True, it may be a tremendous breakthrough that will save many lives and alleviate the sufferings of many more, but if anyone comes near me with that thing, I'm out the door.
Thursday, 23 June 2011
The Mermaid
True, it may be a tremendous breakthrough that will save many lives and alleviate the sufferings of many more, but if anyone comes near me with that thing, I'm out the door.
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
ZEHST
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| A seaweed-based fuel economy? I don't think so. |
Interesting, but when did hydrogen become a "biofuel"?
SonicStar
Also, it has a bit of a Fireflash air about it, so I'm giving it extra points.
Undersea bubble craft
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Doing the maths
I'd be more impressed if it weren't that a) she counted servings as "meals", b) most of the dishes were stews, and c) $21.92 of the budget was blown on a single organic chicken at $3.49 per pound.
For that amount of money, I could have bought four Costco chickens already roasted and have enough left over for proper side dishes in obscene portions and a couple of bottles of plonk.
Now that's economy.
Update: I just noticed that she used the neologism "frugalicious".
I'm calling the police.
Liberation!
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| Pasta of Evil |
You'd think I'd have learned from that episode, but a couple of years ago, not noticing the the brown colour, I accidentally bought a packet of whole-grain spaghetti and with true Yorkshire stinginess I resolved to eat it. Until then, I never realised that it was possible to actually boil wood or that marinara sauce doesn't do much to hide the fact that you need a steak knife to cut the spaghetti.
Come to think of it, the article was wrong. Whole grain pasta does have health benefits–If you're going on an Atkins diet and want a reason to swear off starches, this is it.
The power of chicken
Fascinating and slightly surreal.
Monday, 20 June 2011
The Green last stand
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| Rio, Kyoto, Copenhagen, Masada; not going exactly as planned. |
A matter of perspective
Makes you feel bloody useless.
Concept cars
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| Astra Gnome: "Time and Space Car", 1956 |
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Friday, 17 June 2011
Breathalyser watch
Your moment of culture
More of this wonderful performance here.
Thursday, 16 June 2011
Time to pull out the woolly jumpers
Global warming activists responded by pretending that their shoes were untied.
update: James Delingpole weighs in.
New edicts will be issued by world leaders including President Ryan of the US, Prime Minister Farage of Great Britain and Aussie premier Plimer, scrapping High Speed Rail, abandoning all renewable energy schemes (apart from, maybe, hydroelectric) and making the ownership of 4 x 4s or similar gas-guzzling vehicles compulsory by 2015. Stringent punishments to be introduced for those whose carbon footprint falls below a certain agreed minimum level.
Why the hurry?
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| Scrapped. |
There's a pattern here. Invincible is being cut into scrap as we speak, Ark Royal is on the block, the Nimrods were shredded within weeks of demobbing, and now the Harriers are off to the USA to be stripped for spares. Why? The best answer I've seen so far is that the coalition is angered by all the criticism of the defence cuts and is doing everything they can to make them irreversible as, according to Con Coughlin at the Telegraph, an act of petty revenge.
I am reliably informed that the decision to sell the Harriers, which was only taken yesterday, was an act of vengeance against Admiral Stanhope for daring to suggest that the Government might wish to reconsider its decision to scrap a vital maritime capability.
This government is not only incompetent, it is childish.
Oh, Sheep!
What I want to know is, how the deuce did it get up there in the first place?
Wednesday, 15 June 2011
Airbus 2050
M Champion lost me the moment he said "experience". I had an airline "experience" last Saturday and one is enough, thank you. I'll grant that some of this is interesting and if Airbus can pull off a passenger cabin with a panoramic view, I will be impressed. However, all these "smart tech zones" and "revitalising zones" amount to one big "aggravation zone".
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| Why is the bracing so weird? |
Call it the "I just want to get my destination in one piece with a reasonable degree of comfort and no, you may not use my body heat to power your bloody aeroplane because I'm using it and clearly you don't understand what the auxiliary power unit is for, so naff off! zone".
10 fixes
What happened? Did their Soma shipment get lost?
