Unknown Voyages To The 'New Found Land'

Was William Weston the first Englishman to sail to the new world? From the Daily Mail:

Dr Evan Jones, a historian at Bristol University, has discovered that a Bristol merchant, William Weston, undertook a voyage to the 'New Found Land' in 1499 just two years after Venetian explorer John Cabot 'discovered' North America. The main evidence for the voyage comes from a personal letter written by King Henry VII to his Lord Chancellor on March 12 1499. The letter was found 30 years ago and mis-catalogued among a bundle of Chancery files in what is now The National Archives. The research will be published this week in the academic journal Historical Research.

Max Damage

OK, so you hate me enough already for infecting you with the Boom De Yada earworm. So what have I got to lose by sending you off to play Max Damage? Oh well, you didn't really need the rest of your Saturday. Did you?

Are All Psychologists Liberals?

Here is a fascinating interview between psychologist Dr. Helen Smith and writer and medical engineer Dr. Barbara Oakley. The topic is the profession of psychology and its almost exclusively liberal bias.

Smith intros the interview on her blog as follows:

Many people do not trust psychologists and with good reason. They exclude half of the population or more due to their leftist politics. Barbara Oakley, author of Evil Genes,shares her insights on the American Psychological Association (APA) and their discrimination and stereotyping of any of us who do not agree with their leftist views.

Is the APA a non-partisan [non-profit] or an organization of partisan hacks?

Update: Astounding symmetry here: Why Most Journalists Are Democrats. This from... wait for it... Psychology Today.

But Of Course It Does!

The Sun has a big effect on Earth's weather, don't you know.

A new study in the journal Science by a team of international researchers led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research has found that the sunspot cycle has a big effect on the earth's weather.

From the comments:

Remember all the medieval scientists who had to minimize the significance of any findings that threatened Christian beliefs, for fear of being denounced by the Church?

New Old-Fashioned Pirate Yarn Coming

Before he died, Michael Crichton was working on a new novel called Pirate Latitudes. It's about an attempt to rob a Spanish galleon docked at the town of Port Royal, Jamaica in 1665. The book is set to be published this November.

If you're thinking a Crichton pirate novel might make a pretty good movie, so does Crichton's long-time collaborator, Steven Spielberg.

How Do You Define A Moment?

Chickens In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

After years spent hunting for the buried remains of prehistoric animals, a Canadian paleontologist now plans to manipulate chicken embryos to show he can create a dinosaur.

Boom De Yada!

You got the boom and you got the yada. What else do you need? Here's one of the greatest TV network promos of all time, from the Discovery Channel. Boom De Yada! Tell me this won't be stuck in your head for a week!



Here's the original...



Not enough BOOM? Try StarWars Boom De Yada.



And of course no Boom De Yada! would be - could be - complete without a Top Gear Boom De Yada! At least on this blog anyway...



The melody reminds me so much of the piano duet my sister and I played when we were kids. We were just as good as these kids, too!

Clueless Oldbies

The latest-up-to-datest lingo I learned about the Internet in the early 1990s (when newbies were called, well, clueless newbies) is now totally obsolete. Intranet, Personal Digital Assistant, even Web surfing - all relegated to fogydom. So how do you stay hip on the Interwebz today? BusinessWeek tries to have a clue.

Oh, To Be A Kid Again!

I don't often wish to have my time back. It was tough enough the first time through. But every now and then I spot something that makes me wish I could be 14 again. The opportunity to spend a week at Discovery Camps, organized by The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan is one of them. Especially when, by the end of the week you will have helped assemble a vintage Model T. I'd go do it now except, well, I'm just not a kid anymore. Snif.

Snowin' In The Wind

The New York Times asked readers to come up with titles for Bob Dylan's Christmas album. They headlined it Sleigh, Lady Sleigh.

Then things got all punny.

The Wicked Warmists Of The West

Deepak Lal writes from New Delhi about the west's obsession with "fixing" global warming - at the expense of the developing world.

Nothing is more hypocritical and immoral than rich Westerners driving their gas-guzzling SUVs emoting about the threat to Spaceship Earth from the millions of Indians who want to drive Nanos. Whilst the salving of their consciences by buying carbon offsets (as Al Gore claims to do every time he jets around the world) is akin to the Papal indulgences sold by the Catholic Church, which allowed its richer adherents to assuage their guilt and ‘fornicate on clean sheets’. For Gore to have the lights on his mansion blazing throughout the night, and seek to restrict the emissions from Indian power stations, when most Indians don’t even have an electric light bulb, is deeply wicked.

Meanwhile, the "deeply wicked" Al Gore is set to become the first global warming billionaire.

The Mini At 50

Fifty years ago today, Austin Mini number one rolled off the line. Alex Issigonis's highly efficient transverse engine, front-wheel drive concept was copied by dozens of automakers. A sort of modern grandchild remains in production today.

Will Electric Cars Rule?

In today's National Post, self-professed car lover George Jonas laments what he sees as the passing of the North American car culture.

My grandchildren may still have cars -- they probably will--but not in the way I had them. Few people in coming generations will have the kind of relationship with their wheels so many people had in my generation. They won't be able to. A rheostat isn't a throttle.

