Opel Lives, VW Is Annoyed, Canadians Are Happy

Last week we got news that Canadian car parts giant Magna would purchase controlling interest in GM Germany's Opel. That pleased just about everybody. Nice German-designed, Belgian-built cars owned by a Canadian company. Now who could be annoyed about that?

Well, just when they thought their main competitor was toast, Volkswagen sees Magna ride over the hill like the Canadian cavalry to rescue Opel. If that wasn't horrible enough, Magna is one of VW's main suppliers. Autoblog opines that "'if Opel receives any preferential treatment over VW whatsoever, heads will roll."

One other tidbit: Magna intends to bring Opels to Canada by the end of the year. But not to the US. Of course we are already getting the Opel Astra as a Saturn (which has now been bought by Roger Penske), but Opel has a full line of cars. Not known yet: What dealers will carry Opels in Canada.

Stunning HD Video From The Moon

Via Jason Kottke at kottke.org:

"HD video of the Moon from 13 miles above the surface taken by Japan's KAGUYA probe. The probe's orbit has been decaying since it began circling the Moon and will crash on the surface at 18:30 GMT on June 10."

No More Free Beer? Oh The Humanity!

"Out of my cold, wet hands." You can't make this stuff up.

Pensioners demonstrated outside Molson's brewery here in St. John's this week after Molson clawed back their monthly ration of free beer. Molson brewery pensioners across Canada have gotten a monthly beer benefit of 6 dozen bottles a month since time, er, immemorial. Now they will be cut to, oh horror, 12 bottles a month.

As you might expect, this has not gone over well. From the comments:

"...shame... ex-union members crying in their beer... time for a beer bailout... Taking a man's beer...that's low...incredibly stupid!... bunch of drunks... Oh, the humanity!... disgusting... Molsons -- beer that is barely fit for cooking... obscene ...bunch of Hosers... Molson really needs to man up... Pay for your own beer ya bums... The only way I would drink Molson is if it were free... Cry me a river."

And then there's this:

Doh, I think I'll have a beer
Ray, the guy who brings my beer
Me, I think I'll have a beer
Fa, the distance to my beer
So, I think I'll have a beer
La, la la la la la Beer
Te, no thanks I'll have a beer
And that will bring us back to
Doh!

-Homers beer song.

Gee, I feel bad for you, boys.

Apollo 11 Owner's Workshop Manual

Haynes has published it. Now you can tinker knowledgeably with your vintage 1969 Apollo 11 Lunar Landing Module's, er, carburetors. Or something. Just in time for the anniversary, too.

Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide!

The evils of dihydrogen monoxide have been clearly understood for centuries - no concensus required. The worst of it is even though the US EPA has seen fit to name carbon dioxide as a poison, they still have not acted on dihydrogen monoxide.

In its vapourous state dihydrogen monoxide is the single greatest greenhouse gas of all, by several orders of magnitude. But the IPCC doesn't even mention it. What is wrong with these people?

They couldn't pour water out of a bucket if it had the instructions printed on the bottom.

It's good though to see younger people taking an interest in educating others about this deadly substance.

Too Easy: Yahoo Gets Binged

After only a week and with a heck of a lot less publicity than Wolfram Alpha, Microsoft's new search engine Bing passed Yahoo for second position behind Google.

That may sound great, but here are the numbers: Did you know Yahoo only had 5.13 percent of the search engine market to begin with? Bing got 5.62 percent. And Google-zilla grabbed 87.62 percent.

June 6, 1944: D-DAY

It's the 65th anniversary of the Allied invasion of France. Original combat footage here. Note that the soldiers inside a landing craft just before and during the dropping of the ramp are Canadians.

German victory propaganda here. At about 8:30 note the Canadian prisoners of war from the North Nova Scotia Highlanders and the Canadian Airborne. The sub-titles state they were taken to internment camps. You have to wonder what became of them.

Elderly Canadian veterans recount their personal D-Day experiences in this recent video from Veterans Affairs Canada:

"You can never go to bed at night before thinking about the guys who died. They are the ones that saved my life. They are the ones who won the war. Not me. "

Robot and Cyborg Bugs That Can Fly

Flying robot bugs have shown up before in books and movies. Soon they'll be for real. Via KurzweilAI:

"Unmanned aircraft maker AeroVironment has received an additional $5.4 million from DARPA to further develop a diminutive aircraft that can fly into tight spaces undetected, perch, and send live surveillance information to its handlers."