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
Swings and roundabouts
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| HMS Victory |
Speaking of the Americans, Mr Barack Hussein Obama has once again shown how he really feels about Britain by backing Argentina over the Falklands (or the Malvinas, as the US State Department now refers to them). Admiral Sir John "Sandy" Woodward has even gone so far as saying that in the present situation, Britain couldn't hope to hold or retake the islands if 1982 replayed itself. Not surprising, since Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope states that without Ark Royal or the Harriers, Britain can't hope to even hang on in Libya much longer.
The only good news is that Trident has again been excluded from any planned cuts. Thank God for that. With the way things are going, the Independent Nuclear Deterrent may not only be Britain's only claim to top table status, but it may need to be promoted from last line of defence to first line of defence.
Update: Lord West: "Stupid" not to reopen review.
The age of the robot car
But a world filled with robot cars may have consequence even their creator can’t predict. Driverless cars would be a perfect match for car-sharing services such as Zipcar or Getaround, gradually replacing the idea of car ownership with “mobility-as-a-service.” That, in turn, may lead to a precipitous fall in car ownership--as high as 50%--while breathing new life into suburbia and creating more congestions as the pain of commuting lessens. And what would halving the number of cars on the road mean for the Detroit Three--and the taxpayers who’d like the rest of their bailout back?Interesting, though the author is clearly a city boy. Robot cars have their advantages and I'd love to see them perfected, but they sound very much like an urban phenomenon for people for whom owning a car in central London is like being given a dead albatross complete with neck rope. Out where I live, the car isn't just a taxi that I happen to own; it's a hauler (my 4X4 is legally classed as a truck), emergency vehicle, people transport, dog transport, and a key element in the Szondy family disaster planning. What to do if the balloon goes up? The three-day packs are in the Blazer. Furthermore, I live on a mountain, so some cyber-Prius isn't going to cut it if the road up gets icy. And then there's the fact that if I do order a roaming robot car with my smart phone, "around the corner" is at least seven miles away. Also, I sincerely doubt if these would be built with travelling any distance in mind.
The most chilling point is found in the last paragraph:
Perhaps in the future, they will socialize on smart phones in driverless cars.Oh, Lord, they'll want me to socialise. Exactly the thing I've spent half a century trying to avoid. No, thank you.
Frühstück, Mein Herr?
It looks as if the PR2 general purpose robots are paying off. Now if they can master eggs, bacon, baked beans, and chips with a mug of tea, then they'll be on to something.
Monday, 13 June 2011
Fly the ghastly skies
What made matters worse was that I'd been booked on one of those budget airlines that charge you extra for breathing inside the cabin and provide you with seats so small that you can't wear even a light summer jacket without it flowing over the arm rests. Worse, the only "free" entertainment aboard was the lone music channel that consisted entirely of Minnesotan artists. Thank God I'd remembered my MP3 player stocked with Beethoven symphonies and a couple of feature films–not that the latter did much good over the roar of the engines. Beethoven can cope with that, but not much else can.
Regular readers will know that I can't stand air travel. At least, I can't stand regular commercial air travel. If I travel by seaplane or some local prop service, I'm happy. But put me in those flying cattle cars that lurch between major airports, and I am miserable.
It isn't just the indignity of going through security checks that make me feel like I've been arrested. That's a nightmare in itself, but at least I get my revenge at the full-body scanner when the junior KGB agent has to look at the outline of my middle-aged body. No, it's mainly the increasing coarseness of it all. I've been flying for over forty years and I recall when air travel was an adventure. More than that, when it was something to be looked forward to rather than dreaded. There was once a time when airlines promised (and delivered) speed, comfort, and service. They weren't perfect by any means, but they at least did their best. It wasn't that long ago that airliners boasted lounges, bars, and proper sleeping berths. True, tickets back then were too expensive for the common man, but even when the age of mass travel started there was enough of a trickle-down from First Class that the coach passengers enjoyed an echo of gracious travelling.
