"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Monday, December 21, 2009

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Ouch!

Discovered Ed Youngblood's MotoHistory
Great stuff

One piece - Cook Neilson interview
Motohistory.Net - Featured Story - Cook Neilson Remembers - Page 2:

This one on a particular dangerous bike.
I was pitched off of one and manged to collect some nasty scars
Both palms gone, right forearm, right nipple ground down (I was dumb, wearing a work shirt, sleeves rolled up, no gloves)
Front fender shook loose, and grabbed the front tire... I went down ... hard.

"And what we were doing WAS dangerous. It seemed that we were always a staffer or two short; it seemed that we had a charge account at the Westlake Village Hospital. We lost Dave Hawkins for a good long while; same with Dale Boller; same with me. I remember one time, after we'd published a particularly scathing road test of an H2 Kawasaki 750, I decided that I'd show the Kawasaki people exactly what I was talking about with regard to handling instability. There was this one corner on Mulholland Highway that was perfect for testing: fast and bumpy (it was on a section of that highway that became known as Racer Road). The Kawasaki guys showed up; I showed up. So I was whistling this 750 through this one very high-speed turn when it started to wobble. When that happened, the suspension started to oscillate, then the muffler on the left side started banging off the ground, then it high-sided me through a barbed wire fence and I ended up in the hospital ('Charge it!') for a little while. I certainly hadn't intended to be that dramatic, but the point was, as far as I was concerned, Kawasaki was selling a bike to the public that was fundamentally unsound, and we wanted them to either fix it, or get rid of it."

Monday, December 14, 2009

Worth Sharing

Inspiration
click here

Interesting move

Expanding interest in Natural Gas

With XTO Deal, Exxon Expands Natural Gas Holdings - NYTimes.com

Note that
1) Boone Pickens has been pushing Natural Gas as "bridge" to non-carbon fuels, and esp. for over the road trucks (issues of storage preclude use for family car/SUV

2) Exxon is partner in the world's largest LNG plant which is finishing up in Qatar, which will be the largest man made structure in the world.

3) there are some arguments that NatGas is nearly inexaustable

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Timing

Passing through MSP airport tonight, we spotted an accenture poster with Tiger Woods, not this one, it was him lining up a putt, yellow background with text about thinking vs doing ... we got a chuckle.
Then caught the evening news ... accenture dropped Tiger and pulled all ads.


Saturday, December 12, 2009

Informed Development

Since "Smart Grow" may carry connotation that opponents are "not smart" what about the term "Informed Development" ... trying to be more inclusive and collaborative

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Maybe it's just Magic

Not going to hold my breath.
Some basic physics : more electrons = more protons and neutrons = more mass.

Skepticism Persists as Nissan’s Ghosn Leads Charge Into EV Age: "According to Ghosn, the Leaf's 100-mile (160-km) range covers 90% of the daily driving needs in Japan and most other major markets. The problem is that other 10%.

“Buyers would basically be paying the price of a Lexus for a second car,” one Nissan official admits.

While the basic story line is right, Ghosn has omitted a few details that could make the road ahead a little bumpier – namely, that the Leaf’s 100-mile range is achieved without engaging the car’s air-conditioner and heater, which knocks off 30%. Also, the life of the battery for automotive use is estimated at only four to five years."

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Paleolithic Europe

Interesting piece on early settlements, pre-written language in the southeast of Europe

NYTimes
A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

Continue here

Could it be related to "Noah's Flood"

Experts Face Off on 'Noah's Flood' - The New York Times

Two marine geologists from Columbia University in 1996 advanced the idea that a flood of water from the Mediterranean, rushing through the Bosporus with the force of 20 Niagaras, entered the Black Sea 7,600 years ago. In months, at most two years, the Black Sea rose, inundated surrounding plains and attained its present dimensions.

As a consequence, the geologists suggested, people in the region had to flee, and this could explain the rapid spread of early agriculture into eastern and northern Europe. It was even possible, they said, that the cataclysm became a part of folk memory, inspiring the Babylonian flood myth in the epic of Gilgamesh and, in time, the biblical story of Noah.