earth into the gravity well of Mars, and leave it there, rather than trying to get it back again. Even without an atmosphere, lifting off from Mars is still much more difficult than getting off of the surface of something like the Moon. And so the discussion at NASA (and DARPA for some reason is also funding this) focuses on a 100year spaceship: you get sent to Mars. And then you live there. Until you die. And the basic public reaction to this is oh my god they are going to send them there to die! Well, sorta. You are giving people the opportunity to be the first humans to live (yes, live) on another planet. If you also end up being the first humans to die on another planet, let us hoe they would have a long and productive life. These people ...

This is an interesting one. Obviously, General Electric is invested in the idea of electric cars.. but this is a big order. Right now there are probably less than 10,000 current-model mass-produced electric cars on the road. And in the next few weeks, GE wants to place an order for "tens of thousands" all on their own. Basically, they want to replace much of their sales fleet of 45,000 vehicles with electric cars, as soon as possible. Seeing as how they are involved in the production of 1/3rd of the world's electricity, one might say that they have a vested interest. Even still, this is a very aggressive move for a company which historically has been very cost sensitive. The majority of the orders will likely be for the Nissan Leaf, and the Renault something or other, because Renault has a partnership with Better Place, who GE is also working with. An interesting move, and one that is clearly timed to jump-start the electric car market.

I love it. Absolutely love it. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Rhode Island told Obama to shove it. Literally. Just hours before the Obamination was scheduled to arrive in Rhode Island today, he was given a nice warm welcome by this fine gentleman: This fine gentleman is Frank T. Caprio, who is locked in a three-way race that includes former senator Lincoln Chafee, who is running as an independent. What kind words did he have for our nation's president and the leader of his party? "He could take his endorsement and really shove it, as far as I’m concerned,” Thing is, Obama is friends with the independent and so wont be giving Mr. Caprio his endorsement (which these days is probably a good thing for Mr. Caprio). His further comments? "I will wear as a badge of honor and a badge of courage that he doesn’t want to endorse me as a Democrat because I am a different kind of Democrat,” I really have no clue what Mr. Caprio's politics are, but I am hoping he, lik...

Tired of bluetooth? Tired of devices not really working together? Tired of having to set passwords etc etc. Wi-Fi Direct is coming - and it sounds good. Wi-Fi Direct enlists a technology known as "Soft AP": Soft AP, in a nutshell, is software-based access point functionality built into Wi-Fi Direct certified devices. These devices are capable of routing and directing network traffic just like access points and routers. Wi-Fi Direct is expected to provide superior connectivity over Bluetooth: Wi-Fi Direct is not just an alternative to Bluetooth connectivity; it delivers a better connection and has greater range than Bluetooth. Legacy Wi-Fi devices are supported: If you have one Wi-Fi Direct certified device; that device can connect with 802.11n as well as b and g devices. Wi-Fi Direct has built-in security: WPA2 is bundled into this wireless standard and unlike traditional wireless routers and access points, cannot be disabled. Applications are a driving factor o...

Turns out that automakers are making a lot more money then they did last year. Which is not really that surprising. But looking a little deeper into the numbers, it tuns out that Ford and GM are making a lot of their money through selling full-sized pickup trucks. The big reason for this? Farming. The agrarian economy is booming, because of droughts in Russia and China which have lead to rising wheat and other commodity prices, they have made $9 billion more this year than at the same point last year. One of farmer's favorite pastimes is spending their hard earned cash on a new workhorse. The sale of pickup trucks is up 14% year over year, versus about 9% for the overall industry. Why do automakers love trucks? Because along with SUVs and luxury cars, trucks make $$$. On big trucks, they can often make $15,000 or more... even though the "big 3" have figured out how to make money on cars (unlike the years of losses on cars they took in the 90's), $15,000 per transactio...

For the past... 48 1/2 years, the v6 option on a muscle car was always.. well.. awkward. Yes, it often accounted for a big chunk of sales, but the idea of owning something that looked like a muscle car but went like a Toyota? There has always been a certain type, or types, who owned the v6 muscle cars... and well... you wouldn't invited them to your son's pool party. And, excluding divorces, mid-life crises, and your teenage years (see - I said you would not invite them to your son's pool party), you would never have bought one either. All that has changed. The current crop of muscle cars are defined by modern, and rather impressive, v6's. They all have over 300hp, and let me tell you, that is a lot. A few years ago 300hp was only available for $50,000+. A few years before that, it was only available in Italian cars shaped like doorstops. The Dodge Challenger was the latest to join the fray, ditching its old, 220hp unit for a thoroughly modern v6. Which gives this, rath...

