Book Of Norm

Advanced human civilization has lasted about 3000 years. The industrial age is only about 250 years old. But I, for one, hope mankind is around for much longer than that. And it turns out, I am not the only one.  So, when the nuclear zombie apocalypse comes... where you gonna be? Because if your answer is "downtown NYC" - you know you are screwed. These sites give you a little more protection, and a little more hope that you or (most likely) someone else will at least be around to see the cockroaches, crows, hogs, seagulls and coyotes take over the earth. A really bad case of the Mondays 1) The Seed Vault While most bunkers on this list were built during the cold war when the focus was on building shelters to survive the nuclear holocaust and, most importantly, return fire, today there are those out there who are taking a much longer term approach to keeping the human race going.  In a remote mountainside on the Norwegian tundra sits th...

EV Startup Aptera Motors Pulls the Plug

Marines in Afghanistan Execute the World's First Cargo Resupply with an Unmanned Helicopter - http://pulse.me/s/4b8Kv

These are your top 10 worst-selling vehicles of 2011 - Autoblog - http://pulse.me/s/4I8x6

Christopher Columbus's efforts to obtain support for his voyages were not hampered by a European belief in a flat Earth. Sailors and navigators of the time knew that the Earth was roughly spherical, but (correctly) disagreed with Columbus's estimate of the distance to India, which was approximately one-sixth of the actual distance. If the Americas did not exist, and had Columbus continued to India, he would have run out of supplies before reaching it at the rate he was traveling. Without the ability to determine longitude at sea, he could not have noticed that his estimate was an error in time to return. This longitude problem remained unsolved until the 18th century, when the lunar distance method emerged in parallel with efforts by inventor John Harrison to create the first marine chronometers. The intellectual class had known that the Earth was spherical since the works of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Eratosthenes made a very good estimate of the Earth's d...

Ok, ok, I would say that the clock of the long now, or the new atomic clock in Boulder are probably the real contenders for the best clock in the world. But this? This is just freaking cool - and you could probably build one yourself.

These are pretty damn cool... I wish I had the slide one when I was a kid..

One of the publicly released bidders for Saab has just pulled back, shooting insults at GM for making the deal impossible. Essentially what is going on is this: Saab is completely bankrupt, but licenses a lot of its technology from GM. And by "a lot of its technology" I mean the entire Saab 9-5 and 9-4X, leaving the company with the rights only to the new 9-3 (with the previous 9-5 and current, my, 9-3 already having been sold to China). Now, the new 9-3 concept is cool, but the production car doesn't even exist yet. The old 9-5 lives on, with funky headlights And my 9-3 lives on, pretty much unchanged But the reality is this: one car does not a brand make. Here is the full story: "Nearly three months on the Saab story is the same: company makes a bid, General Motors knocks it back. But this time, the latest round of corporate "He said/She said" puts Turkey's Brightwell Holdings on the other side of the table instead of a Chinese comp...

mmmmmm

This is pretty amazing - print media, not doing as well as it was once...

This is getting ridiculous. The government is now going to regulate a backup camera on every car. This also mandates a LCD and complex wiring on every car. The upshot? They estimate it will save 100 lives a year. Ok, noble cause and all that. But lets think about this for a second. There are 5.5 million vehicles sold in the US each year. Each of these systems will add, conservatively, $200 to the cost of a new vehicle. Do the math. That's $1.1 billion dollars. To save 100 people. In other words, $110 million per life saved. There is only one just way to put a value on a human life: the value of another human life. For $1.1 billion, you could save orders of magnitudes more lives than 100. And that is the only math which makes sense. You can't regulate every risk out of existence. This is the real world. You have to chose. Everything that you chose means you didn't choose something else. This is a bad choice.

Green is dead. Long live Green. Most clean technology is a complete and utter waste of time. And now it turns out, a complete and utter waste of money. Fail. Epic Fail. In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75 billion. By 2008, it had leaped to $4.1 billion. And the federal government followed. Through a mix of loans, subsidies, and tax breaks, our lovely and almost completely misguided government directed roughly $44.5 billion into the sector between late 2009 and late 2011. The bill which allowed the government to do so was ironically designed to funnel money into nuclear, but the nuclear industry just never took off, due to the shortsightedness of mankind. The investments did result in some real capacity: at the end of 2006, the total capacity of all the wind turbines installed in the US was 11,468 megawatts, enough to power 3.2 million homes. By 2010, it was nearly four time...