Book Of Norm

Virgin Galactic too tame for you? Hell, $20 million to go to the ISS too tame for you? How about flying to the Moon in an old and unused Russian space station? That's exactly what one super wealthy British entrepreneur is trying to sell, and he might just make it (the technology is in fact proven, it's only the price and the management which are the big challenges - and they will be big challenges).  The final frontier in holiday destinations: British company prepares tourist trips to the moon (it's a 500,000-mile round-trip and will cost you £100million) By  EDDIE WRENN PUBLISHED:  10:17 EST, 19 June 2012  |  UPDATED:  11:35 EST, 20 June 2012 Comments ( 29 ) Share A British company is offering seats to adventurers willing to go the extra mile on a historic journey to the moon. The first 500,000-mile round trip in a converted Soviet-era space station could take place as early as 2015. Art Dula, founder and chief execu...

If you've been wanting to get your hands on one last new Saab but missed out on the great Saab sell-off when Saab Cars North America declared bankruptcy, well, your ship has now come in. Actually, it came in last year – but hundreds of new Saabs got waylaid at ports in California and New Jersey because of the bankruptcy, according to SaabWorld.net. Those cars are now slated for auction, some 900 of them, which will be available for dealers, exporters and rental car companies to bid on beginning next week. Eventually, 300 of these cars should make their way to Saab dealers, where they're expected to be sold off at 30- to 50-percent discounts. The other 600 will either be exported or used as rentals, according to the report, so "the price of Saabs will not be severely depressed." Besides the new cars, some 67 company cars, including some interesting stuff like a 1960 Saab Quantum IV and a 1970 Sonnett III, will also be auctioned off, according to the report. Of ...

On Jun 25, 2012 9:42 AM, "Healthy Competition" < healthycompetition@cato.org > wrote: Health policy news, commentary, and resources from a free-market perspective Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser . ...

Well worth checking out Incredible Long Exposure Photographs Shot from Orbit http://www.petapixel.com/2012/06/07/incredible-long-exposure-photographs-shot-from-orbit/ --- Sent from Zite personalized magazine webOS app. Available for free in the App Catalog www.zite.com -- Sent from my HP TouchPad

Scientists Decipher Almost the Entire Genome of an Unborn Baby - Popular Science Above is the story of how it is getting easier to get the genome of your child read early and easily. This is an important and necessary step on the road to genetically managing and eventually manipulating reproduction. The question of whether this is a good thing however is a little trickier. Humanity could split in the relatively near future into two sub-populations: those who can afford genetic engineering or selection (as well as drugs which enhance brain function and medical care which will extend lives perhaps indefinitely) and those who can't. I think we are a long way from manipulating the genome to create something new, but we are very close to being able to select from what is already there.

In Five Years, Most Africans Will Have Smartphones - TechCrunch

GM’s Next Full-Size SUVs: Money Talks, So the Truck-Based Escalade Doesn’t Walk Cadillac didn't want to build a new Escalade, but people just wanted to keep buying it...

I love my Palm Pre. Though I now have the latest and greatest Android phone etc etc, the Palm was the better attempt at making a truly usable and intuitive smartphone.  Android is Linux: yeah, you can customize it, but it just kind of sucks to use. Palm came up with something really new and innovative with the Pre. This is the inside story of how they did it, how close they came to falling apart even before the release, and why they so quickly faded into nothing after the Pre came to market (though in my opinion the single decision to go Sprint only is what doomed the company).  http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-inside-story-pre-postmortem

The interesting story here is not that the golden age of books has passed (it has - though the golden age of literature might still be going strong...) but that the "golden age" was in fact very, very short. A Golden Age of Books? There Were Only 500 Real Bookstores in 1931 JUN 8 2012, 6:18 PM ET   17 And two-thirds of American counties had no bookstore at all. Some Ivy League graduates feeling superior, 1939 (New York Public Library). I'm reading a fascinating book called  Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America , published in 1984 by the popular historian  Kenneth C. Davis . I picked it up because many of the changes that social media and the Internet are supposed to have wrought on culture are ascribed to the rise of the paperback in this book.There's all this talk in the book about "the Paperback Revolution" that "enabled American writers to find American readers by the millions" among the "Paperback Generation."...

Want to watch contestants compete for a chance for a one-way ticket to the Red Planet? That's the proposal of a new and well connected group looking to establish human settlement on Mars. Of course, given the general level of human intelligence, team work, and leadership capability seen on reality TV shows, this plan is clearly fucked from the beginning. The only terraforming this guy knows is for his hair Still though, an interesting concept... Mars One plans to establish human settlement on Mars in 2023 No return ticket June 3, 2012 Mars colony in 2025 (credit: Mars One) Help wanted: astronaut. Must be willing to relocate to Mars — permanently. Hire date: 2013. Benefits: make history, start new planetary civilization, star in reality TV show. Apply to:  Mars One .   Netherlands-based Mars One hopes to establish the first human settlement on Mars in 2023. It has created a technical plan for this ambitious mission that is “as simple as possi...

German has decided to sell Israel some diesel electric subs which can be fitted with nukes.. but don't believe what the news reports are telling you. But first, a little backstory on one of my favorite machines... The cool thing about diesel electrics is that they are great at fighting in the littoral zone (the continental shelf more or less, as well as some of the shallow seas, gulfs, and straights). They are so badass that an entire NATO invasion exercise had to be re-run because the "defense" had a little Dutch submarine which kept blowing up the aircraft carrier. NATO's solution? Run the exercise without the submarine. The US was so intrigued they borrowed the sub for two years. If you want to read more about theses amazing machines, I got a great post for ya: (it's funny, I promise) http://bookofnorm.blogspot.com/2010/08/romeo-oh-romeo.html But back to the point of this post: Israel has "nuclear missile submarines." If you read some...

I am disgusted with the United States right now. The Obama administration could not have come at a worse time. Not only will he manage to fuck our economy for at least the next decade, he is also failing to support pro-Democratic uprisings across the Middle East. Right now, women and children are being massacred in Syria . They have been in open civil war for over a year and all that the Obama has offered them in support is a bunch of left over "hope and change" stickers which somehow missed being put on the back of Priuses. I don't know what we are waiting for. The rebels to lose? Over 1,000 women and children to be killed in the same place at the same time? I really don't know what it would take to get Obama to actually do something other than protect is own political ass, but in my opinion - those deaths could have easily been prevented by something as basic as air support and munitions, without even putting American lives at risk. Fucking pathetic.

I really don't like the UAW. I actually hate them. Yes, it's a strong word. Yes, it's accurate. Yes, if I ever run for office, someone will dig this up. Screw you future reporter. Here is the short scoop - Hyundai was opening a new plant in Georgia. They had 877 jobs available. They received 20,000 job applications. Yes - that is a) not a good sign for the economy b) shows the UAW is completely full of crap and c) shows that Obama (who should be given the UAW lifetime achievement award for what he did to the debt-holders of old GM) is still a complete asshole. But of course, the "private sector is just fine" - the man is an idiot.

My new theory of everything, what I am calling valuation theory, basically states that people have a hard time putting accurate values on a lot of the decisions they make. This does not make them irrational actors: instead it means they are acting rationally, but with bad numbers. For example, people have a very hard time coming up with a accurate valuation of something very bad but not very likely... for instance.. dying in a motorcycle accident. This is why people don't always wear helmets. The second question is whether they should wear helmets. And I would say no. Perhaps it's a cynical view, but the good they are doing donating organs (basically, because they are generally healthy and dying by hitting their heads but keeping their bodies intact, non-helmet wearing bike riders make great organ donors) coupled with the fact that not wearing a helmet doesn't really put anyone else at greater risk makes me believe they should be allowed to do what they want. Th...