DARPA also funds a live flying bug experiment - a giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled to fly wherever the controllers decide. A cyborg beetle. Now that's creepy.

Eight Things...

...you didn't know about the internet.

Bugatti's Bugatti

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa which sold at auction for over $12 million and became the most expensive car ever sold. That record may be surpassed in August when Ettore Bugatti's very own personal Bugatti Type 57C goes to auction. Wired has pictures and more on the history of this stunning car.

Could A Meteor Bring Down An Airliner?

Yes, of course it could, but what are the odds? Much, much shorter than you might think. Slashdot links to speculation that the odds of a meteor hitting an airliner over the century of flight is now 1 in 10. Is that what happened to Air France 447 off the coast of Brazil earlier this week?

Update: A member of the UN Climate Change commission yesterday straight-facedly blamed the Air France crash on “global warming”. Seriously.

I'll stick with the meteor theory for now. It has far more credibility.

Ignoring History?

Barack Obama spoke to the Arab world in Cairo yesterday. Did he deliberately ignore the history of the Jewish people in Israel? Round-up of opinions and a history lesson at SDA. Be sure to follow the comments.

And this from Barry Rubin of the Gloria Center: "So afraid was Obama of giving offense—and thus not maximizing his popularity-at-all–costs mission—he did the political equivalent of scoring an own-goal. President Bill Clinton said, “I feel your pain.” In effect, Obama declared, “We’re your pain.”

Penske Buys Saturn

Former Nascar racing and auto dealer magnate Roger Penske has agreed to purchase the Saturn brand from GM. Based on Saturn's current lineup, this would seem to be a wise move. But much has changed.

The first generation Saturns were actually quite good. That and the haggle-free buying experience should have been a huge success for GM.

With the second generation Saturns, GM lost the thread. We've had a Saturn SL-2 in the family for ten years. It has been decently reliable. But that's the best can be said for it. Otherwise it is a noisy, cheaply built, mediocre appliance that offers little in the way of driving dynamics. It is simply no fun. The SL-2 devolved into the Ion, arguably the most uninviting car GM ever built. There were other Saturns, all equally forgettable.

That all changed when Saturn started re-badging Belgian built, German engineered Opels. Suddenly Saturn had a small car - the Astra - that was more than competitive with the lofty design and assembly standards and superior driving experience of the Volkswagen Golf and 1-series BMW. In addition, the Saturn Aura, built on a new shared GM North American mid-sized chassis benefited from GM's too-little-too-late surge in making actually good cars.

So Penske will keep the brand alive. Unknown at the moment: Will Saturn continue to rebadge Astras now that Magna owns Opel? Will Auras still be made on GM-designed chassis? Or will Penske decide to build a wholly new car? There has also been talk of importing Korean-built cars from Samsung. Yes, Samsung makes cars too.

What we do know is that, product aside, the business of the car business has never been more interesting than it is just now.

Update: "Controlled by Renault, Samsung builds Nissan spec vehicles which could replace current Saturn vehicles if everything falls into place."

Dang!

"Faced with ballooning costs and growing delays, ITER -- a multi-billion-euro international experiment boldly aiming to prove atomic fusion as a power source -- will be scaled back." Dang.

"System Maintenance" - Some System

In response to the 20th anniversary today of the crackdown on democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, government censors have blocked access to many international Web sites and caused temporary closures of domestic online forums and blogs. The scientific community, too, is feeling the heat.

Can People Out-Google Google?

Via email: Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow, writing in the Guardian, opines that search engines like Google have altogether too much power to be trusted. He proposes a new open source search system created by people.

"It would have one gigantic advantage over the proprietary search engines: rather than relying on weak "security through obscurity" to fight spammers, creeps and parasites, such a system could exploit the powerful principles of peer review that are the gold standard in all other areas of information security."

Water: Why Biofuels Are Doomed

Biofuels are made from corn and other plants and have been touted as a means of weaning off fossil fuels. Until now, the main argument against biofuels is they take away from the food supply. But what about the water supply? Biofuels require staggering amounts of water: the production of one liter of biodiesel requires 14,000 liters of water.

"Water that is used for bioenergy – whether it be for a food crop such as maize or a non-food crop such as jatropha – cannot be used for food production, for drinking water or for maintaining natural ecosystems. The water footprint, developed by Prof. Arjen Hoekstra, one of the authors of the PNAS article, is a powerful tool for surveying this."