I don't normally get drawn into human interest stories - but I found this one particularly interesting, and rather moving. He invites suicide jumpers for a cup of tea Don Ritchie moved to a house outside Sydney, Australia, for the clifftop view. But soon he was stopping suicides by inviting potential jumpers inside for a cup of tea. Don Ritchie has been awarded a medal for bravery and an Order of Australia (the nation’s second highest honor) for averting hundreds of would-be suicides by approaching people and offering them a cup of tea. ‘I used to sell kitchen scales and bacon cutters,’ he says. Now, ‘I’m trying to sell people life.’ Jeremy Piper/AP By Kathy Marks , / Correspondent / October 18, 2010 Sydney, Australia Don Ritchie bought his house for the beautiful views it affords of Sydney Harbor and ...

Yeah... so there is now a 11.6' MacBook Air. Which basically means it is a netbook. All in all, it has marginally better spec's than my Acer Aspire One. Which I bought for $200, brand new, from Target on sale. So... lets see how they compare. Yeah.. the MacBook maintains a slight edge all the way down to the final hurdle... which is that it costs 5x more than the Acer. Honestly, I could buy the Acer, an iPad (which is also overpriced) an iPod Touch and still have money left over to buy a nice digital camera. You would have to be out of your mind to buy the MacBook. Of course, as they are selling to Apple users, they will likely sell many of them, and then cackle all the way to the bank.

I am a big fan of the original X-Prize, and the current X-prize foundation. However, in this one case, I never thought that what they were asking for was possible, and well, it wasn't. Basically, for years, consumer advocates have been going on and on about how it is easy to build a 100mpg car if only car companies tried and were not tied up with big oil. BS. The two main things holding back mpg's are 1) safety regulations and 2) consumer preference for cars that move faster than granny on a penny-farthing. Yeah - you try merging onto a highway on this... The issue is basically this: if you want to build a light, high-mpg car which is drivable, you have to not pass safety regulations. How do you not pass safety regulations? You take away one wheel and call your car a motorcycle (which is what tricycles currently count as). And you get this, which won the side-by-side automotive X-Prize: Li-Ion Motors Wave II – Yeah, it's that fugly I would never want to be seen in one, let ...

First, full disclosure - I have not driven the Chevy Volt. But I will give you my quick and dirty analysis. Essentially - this is the perfect commuter car, if you drive about 50miles or less per day. It is not a great car for pretty much everything else. And let me tell you why: First of all, there has been a lot of controversy recently about whether the Volt is a range extended electric vehicle or a plug-in hybrid. What's the difference, and why does it matter? Well, basically the issue is that GM told everyone that the Volt was going to be the world's first mass-produced range extended electric vehicle. And all of the enviro bloggers got their patagonia panties in a twist when they found out that the little 88hp iron-block 4-banger under the hood is attached to a clutch which can both send power to the 55kw generator and to the front wheels. Turns out that this is 10-15% more efficient that just having the motor powering the generator under range extended mode... but the ecom...

Palm has announced version 2.0 of what I still think was the best phone in the world... nine months ago. And it will be completely revolutionary! And by completely revolutionary, I mean it is completely identical to the palm pre which is sitting next to me on the couch right now. Yeah... I mean really, pretty much identical. It has a 5.0mp camera instead of 3.0. And 16gb instead of 8gb, but the Pre+ on Verizon already had that... It also comes with the obligatory upgrade from 600mhz to 1ghz, and 256mb RAM to 512 - but every other phone that went through that (the Droid comes to mind) showed very little real world speed improvement. So... this is basically the same phone... What is new however, is webOS 2.0 - which is a good thing. Because webOS is still, and in my opinion with no ambiguity at all, the best mobile operating system in the world. Honestly, its just so much better than Android or the iPhone it is silly - but it does not have the same quality of apps, the major downfall. Th...

