Don’t you hate it when expensive car repairs don’t work? Like, VERY expensive car repairs? On the eve of a long vacation?
I’m taking it in tomorrow to see if it’s something minor, but if not I have a very long, very detailed post already written.
When we first agreed to the repair, the owner was very proud of the fact that you could “check the blogs” to see about his reputation. Live by the blogs…
Tom Brokaw on “something called the Internet” way back when.
Building the newest, biggest, most powerful aircraft carrier in the world.
Cessna, Gulfstream, Supertanker? No problem. The life of a super repo man.
Go to Prage. Look in store window. See a lifesize version of your own Christmas card photo.
Check out this cool mirror:
Notice anything weird? It’s not just that it’s reflecting the image from the book 90 degrees off, but it’s that the words are read left-to-right. Like I said. That just ain’t right.
For more neato mirrors, go here.
Scientists create an acoustic black hole using a Bose Einstein condensate.
I do so love being a geek.
I lament how today’s America is far less free than the country of my youth. Replacing it is not a 1984ish totalitarian dictatorship, but what Alexis de Tocqueville called the ’soft tyranny’ of what Mark Levin sees as a 21st century ‘nanny state’. We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence. What makes Americans’ surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles.
Almost half of all U.S. income is taxed today which means we have lost about half our economic freedom. With record government spending and soaring debt, we are set to lose a lot more. And to think the Boston Tea Party was waged over a three-cent-a-pound tax on tea. Government regulations on business cost us well over $1 trillion a year in higher consumer prices, and there are exactly 26,911 government words policing the sale of a head of cabbage.
In recent years, obsessive-compulsive environmental regulations halted a Massachusetts town from using fireworks on Independence Day since an ‘endangered’ bird’s nest was found near it. News flash: on July 4 we celebrate independence from a tyrannical government. Yet George III never taxed, regulated, or policed us remotely as much as Washington, D.C. does today. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says “Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory”.
Everywhere rules and paperwork mushroom as nit-picking bureaucrats grow in numbers and power. As a buddy bemoaned, the increasingly shrill message of the establishment is “Sit down - and shut up”. No wonder so many Americans feel frustrated and impotent.
Read the whole thing.
Just 42% of current owners likely to buy a GM product again. Count me as one of them, Count me as one of the abstainers! (sorry about that, I got muddled while typing and only caught it just now). I currently own a Chevy S10 (1992 vintage) but will be replacing it with a Toyota Tacoma. Why? Partly because of the Taco’s good repair history, and partly because I don’t know if GM will even be around for the 10-15 years that I hope to own the car. Why would I spend thousands of dollars on a product if I didn’t think the company would be around over the life of the product to support it? I’m not alone.
And here’s the kicker. I could get a similar GM-made replacement to the Tacoma for several thousand dollars less than what I’ll be shelling out. So in this case voting with my dollars is costing me more, but I’m still doing it. I predict that the US government will continue to dump billions of taxpayer dollars into revivifying GM (the “sunk cost” fallacy) only to ultimately pull the plug.
Your government at work!
Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that “the people” do not want freedom. They want bread and circuses. They want workman’s compensation and fringe benefits and TV. Give up your free will, give up your freedom to make choices, listen to the expert, and you will have three cars in your garage, steak on the table, and you will no longer have to suffer the agony of choice.
Madeline L’Engle, Walking on Water, p103
h/t Sean
PopSci interviews Dean Kamen.
“I take vacations all the time,” he says. “Vacations from the Slingshot to work on the Stirling, vacations from the Stirling to work on the prosthetic arm, vacations from any of that for FIRST. But if you mean going to some island and lying on the beach all day doing nothing, no, I have never done that. If you could point to one thing I’m working on that is not so important that I can spare to waste a week, well then, I’ll go on vacation. But you see, those are the projects that I’ve already given up. What’s left — these are too important to waste even a minute.”
Time. It’s the only thing Kamen fears running out of. It’s why he can’t take a day off. It’s why he can’t stop working until he is too exhausted to think. It’s why, only in the wee hours of the night, after too much wine and too little sleep, will Kamen the preacher, the salesman, the uncompromising moralist finally take a vacation from the hard sell. In the comfort of his hexagonal wine cellar, with its redwood panels and thousands of aging vintages, Kamen turns into an ordinary man, with fears unconquered and dreams unrealized and an almost obsessive awareness of his own mortality, heightened by the recent loss of his father to cancer.
“Other people have peace because I think maybe they just don’t think about it — the ticking clock. But it’s always there with me. I know that I have this finite amount of time, and there’s so much to do, so much in this world that needs fixing,” he says. “What if I don’t have time to finish all this before . . .” The London Symphony (playing the Moody Blues) fills the silence of a long pause. “I can’t cheat death,” he says finally. He begins to talk with his hands. “I’m not a religious man,” Kamen says, “but I have a kind of faith. Faith that these kids will be able to finish what we’ve started.”
Kamen has no trouble justifying his relentlessness. Every spring, he sees the thousands of kids massing at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, home to the FIRST championships, and thinks, One of these kids is going to cure cancer someday. “We’re playing with the laws of large numbers here,” he says. “You’ve got to look at the probability of outcomes.” In fact, the formula is pretty simple: The more problem-solvers you have, the more problems they will solve.
Read the whole interview with the guy who Sean jokingly calls my man-crush.
Theo Grey, on why dangerous science at home may be the savior of science education.
Sports, especially at the high school level, are extremely dangerous. So many children are injured on a regular basis that you don’t even hear about it. Many of these injuries are relatively minor, just a broken bone or perhaps a torn ligament that puts the child in a cast for a few months. But a substantial number cause permanent disability and death.
This carnage could easily be avoided by switching to video football. Graphics are very realistic these days; students could study tackles from all angles in complete safety. Gymnastics students could do their routines on a Wii Fit board, and video screens are readily available for exercise bicycles, eliminating open-road bicycle riding, a major killer of children.
You know I’m kidding. No one can seriously deny the value of actual physical education and exercise, and unfortunately, no matter how safe you try to make it, accidents, including bad accidents, happen. That’s part of life.
But this is precisely what has happened to science education. Precisely. Virtually all experiments involving chemicals more dangerous that cabbage juice have been eliminated from the curriculum. And, yes, they have been replaced by elaborate video simulations that let you choose which of two beakers to mix together, then show you what happens.
This is all very safe, but there is a price to pay: death and misery for millions. And this time I’m not kidding. We have turned science, which should be the most exciting, the most engaging, the most relevant hour of the school day, into a deathly boring series of lectures and video games. Is it any wonder kids would rather become accountants, when chartered accountancy is made to seem like a more exciting profession than science?
When students enter a science classroom, they should see things they cannot imagine in their wildest dreams.
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