I can understand how things have changed. Once the airlines competed against railways, ocean liners, and even airships. Now they compete against themselves in an environment that cuts margins to the bone, yet doesn't force enough of the weak sisters out of the game to make way for the real innovators. Add in security and government regulations and you end up with a powerful downward pressure combined with a bureaucratic mindset. All of this could be tolerated if it weren't for how a sense of shabbiness has crept into the whole thing. Despite the efforts of some of the better airports to improve things, terminals are more and more like coach stations without quite so many puddles of fresh urine. The depressing thing is that at least with coach travel you get a decent view of the countryside. As air travel becomes more like waiting for a Greyhound, so the passengers look and act more like the sort of people who do that sort of waiting: Men who dress like children, persons carrying frightening looking parcels, and those you really don't want to make eye contact or inhale downwind of.
Add in a service philosophy that treats passengers like cattle and you get flights like the one I was on Saturday where a coffee trolley becomes a source of excitement like an actual second of plot development during an episode of Game of Thrones. No wonder I was the only one aboard who felt obligated to put on a jacket to travel instead of a shell suit and a baseball cap.
Why has this happened? Why this race to the bottom and why have people responded in kind? I think it's because air travel, at least at the major airlines end, is a bust. True, jet liners are fast and they don't require much infrastructure compared to railways and cars, but getting hundreds of tons of metal to fly through the air isn't cheap and it leaves so little profit margin that slicing an inch off the leg room sounds like a good idea. Can you imagine someone giving the deck chairs aboard the Queen Mary or the smoking lounge seats on the Hindenburg a similar treatment? So we've gone from stratoliners with sleeping berths to economy seats designed for midgets. Worse, it produces the attitude that makes the Peter Sellars advert at the top of the article look ludicrous by today's standards.
So, whats to be done? There are some simple things, such as accepting that you get what you pay for and that anyone who flies Ryan Air or Sun Country gets what they deserve, and there are others such as encouraging stronger competition in freer markets, but I suspect that technology will have the decisive role. For example, the development of more sophisticated air traffic control systems will allow true air taxi services to form and for even small jets to operate from local airports. Blended body designs and other improvements may take the pressure off airlines to cram in seats and allow them to work more on improving service to attract people away from older cylinder airlines. And the revival of the airship may bridge the gap between those who wish to travel in a hurry and those who wish to arrive in comfort.
Maybe, but in the meantime, I plan to travel by car whenever my schedule allows me.
Sunday, 12 June 2011
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Friday, 10 June 2011
Peekaboo Pontiac
It's designed as a sales gimmick, but sometimes I wish my car was like this. Then I wouldn't spend so much time crawling around and peering into tiny crevices with a torch while I try to figure out what the blazes has gone wrong this time.
Pink Bugatti Veyron
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| My eyes! |
Thursday, 9 June 2011
Jet aesthetics
Will someone please take this lot aside and point out to them that jet aircraft are the shape they are because of something called aerodynamics and anything cobbled together from aesthetics is going to auger straight into the ground faster than you can say Icarus?
Thank you.
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| Um, where are the pedals? |
What's the point?
The question we should be asking ourselves is not how we can conserve, but how can we best produce energy at the lowest marginal cost? There are three ways to do that: Nuclear, coal, and natural gas. They are cheap, abundant, and for national security bugs they are in our own country. Without new sources of them, we won’t expand our economy as fast as we could. Existing supply chains will become constrained, driving up the cost.Mr Carter puts his finger on a point that's driven me bonkers ever since the energy crisis of the '70s: If the Environmentalists (and I include Frau Merkel, Mr Cameron, and Mr Obama here) are serious and not pushing a barely hidden agenda, then what's the point of their drive to "conserve energy"? Conserve it for what? For how long? What comes next? I can understand a conservation programme in wartime or if there's a woefully inadequate energy supply, but surely the goal in both cases is to mitigate any hardships until the war is won or capacity is restored. Neither is the case here. The ones bleating on about conserving and sustainability certainly aren't looking forward to the bright day when the emergency passes, the lid comes off, we can scrap the windmills and finally start building nuclear reactors and drill for oil again. No, it always looks like candles and woolly jumpers until doomsday.
As I said, assuming the Environmentalists to be honest, what do they expect the rest of us to do? Keep civilisation in stasis? Create a steady state economy that never grows yet somehow never shrinks? Declare that so many gigawatts may be generated and no more because... Because what? It's like those insane resource conservation drives that tell us we must preserve this or that "for our children", but make it quite clear that those proposing the conserving don't want our kids to have a go at it either.