The entire country (well - the old-line socialist part of it) of France is currently in revolt. They are burning trash, blockading fuel depots, and refusing to go to work, go to school, or wear deodorant. Of course, they never wear deodorant, but they have occasionally been known to go to school and go to work. The reason for all of this gnashing of teeth, destruction of public property, and increasingly malignant odor is because the govt, lead by one of my favorite world leaders Sarkozy, wants to raise the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62. Ahhhhh the horror. The End Result? France - you are one big country of fail, with a few standout truly exceptional individuals that keep the whole damn thing running, and have prevented you from being completely worthless.

We recently found out that the Moon, or part of it anyway, has twice as much water on its surface as the Sahara desert. Obviously, thats still not a lot, but it is at the same time a pretty incredible finding. This is the quick, and very impressive story of how some extra payload capacity and efficient operation lead to one of the most memorable space missions of recent years: NASA's Explosive Findings on the Moon The Brilliant Idea: Sending a spacecraft made from off-the-shelf parts careening into the moon at 2.5 kilometers per second to find water ice. By Logan Ward and the Editors of Popular Mechanics Email Print RSS Share October 4, 2010 6:30 AM (Illustration by Michael Tschernjajew) 1. Shepherding Spacecraft Rather than commission expensive new devices for the shepherdi...

Ambitious green city project strives to emulate Silicon Valley's R&D culture Urban Operating System Living PlanIT via Fast Company A new eco-city planned in Portugal takes a cue from biology, using a centralized computer “brain” to control functions like water use, waste processing and energy consumption. It’s the biggest attempt at urban metabolism , which attempts to compare cities to living organisms. PlanIT Valley, in southern Portugal near the town of Paredes, will use a network of sensors much like a nervous system to collect data and control the city, New Scientist reports. A firm called Living PlanIT is leading the effort, and aims to make PlanIT Valley a low-carbon city that also provides a European alternative to Silicon Valley. The $19 billion city could be built by 2015, beating Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City by five years. As a centrally operated smart municipality, it’s more ambitious than Masdar or...

Pretty wild story, which I am sure you all have already seen. But this pictures really bring it home in a new way. Oct. 13, 2010 -- In the wake of last week's toxic sludge spill in Hungary , NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite snapped these images of the disaster area, showing a wide swath of destruction. The spill immediately killed four people in the area and poured into the Raba River before reaching the Danube later in the week . The bright red sludge is an iron-rich byproduct of refining aluminum ore. It is highly alkaline, and several people who came in contact with it were hospitalized with chemical burns.

Well, this is really nothing new, as the UN is one of the most ineffective organizations ever created. Calling it a force for world peace would be like calling Goat Island good at stopping Niagara Falls... Nonetheless, the UN is determined that it is going to save us from ourselves. Even if that means preventing us from saving ourselves. What I am talking about is geoengineering - the controversial concept of using engineering to affect the planet as a whole. Generally this means things like cutting back on the amount of energy we are getting from the sun, or other measures to prevent global warming. I don't see the issue here. What we have done for the last 200 years - that was geoengineering. This would just be doing it directly. For me, it is the same argument as genetically modified foods. We have been genetically modifying foods for the past 10,000 years, but now when we do it directly, it has become a huge issue. Humanities best asset is our ability to solve problems. What th...

Not sure how I missed this - it happened back in May. Amazing stuff though regardless... absolutely incredible really. Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 - the world's first synthetic organism Image Gallery (2 images) A research team, led by Craig Venter of America’s J. Craig Venter Institute (JVCI), has successfully produced the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cell. Called Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 the synthetic cell is the proof of principle that genomes can be designed in the computer, chemically made in the laboratory and transplanted into a recipient cell to produce a new self-replicating cell controlled only by the synthetic genome. The resulting bacterium could be regarded as the first truly synthetic organism. The researchers now hope to be able to explore the machinery of life, and to engineer bacteria designed for specific purposes such as producing drugs, biofuels or othe...

WOW. OMG. FACEBOOK ABUSES YOUR PRIVACY! FRONT PAGE OF THE WSJ!!! OMG OMG OMG yeah. related news: Chávez nationalizes a company Google buys something Apple makes a shit ton of money The earth is, indeed, round How the hell is this news?