Also this: Biofuel production and water scarcity: a drink-or-drive issue?

Too Cool

Via Instapundit, a 360 degree panorama of the bridge from the new Star Trek movie.

Coveting The Trees Instead Of The Forest

Need to "do something" about global warming? Why, let's burn the forests! No, really. After all, wood doesn't emit near so much "deadly poison" carbon dioxide as coal when it's burned. We don't have to drill, or dig, or ferment. The trees are, well, right over there on top of the ground. And since we've been turning them into bird-cage liner for a century and a half, we know how to get 'em.

So let's convert coal-fired electric plants to burn wood instead. Think of all the lovely carbon credits we could earn! Think of all that lovely money saved. Lovely green money. Think of all that lovely forest ecosystem going up in smoke? Not so much.

Anyone who reads here at all knows I am no hair-shirt "environmentalist". I like cars, especially old ones. I even have a small woodstove. But I have also studied biodiversity and ecosystem science some and I have seen first-hand the horrifying result of forest clear-cutting in Newfoundland, Labrador, Nova Scotia and the US Pacific northwest. Just when it looks like the forests will get a break due to the obsolesence of the newspapers, here come the suddenly environmentally-concious energy companies looking for a way to make a buck on carbon trading. Good bye forests. What's gonna absorb your carbon dioxide now?

Tiananmen Massacre June 4, 1989

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

"No one knows for sure how many people died at Tiananmen Square. Reports are as high as several thousand. The Chinese government says fewer than than 250 were killed, including soldiers.

The events of that June on Tiananmen Square have been conspicuously missing from China’s history books."

Here are eyewitness accounts from Janet Wilson in the Ottawa Citizen.

More from Radley Balko: "So go find your own metaphor for the government tank pictured above. Then put yourself in front of it."

Robert Farago On Al Jazeera

One of the best analysts and writers on the automotive scene today is Robert Farago, editor of The Truth About Cars. Today he appeared in a lengthy and well-balanced discussion on Al Jazeera's Inside Story. The topic: The GM Bankruptcy. You can watch at TTAC and the comments are worthwhile too.

Royal Navy "Seconds" From Firing On UFO

In The Register:

"A Royal Navy warship may have come within seconds of opening fire on Unidentified Flying Objects above Merseyside, possibly narrowly avoiding the precipitation of an interstellar war and the extirpation of humanity by testy aliens."

Well that's one theory anyway.

Music - It's In Your Genes

A new genetic study shows that "musical ability is linked to gene variants that help control social bonding. The finding adds weight to the notion that music developed to cement human relationships. Musical aptitude evolved because musical people were better at forming attachments to others: "Think of lullabies, which increase social bonding and possibly the survival of the baby."

I dunno about lullabies, but I do know the guys who learned to play guitar in high school definitely had an advantage with, er, relationships.

Mix An Exploding Drink - Fun For All Ages!

I probably should save this for a summer garden party, but what the heck. Wired gives instructions on how to make an exploding drink they call The Manhattan Project.

Harrison's Magical Mystery Chord

"It’s the most famous chord in rock 'n' roll, an instantly recognizable twang rolling through the open strings on George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker. It evokes a Pavlovian response from music fans as they sing along to the refrain that follows":

It's been a hard days night
And I've been working like a dog

For 40 years, no one has been able to accurately chart what Harrison was playing. By decomposing the sound into its original frequencies using computer software, Halifax mathematician Jason Brown has finally figured out the mystery chord.

The North West Passage

We began today with Stan Rogers and so we'll end today with him too.

London’s National Maritime Museum has a new exhibition, The North West Passage: An Arctic obsession, exploring Britain's fascination with the North West Passage. Stan Rogers sang about the tragic tales of Franklin and the others who tried the North West Passage.

The YouTube description says they are the Chamber Men singing Stan Rogers' North West Passage for the Etodori Highschool Students during the cultural exchange day on October 26, 2006.

I don't know where these young men are from but they sing beautifully.

Dow Jones Drops GM

How done is GM? It was dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average today after 83 years. Sign of the times replacement: Cisco Systems.

Dig This

Looks like the photo is squished. It's not. Introducing the Smera. On sale in France now. 144 volt, 10kWh lithium-ion battery pack connected to a 30kW (40bhp) electric motor that also generates 1000Nm (738 lb/ft) of torque through four wheel drive. Yes, that's correct. 738 lb/ft of torque. Almost enough torque to reverse the rotation of a smaller planet. Horsepower is so 19th century you know. Torque is really where it's at.

Artificial Music - Ready For Prime Time?

Should, you know, real musicians be concerned about this?

"A group of researchers from the University of Granada has developed Inmamusys, a software program that can create music in response to emotions that arise in the listener. By using Artificial Intelligence techniques, the program means that original, copyright-free and emotion-inspiring music can be played continuously."

As usual, the comments are often as informative as the post itself.

Like A Streak Of...

... well, it's not Penguin Poo:

At Wired: "Motor madman Bob Maddox recently bolted a dual-exhaust pulse jet engine to the side of an ordinary bicycle, donned a leather jacket and helmet and then held on tight as he peeled off a 73-mph run down a deserted back road."

Penguin Poo

It's not every day you can blog about Penguin poo.

"Penguin poo (guano) stains, visible from space, have helped British scientists locate emperor penguin breeding colonies in Antarctica."

Penguin poo.

First Goal's The Winner?

"A note on the importance of the first goal in a National Hockey League game"

Um, I wonder of the predictions are still true once corrected for the actual length of a hockey period. Or was it just a typo?

A Car Guy On GM

OK, no more GM posts. Well, except this one. And any others I want to post. It's my blog.

So this is from car guy Michael Hasenstab. We are contemporaries, sort of (he's older) and everything he says about GM here parallels my own car guy thoughts. Er, just substitute Pontiac and 389, 421 etc. for Chevy and 327, 409 etc. As always, read the comments too.

TTAC's GM Zombie Watch

Robert Farago, editor of The Truth About Cars (TTAC) has been running his column "GM Death Watch" for four years. Now that GM has finally gone bust, he's changing the name to "GM Zombie Watch". Because, you know, it ain't just gonna be business as usual at Government Motors. I hope someone is paying Farago a lot of money because with writing like this he deserves it:

"The mainstream media seems obsessed with the idea that President Obama’s minions will force the automaker to build shit boxes to appease the environmental wing of the democratic party, and, thus, drive GM into bankruptcy. Oops. I should have said “continue to suck-up taxpayer money until British Leyland looks like a winning lottery ticket.”

And:

"It’s a ridiculous concern. Government Motors has but one goal: nothing. Remember? No deadline. No timeline. Nada. Simply put, governments are not profit-driven. At all. On any level. Ever. So it doesn’t matter what kind of vehicles post-C11 GM manufactures. At all. On any level. Ever. Snap! That makes “new GM” the same as “old GM.”

Read all of it. Comments too.

Government Motors

President Obama: “We can truly say that what is good for General Motors and all who work there is good for the United States of America.”

Terence Corcoran in the National Post: "It’s a phrase that for years served as a rallying slogan for the left to condemn various U.S. administrations as lap-dogs of corporate power. Now that the President of the United States has personally endorsed the merger of government and corporate interests around the auto sector, what’s left for the left to decry?"

More On Female Doctors And Productivity

Last week I quoted an article from the National Post:

"The growing ranks of female physicians in Canada will slash medical productivity by the equivalent of at least 1,600 doctors within a decade, concludes a provocative new analysis of data indicating that female MDs work fewer hours on average than their male colleagues."

As a result of that post I got an email pointing out an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association of February 25, 2009 titled "The Feminization of Medicine and Population Health" (subscription required).

Some key quotes:

"Recent reports identifying lower productivity among female physicians have debated whether more women in medicine will exacerbate a shortage of physicians by limiting patient
access to care."

"In developed countries, the number of physicians per capita, alone and separated from any analysis of the nature of care provided, has no association with mortality rates."

"Although physician density is not a determinant of health outcomes, a greater proportion of generalists to specialists among those same physicians is associated with increased longevity of the population."

In a nutshell, female doctors tend to be generalists and the more generalists there are the longer people live. Quality of care counts more than quantity of care.

Concussions And Hockey

"Concussions can have cumulative and lasting effects on memory, judgment, social conduct, reflexes, speech, balance and co-ordination. Key to preventing repeated injuries is to recognize the symptoms of concussion when they occur and knowing how to deal with their effects."

"When Chicago Blackhawk's leading scorer Martin Havlat returned to the ice for game four of the Western Conference Final after sustaining a concussion only two days earlier, questions were raised surrounding his swift return."

And that was at the top. What about kids who have bells rung in the minor leagues?

"Serious misconceptions exist among minor league hockey players, athletes, coaches and parents when it comes to understanding the signs and symptoms of a concussion and its treatment”

Turns Out Cats Are Stunned

In the scholarly Dictionary of Newfoundland English, stunned means unyielding ... sulky; impassive; stupid; foolish, naive. But mostly stupid.

Cats also do not get string theory.

Hooray! VMyths Is Back.

I missed this. For years, I subscribed to Rob Rosenberger's VMyths mailing list to keep myself ahead of computer security and virus hype in other media. Rosenberger went on hiatus to serve in Iraq. But he's back online (obviously for some time) and I am happy because Rosenberger cuts through computer security and virus BS.

Remembering Stan Rogers

Stan Rogers died 26 years ago today in Cincinnati, June 2 1983. He was only 33 but he was already one of the greatest singer-songwriters Canada has ever produced. Stan Rogers wrote songs about fishing for farmers and songs about farming for fishermen and songs about women for men and men for women and songs about pirates for landlubbers. He died before he even reached his prime.

So let's remember Stan Rogers.

In this clip from a CBC documentary, Robert Cusik tells his first-person story of survival, setting up a live performance of Stan Rogers, The Mary Ellen Carter. Rise again.



If you really dig Stan's music, check out Fogarty's Cove Music.

Earth's Real Environmental Problems

Indur M. Goklany guest-blogging at Watts Up With That?

"No matter how significant climate change may seem when viewed in isolation, it pales in significance when compared with other global problems - hunger, malaria and coastal flooding - at least through the foreseeable future."

Catching Up

I've been busy today having a, you know, life. It was such a fine day.

First of June aught-nine. That was the day General Motors went bust. General Motors! The largest industrial bankruptcy in history. And then, in a perverse outburst, the stock market went up. The markets are just glad it's over with.

Update: It might be a bad day for GM but it’s a much worse one for Toyota.

Millvina Dean Has Died

Millvina Dean was believed to be the last survivor of the sinking of the Titanic. She was 97.

Pot, Meet Kettle

At Pravda. In Russian, pravda means "truth", you know.

Enron's Global Warming Secrets

From The Financial Post:

"The climate-change industry — the scientists, lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and, most importantly, the multinationals that work behind the scenes to cash in on the riches at stake — has emerged as the world’s largest industry.

Some of the climate-change profiteers are relatively unknown corporations; others are household names with only their behind-the-scenes role in the climate-change industry unknown. Over the next few weeks, in an extended newspaper series, you will become familiar with some of the profiteers, and with their machinations. This series begins with Enron, a pioneer in the climate-change industry."

SmallDeadAnimals links to the Financial Post where Lawrence Solomon begins a new series on following the surprising - and alarming - trail of global warming money.

Among the more stunning revelations: James Hansen worked for Enron.

"The groundwork had been laid well, not least by entering into relationships with scientists who, Enron expected, would further its cause (James Hansen, the scientist who more than any other is responsible for bringing the possibility of climate-change catastrophe to the public, was among the scientists Enron commissioned). Just as shrewdly, Enron saw the importance in silencing the scientists who didn’t accept the alarmism that had driven the Kyoto Protocol. In a 1998 letter, Enron CEO Ken Lay, among others, asked president Clinton to appoint a bi-partisan “Blue-Ribbon Commission” designed to pronounce on the science and, in effect, marginalize the skeptics."

And read this too. The British approach to capitalizing on global warming fears was equally Machiavellian.

NASA Model Incorrect. Imagine That.

"It turns out that none of our models were totally correct," says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA's lead representative on the panel. "The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way."

New From P.J. O'Rourque

I first encountered the incomparable satirist P.J. O'Rourque in the pages of Car & Driver, later in his book Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut.

His new book is called Driving Like Crazy. Edward Niedermeyer at The Truth About Cars reviews:

"His diatribes may do nothing to bring back the days of rumbling V8s, perpetual drunkenness and small-town girls begging to be whisked away by men on motorcycles, but his vivid recollections bring them to life in the reader’s imagination."

O'Rorque reminds me of no one so much as Hunter S. Thompson just on lighter drugs.