As for "efficiency", if you want to make an engineer angry, suggest that technology should be made more efficient. I had a friend in the field who would do his nut every time he heard about the government setting new energy efficiency targets as if they were the first ones to think of it. "What the Hell do those tossers think engineers do?" He'd yell over the din of the snug bar. "The whole point of engineering is to make things more efficient. That's our job!" It was a bit like telling a writer that things might go smoother if he put some words together.
Yes, I do know what the answer is–or are. There are quite a few ranging from the clueless to the totalitarian, but they don't get much of an airing in public debate because people have no desire to become medieval peasants again, thank you. I'm being rhetorical here. I'm just curious about what the "green" crowd would say about energy policy if they lived in the real world where we actually need to not only keep the lights on, but to produce as much additional wattage as possible to solve our problems. What do they say to someone like me who pulls out the charge sheet and says, "Look here, we need 100 terrawatts of power by the end of the century or we're going bust. Where are we going to get it from?"
Probably the same thing they say when it's pointed out that you can't defend a country with good intentions as opposed to warships and tanks.
Hug a Climate Scientist Day
Mark your calendar and remember to give your nearest warmenist climate scientist a hug.
Or just invade their personal space. Both are good.
Surrealism rules
Police say a man was carrying a dead weasel when he burst into a Hoquiam apartment and assaulted a man.My brain hurts.
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
The story of bread
Oddly enough, bread is the key element in the foundation of civlisation and it came about because of beer. If you think about it, the steps in making bread are pretty complex and getting from wheat to bread seems pretty improbable. What actually happened was that mixing flour, yeast, and water produced a nice little lump that you could let sit, then break up into a pot of water to ferment if you wanted a quick (and disgusting) pint. All it took is some drunken Babylonian getting the munchies and baking said lump and voila! Bread.
Bread wars
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| The noble loaf |
That's all I want and that's why modern sandwiches annoy me so much when I go out to eat. Instead of a bit of meat, a pile of bacon, or a dollop of egg salad, I'm confronted with an entire three-course dinner complete with green salad stuffed between two slices of "artisan" bread two inches thick and consisting largely of saw dust and bird seed. I suspect that "artisan" is a euphemism for "bloody awful" and expect to be on the toilet the rest of the evening. This monstrosity, which only remains stable due to a pair of toothpicks so large that Count Dracula would give them a wide berth, takes two hands, complete concentration, and several napkins to eat. It defeats the whole purpose of the sandwich. How does it help anyone if the sandwich just makes things messier? If I have to go through all that, I'd rather have the sandwich contents on a plate where they can be attacked with a knife and fork and the bread replaced with some chips.
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| Reuben |
And then there are the sandwiches that morph into bizarre shapes as if they'd been exposed to atomic radiation in some 1950s horror film. What maniac came up with wraps? Granted, they are lighter than most sandwiches (and in this artisian world that's saying something), but I dislike sandwiches that unravel. Sandwiches shouldn't unravel. And I especially dislike the McDonalds versions that are basically a tortilla with a chopped-up Big Mac ladled in. Taking the paper off one of those is like disarming a bomb. Worse, a bomb filled with "special sauce", which doesn't bear thinking about.
Submarine sandwiches, grinders, and other variations stuck on French bread are more or less stable if you have a degree in civil engineering as well as cookery, but their tastiness is offset by their acting as if they're challenging me. "Look at me," it says. "I'm a foot long and crammed with cold cuts, lettuce, onions, peppers, and three kinds of cheese and I clock in at two and a half pounds. I don't think you can eat me and if you do, you'll live to regret it." And it would be right.
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| Kebab |
That's why I happen to like the sort of Chorleywood-style bread you get down the supermarket. It's a bread that shows proper deference in the sandwich making process and never gives me an argument. It's consistent, slices thin, toasts nicely, and has the decency to just lie there waiting for the Marmite. True, it won't hold together very well when making a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, but I've found that the easiest solution is to forgo the lettuce and tomato and make up the deficit with more bacon. It's what the Earl of Sandwich intended when he had the brilliant brainstorm and invented a snack he could eat while playing cards and who are we to judge his wisdom?
Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll find the cheese and piccalilli.
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
A small detail
Note to beleaguered climate scientists in the warmening camp: If you're going to posture about the death threats made against you, you might want to wait for some actual death threats.
Flood Relief
Personally, I'm more for getting to dry land, but that's just me.
Natura
I appreciate the effort. I believe that what the home needs is a proper urinal (as I keep telling my wife when she brings up a certain topic), but the idea of a flip-out urinal is one that I think raises more problems than it solves. Especially at two AM.
Monday, 6 June 2011
Car-Boat
I think what killed this 1956 amphibious flying car was the need to radically restructure suburban garages.
What's wrong with the precautionary principle?
I came across an example of this back in the 1980s in Scotland where the MoD had a missile test range. The missiles were fired out to sea over a stretch of ocean that was a cauldron of shoals, reefs, and jagged rocks that only a lunatic would sail into, but the Powers That Be declared that for safety's sake a couple of men drive a jeep out to the point to make sure the area was clear.
The result? The test programme had to be abandoned because of the many accidents the men had driving on the dirt track out to the point to prevent the unlikely chance of an accident.
BitCoin
I can see some real problems with this particular version, but the basic idea has some fascinating implications.
Sunday, 5 June 2011
Saturday, 4 June 2011
Friday, 3 June 2011
James Arness (1923-2011)
HMS 99 Flake
Britain launches the world's first amphibious ice cream van to cash in on the underdeveloped offshore market.
I don't know how effective this will be, but it's sure as heck surreal.
Getting really tough on crime
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| Another perp goes down in the Fatherland. |
Vultures?!?!
Crank up the iPod and off we go
His plan is to turn it into a nature preserve. All very well and good, but if I had the scratch, I'd put in a bid, too. Though instead of a preserve I'd use it as a venue for non-stop dancing in my underwear.
Thursday, 2 June 2011
Fixing what wasn't broken
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
Sustainable
I used to live in a sustainable town. It's called London and it's been sustaining for 2000 years.
Save the NHS.. For the high jump
The middle classes, who tend to live in parts of Britain where public services in general are in quite good nick, have done pretty well from the NHS. The rest of Britain, those who have been notable by their absence on “Save our NHS” protests, has not. For them, the NHS is no longer a glorious postwar invention – it is the institution which lectures them endlessly about their eating, drinking and smoking habits. It’s an institution whose staff are now openly described by government officials as “agents of persuasion” (formerly known as “agents of the state”) who should seek to “reshape” people’s lifestyles. It’s an institution whose contempt for Joe Public is perfectly demonstrated in those ubiquitous posters in hospital waiting rooms warning us not to beat up nurses or doctors. It’s an institution that feverishly looks upon everyday human relationships as dirty and degraded, where midwives are encouraged to interrogate pregnant women over whether they are being domestically abused, and where phrases such as “puppy fat” are frowned upon, and sometimes even banned, lest they give dumb parents the idea that it’s okay for their kids to be chubby.
It’s an institution which no longer treats the patient as an individual with specific problems, but rather as a unit of the population who must be made to stop smoking or drinking more than four units of alcohol per week in order to achieve certain government targets. It’s an institution which sometimes refuses to tell pregnant women the sex of their babies in case the Asian ones find out they’re expecting a girl and abort it pronto. It’s an institution which, at a time when the powers-that-be feel incapable of making a connection with the public, is thrust forward to police us and transform us according to government diktat. And it’s an institution that blows so much money on new managerial techniques and health-propaganda campaigns that it doesn’t have enough left to provide decent medical services to those who actually need them.
BodyGuard
Policemen equipped with scary armoured gauntlets; that ought to put public relations back a couple of centuries.
Anatomy of the Centaur
I know, I know; I need a hobby.
Next up: Thark arms. How the heck do you fit the lower pair on the rib cage?
Community standards
Safeco Field streaker faces criminal trespass, lewd conduct chargesLewd conduct? In Seattle? I didn't think they understood the concept anymore.
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