Yes, robots are taking your job. Well.. sorta. In what has become the modern standard for recovering from a recession, the first place that companies put their money is capital expenditures - hiring comes later. This is because capital is just a lot more reliable than people. You've already downsized, you have (hopefully) kept your best people, and now you are going to give them additional resources in order for them to be able to do more. Or in some cases, you just don't need anyone anymore, and you replaced them all with robots. http://www.good.is/post/automation-insurance-robots-are-replacing-middle-class-jobs/ Economists (in the article and other places) call this "the destruction of the middle class." I call it "replacing semi-skilled manufacturing workers with robots that are faster, more efficient, more cost effective, and the long-term path to a better world." In other words, low-paying jobs (non-manufacturing unskilled blue collar) are hard to repla...

Hahhahahah. Love it. The United Auto Workers are protesting against the United Auto Workers. Fantastic. Obama's favorite union, and the one which was given almost all of GM and Chrysler rather than, oh I dont know... the secured and unsecured creditors who owned it and were owed back their money (this whole capitalist system we have? It relies on the ability to lend money and expect certain legal security - not that Obama has ever really cared about being legal) is now eating its own tail. Basically what they are protesting is the two-tiered solution the UAW came up with. Back when the government, the UAW, and the management of GM and Chrysler realized that they had managed to collectively destroy the US auto industry, the UAW agreed (oh so gracefully) to take wage cuts. Sorta. You see, they did not take wage cuts. They said that any NEW workers would be paid 1/2 of what current workers were paid. Regardless of skill, ability, productivity or any of those other silly metrics the c...

Turns out a little bit of a trend among hardcore gamers is building calculators and even basic full-fledged computers using materials inside of computer games. While this might sound a little like using laser-cannons to invent the bow-and-arrow, I think it is damn cool. Here are a few examples: Computing Inside Videogames Dwarven Computer : A complete 8-bit programmable computer built inside Dwarf Fortress . It has 672 pumps, 2,000 logs, 8,500 mechanisms and thousands of other assorted bits and knobs like doors and stone blocks. The Dwarven computer is Turing complete , which means it meets the definition of a universal computer. The Minecraft ALU : A 16-bit arithmetic unit built using 8,507 blocks of ‘Redstone,’ a cube with special properties found in the Minecraft game. The entire ALU uses 6,835 wires and 1,672 torches — the most basic logic unit in the game. Little Big Planet Calculator : An extremely complex yet fully functioning calculator created inside one level of the game. ...

I have always looked to the UK, specifically the 1950's-1980's UK, as an example of what can happen to a country where it takes its position for granted, when it retreats into its shell, when the primary concern of the population is 'security' rather than growth. And I still think it is the closest example, and a clear sign of what can and in my opinion already is happening. But there is another example out there. Japan. Today. In 1991, economists were predicting that Japan would overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2010. In fact, Japan’s economy remains the same size it was then: a gross domestic product of $5.7 trillion at current exchange rates. During the same period, the United States economy doubled in size to $14.7 trillion, and this year China overtook Japan to become the world’s No. 2 economy. Takeaways from this? Even the greatest can fall. Oh yeah, and China is not on a path to unlimited growth - though I think growth is more limited b...

WELCOME TO ADVENTURE! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS? >YES YOU ARE SOMEWHERE IN BELTWAY FOREST, WHERE SOME HAVE FOUND TREASURES OF GOLD ALTHOUGH SOME HAVE ENTERED AND NEVER BEEN SEEN AGAIN. MAGIC IS SAID TO WORK IN THE FOREST. I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. DIRECT ME WITH SIMPLE COMMANDS. YOU ARE IN AN OVAL OFFICE. THERE IS SNOW OUTSIDE. YOU ARE BEHIND A DESK. ON DESK THERE IS A BUST OF CHURCHILL. YOU HAVE A CONGRESS. YOU HAVE A SENATE. YOU HAVE A MEDIA. YOU HAVE A TELEPROMPTER. YOU HAVE A MILITARY. YOU HAVE A BIG JET. YOU HAVE $3 TRILLION OF GOLD. YOU HAVE 82% APPROVAL HEALTH. THERE IS 7.2% UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE FOREST. YOU HAVE A RACE CARD. YOU HAVE INAUGURAL PARTY LEFTOVERS. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO? >EAT LEFTOVERS >RETURN BUST YOU ARE IN AN OVAL OFFICE. YOU ARE BEHIND A DESK. ON DESK THERE IS NO BUST OF CHURCHILL. THERE ARE NO MORE LEFTOVERS. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO? >GIVE SPEECH YOU ARE IN AN OVAL OFFICE. YOUR APPROVAL HEALTH IS 81%. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO...