Book Of Norm

Sales of manual-transmission cars tick up -- is it temporary? http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-edmunds-manual-transmission-20120731,0,5444149.story --- Sent from Zite personalized magazine webOS app. Available for free in the App Catalog www.zite.com -- Sent from my HP TouchPad

Most street art is not good. However - Bansky is pretty amazing...

From gCaptain, a great nautical blog: "In this haunting image by Ruslan Eliseev, we see the sunken remains of the 76-ft Mar Sem Fin, a Brazilian boat that was used for scientific and educational expeditions. The boat, which sunk on April 7, 2012, lies at a depth of about 9 meters (30 ft) in Ardley Bay, Antarctica. Thankfully the crew was completely evacuated and nobody was hurt." One of the more amazing pictures I have seen in a while - partly because of the clarity of the water, partly the perspective, but mostly because of the "holy shit" factor.

Pebble, the adorable e-ink watch that could (might?) has announced it wont be coming home for the holidays. Actually, they just said it will miss its September 1st ship date - so there is still a (slim) chance it will be showing up this year. No hello for you The reason why it is behind? According to the company, it is because orders have skyrocketed: while they were originally planning on making only 1,000 total they now say they are working on making 15,000.... per week. That's a big ramp up. Hopefully unlike Yugomania which swept this nation before anyone actually drove the little shitbox, the pebble actually comes through on its promise. Yugomania was, sadly, a real thing

This is a great story - Gunther and his wife Christine set out in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin wall to do a tour of Africa. 500,000 miles later that journey is still going. Gunther Holtorf's 23-Year Road Trip from srterbas on Vimeo .

Interesting article. I want to agree, but I think that aging will be a more difficult nut to crack than optimists think. End of Human Aging Can Be Achieved in 20 years, experts say http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pelletier20120721

It turns out that cars spend most of their time parked. This should come as no surprise, because unless your job somehow requires that you be in the car to do it - we spend about 1/3rd of our time working and 1/3rd of our time sleeping - and we drive to get between those two (and lots of other good times). So along comes a great idea: you have this big cost sitting there in a parking lot - why not rent it out? These p2p car sharing services are now all the rage - install a remote unlock system on your car and whoosh money starts flying in... supposedly. But here is the thing: the people who are renting your car clearly don't have a car of their own. In fact your car is being rented by this guy: Pink Socks FTW Or really - if someone does already have a car and they are renting yours it means they are going to a) drive a long way, b) trash it, c) all of the above. So... why would you rent your car out? I mean yes, you get some incremental revenue. But honestly - is tha...

Back in the day, there was a tiny little division of GM called Saturn. It's goal? Compete in the small car market with the imports which were wiping the floor with bow ties. Losing So, Saturn came along, and before it became a laughing stock, it actually made some really good cars for their time. It also had an interesting theory - a lot of car buyers, especially women, but mostly just because most men want to believe that a) they know about cars, b) they know how to negotiate a deal, and c) that paying $6,995 for the "Exclusive" package was a good deal and they didn't get talked into it by the sales guy, hate buying cars.  Guess what Saturn was right. People flocked to the new brand, and they loved it. Saturn rallies were held, and even without topless tattooed women and excessive amounts of facial hair, they were more popular than Harley rallies.  Winning What killed Saturn? Oh yeah - the UAW. Because Saturn had this special agreement with the un...

Recent polls show that 22% of Americans believe that the apocalypse will come in their lifetime.  That's a startlingly high number... at first.... Then, you stop to think that only 1 in 3 Americans believe in evolution and you realize that 22% is actually doing quite well. And other than an irrational love of canned meat, holes in the ground, and guns, I would hazard that believing in the apocalypse is probably a lot less damaging than teaching children a bearded white guy (how did an Arabic Jewish guy become a Scandinavian hard rocker? I have no idea) created them by sticking his skinny ass on an all powerful Xerox machine. So go ahead, buy your rations, solar panels, rifles, seeds, generators and most importantly, SPAM. 80% of your neighbors won't know what hit them (sometime in the next 65 million years).

Yes - you read that correctly. The US Army is building a weapon which uses laser beams to guide lightning bolts at the target. If you thought this sounds like something from Unreal Tournament or Quake... you would be pretty much right. Why they decided to use a Ford Taurus as their apocalypse death car 2012 - no one knows From PopSci: Over at Picatinny Arsenal, the research and development facility and proving ground for the U.S. Army’s weaponry, engineers are developing a device that  shoots lighting bolts along a laser beam  to annihilate its target. That’s right: lighting bolts shot down laser beams. This story could easily end right here and still be the coolest thing we’ve written today, but for the scientifically curious we’ll continue. The Laser-Induced Plasma Channel (LIPC) can be used to destroy anything that conducts electricity better than the air or ground surrounding it (unexploded ordnance seems a good candidate here). It works off of some pretty ba...

This is one cool stove . When you are out camping a good stove is your best friend. Somehow, I usually seem to end up camping when it is cold out, at least at night. There is pretty much nothing better than hot instant oatmeal in the morning (something I don't ever eat not camping) or a big bowl of mac-and-cheese at night after a long hike. There are a lot of good stoves out there. For short trips, I am actually a big fan of the super cheap and light solid fuel stoves . I also have a MSR Whisperlight which is pretty much the gold standard of non-pressurized stoves. But... this new stove? Freaking awesome. It runs on basically kindling - so you just need to find some nice dry fallen branches. It not only boils your water, but it also powers a USB port at the same time. Want to charge your phone or listen to some music while you set up dinner? No problem. Weighing in at 2lbs - this is not what I would take for an overnight for 1-2 people, and also not what I would take ...

I   love   airships .  And it looks like maybe, just maybe, they might be finally getting off the ground.  Right now, the focus is logistics and transport. However, what I really want is a airship luxury liner, so that I can cruise over the Grand Canyon, Pyramids or Savannah in complete comfort.  Great PopSci article on where things stand now: A Plan For Airships That Might Finally Take Off Sky Captain and the World of Today By Josh Bearman Posted 07.02.2012 at 10:12 am 29 Comments Skeleton Crew Worldwide Aeros Corp. "Some kids wanted to be firefighters,” Igor Pasternak says. “I always thought about blimps.” Pasternak grew up in Lviv, Ukraine, near a weather station. When he was six, he convinced the Soviet meteorologists there to let him launch one of their balloons. “I was hooked,” he says. “I wanted to build airships.” We are standing in the vast wood-beamed hangar where one such vessel, a 400-foot-long “variable buoyancy ...

Ok, not really Atlantis. Actually more cool than Atlantis in a way. The UK was not an island until quite recently: it was actually just part of Doggerland. How different history would have been if Doggerland had stuck around, and instead of 1000 years of invasion-proof living the Brits would have had to fight land wars with all the other tribes (not that "Brits" were ever a "tribe" - I'm taking some liberties here). Hidden Doggerland underworld uncovered in North Sea A map of the UK with areas of the Doggerland landmass marked as red Continue reading the main story Related Stories Cave record of Britain's pioneers Mammoths survived late in Britain Sea gives up Neanderthal fossil A huge area of land which was swallowed up into the North Sea thousands of years ago has been recreated and put on display by scientists. Doggerland was an area between Northern Scotland, Denmark and the Channel Islands. It was believed to have been home to t...

I have not yet written about the ObamaCare decision. I can't really bring myself to do it. I fully believed there was no way the supreme court could uphold something so incredibly antithetical to the constitution. And yet, they did. I don't want to discuss it here. I don't want to discuss it at all. I want to close my eyes and imagine it never happened. But it did happen. And even worse, we are guaranteed to elect the architect of the whole stupid mess... seeing as both of them are more or less responsible. But seriously, looking at Obamacare and everything it will cost this nation and how little it will deliver in terms of benefit - how could anyone re-elect the idiot in chief? At least the other guy is on the right side (now...) Yes, we needed affordable health care for the about 5 million uncovered Americans (yes, 5 million, not 50 million - that number is a complete fallacy - see about 75,000 articles on the subject by the Atlantic and others), but ObamaCare is su...

I have long argued that solar power makes absolutely no sense for us baseline loving energy consuming grid using developed countries. But I love it for my boat. Or for camping. Or for my planned off-the-grid-zombie-apocalypse-ready-ski-chalet. You see - where solar makes sense is where the grid ends but electricity is still needed. Other than solar the typical answer is a diesel generator - which are relatively efficient, but loud, require a lot of fuel (which is pretty expensive these days) and are not cost effective compared to solar over the long run (cheaper up front, more $ over time). So where are the (smart) solar companies going now? To the edges of the grid: SunEdison Turns to Big New Markets for Solar Power The solar-panel installer is replacing diesel engines in villages in India and other Asian countries. 44 comments KEVIN BULLIS Friday, June 8, 2012 Jungle power:  A 430-kilowatt array of solar panels installed by Optimal Power Systems in ea...

There is something to be said for trucks which work as trucks. In the US, we have moved beyond that. Our pickup trucks drive nicely, have great interiors, and are massively overqualified for what they typically do on a daily basis. Life in Africa is not so easy on the automobile. That is why a small company is working on releasing a $6,000 SUV designed specifically for the African market. Forgoing most of what has been added to SUVs in the last 5 decades (it seems to be more on par with a 60's Land Rover), this looks like one tough nut. Nairobi-based Mobius Motors says it will be capable of handling the inhospitable roads of the continent's interior for just $6,000 – a price it says is similar to the auto rickshaw. It has 14 inches of ground clearance and beefy skid plates underneath, and will likely be powered by something small and Toyota in nature (remember - the Willys Jeep only had 45hp - gear it down, get some torque, and never drive faster than 60mph).