In his 1980 novel ‘The Ghost From the Grand Banks” Arthur C. Clark has a character who became wealthy by developing a way to clean windshields using ultrasonic energy and eliminating wipers. I’ve been waiting since then for this to actually happen, and it looks like the wait is nearing an end. Slashdot has a [...]
This is a personal post. The name Jerry Karl won’t mean much to most people. Open wheel racing fans may have memories of him from the 70′s and early 80′s when he was part of the Indy series. he made 6 starts at Indianapolis and many other races in an interesting, independent career that included [...]
Those kooky Swiss! Rinspeed takes one of the worlds least practical (but most fun) cars and turns it into the worlds least practical submarine, the sQuba! Oh, and it’s electric of course. Anyone else getting a mental image of the Simpsons test drive of the EV1?
This week there is a great video on TED from George Dyson talking about the Orion Project from the late 50′s that intended to send people to Saturn on rockets powered by nuclear bombs. Fascinating stuff!
The space shuttle Atlantis has a kinked hose, a problem that could lead to cooling issues and a possible rupture. The fix? NASA is going to send someone in to poke it with a stick. You just can’t make this stuff up.
I saw this report on cnet about ebay banning sellers from leaving negative feedback about buyers. I can understand the point, the rating system always seemed to me as something more intended to protect buyers than vice versa. Still, I’ll assume there are a reasonable number of unreliable buyers out there, so how are sellers [...]
This just cracks me up. According to this story in the New York Times, the current theory about the Minneapolis bridge collapse that I blogged about previously is being rejected by the masses. Why? Because it isn’t what they want to hear. “Everyone” knows that the bridge collapsed becuase of poor maintenance. That is what [...]
Hard to believe it’s been three and a half years since I watched (on line) Mike Melville pilot SpaceShipOne into sub-orbital flight the first time. That was a really special moment for me. Seems like yesterday. Burt Rutan and Sir Richard Branson today unveiled a series of models, images, and pictures of in process craft [...]
On Friday Google unveiled its plans to invest $30 million in initiatives including efforts to: Create systems to help predict and prevent disease pandemics. Empower the poor with information about public services. Create jobs by investing in small- and mid-size businesses in the developing world. Accelerate the commercialization of plug-in cars. Make renewable energy cheaper [...]
There were a few stories published last week reporting that preliminary news from the inspection of the Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapse last August indicates the bridge was not properly designed. It seems that gusset failure caused the collapse and that the gussets were not properly sized for the original conditions of the bridge, let alone [...]