When superb cars like half-used 5-series BMWs and even Corvettes are being trashed as "clunkers" to get some government dosh you have to wonder. But it is way too soon to write off the internal combustion engine. No one, and I mean no one, has yet perfected an all-electric car. And here's why.

St. John's, Newfoundland, where I live, is the one of the most beautiful small cities in the world. It is also one of the toughest driving environments anywhere . Moist sea air, fog and rain, heavy snow, steep hills, abundant road salt to keep the hills ice free in winter, a stop-and-go and never-warm-up driving regime, and yes, expressways - even the most modern conventional cars wear out and rust out much faster here. Electrical problems due to corrosion are common.

How would an electric car stand up to our constant winter demands of heating, defrosting, lighting, wipers, deep snow traction and wheelspin on our steep hills? How long would a charge last?

And that's in the city. Newfoundland is a huge, sparsely populated island. People drive 200 kilometers every day just to get to work. They use isolated highways where there are few gas stations, let alone electrical outlets. And then there's Labrador and its sub-arctic cold. People driving in these conditions will not give up their IC engines.

Perhaps our grandchildren will drive electric. Personally I'm hoping for a breakthrough in cheap hydrogen generation. This will allow us to build new, pollution free internal combustion engines that run, drive and sound just like what we love today. Oh joy!

Ted Kennedy Has Died

The Wall Street Journal has a retrospective on the life and times of Ted Kennedy.

Driving On The "Wrong" Side Of The Road

The Prime Minister of Samoa, Sailele Malielegaoi has stirred up a hornet's nest by ordering the entire island to change to driving on the left side of the road. He claims this will help poorer Samoans afford used cars from nearby Australia and New Zealand which, like most former British colonies, drive on the left.

Here in Newfoundland vehicles drove left until 1947 and then drove right to conform with the rest of North America. Then there's the British Ministry of Transport which has this useful advice: “Visitors are informed that in the United Kingdom traffic drives on the left-hand side of the road. In the interests of safety, you are advised to practise this in your country of origin for a week or two before driving in the UK.” Yes, I'll be sure to drive into oncoming traffic before I visit them.

All of this naturally brings up the question of how people decided what side of the road to drive on in the first place.

Galileo's Place In History

400 years ago today, Galileo Galilei demonstrated his first telescope to a group of businessmen in Venice. It was quite enough to impress the laymen and considerably more than enough to annoy the clergy.

Like DaVinci, Galileo was a polymath - a true Renaissance man. He excelled at engineering, mechanics, optics, the physics of motion, playing the lute and painting, just to name a few of his accomplishments.

Movie Magic Evolves

108 years of movie special effects. Click here to watch. The wide screen format does not embed well in this Blogger format.

New Airplane Photos

Boston.com has 40 recent photographs of various flying machines in action or on display around the world. Some of them are spectacular.

Maybe Big Brother Is Not Watching?

He's certainly not watching English criminals, anyway. Via Slashdot:

Only one crime was solved for each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city's surveillance network has claimed.

I'm Jealous

St. John's CBC TV reporter Zach Goudie took a video camera and went soaring and rolling over northeast Avalon in a CF-18 last Friday. Who wouldn't enjoy goofing off for an afternoon in a fighter plane? Here's his raw camera footage. I love the pilot's comment at the end, "He didn't barf and he wanted more."

The Narrative

No doubt you remember Rodney King. But do you know who Kenneth Gladney is? Do you understand political narratives and political correctness? This semi-rant, semi-history lesson is called "MSNBC & The Great Liberal Narrative: The Truth About The Tyranny of Political Correctness". It's written and presented by commentator Bill Whittle and it is very much worth your while.

Ireland Gets All Medieval

Oh ye blasphemers beware! Ireland has introduced laws to impose

...a fine of up to 25,000 euros -- about C$39,000 -- for anyone who "publishes or utters matter that is [intentionally meant to be] grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion."

Police with a search warrant will be able to enter private premises and use "reasonable force" to obtain incriminating evidence.

Most other western democracies have eliminated blasphemy from criminal codes, since blasphemy is, you know, protected speech nowadays. By Grabthar's hammer...

Big Bad Bill...

... Is Sweet William Now.

Leon Redbone, Ry Cooder and even Van Halen and a zillion others covered the theme song for last night's "hurricane". Was that even a tropical storm? The only damage we have here in St. John's is, well, a few leaves got blown around, and well, it rained like crazy for about two minutes, and well, we did lose one computer overnight but that may have been dying anyway, and well, it's still mauzey. So we never even got a break from the humidex. Oh noes! My lawn chair got blowed over.

"Eeeekology" and "Eeeekonomics"

Since every such Prophet-led, scare-mongering, pseudo-religious conspiracy needs a properly descriptive name, and since this one's primary concerns ... have shifted to a panic over CO2, a fitting name for this cultic gaggle might be the "Branch Carbonian Cult".

Big Bad Bill...

Hurricane Bill is still some ways southwest of Newfoundland and is expected to drop from a Cat 1 hurricane to a tropical storm as it passes Nova Scotia. Environment Canada has issued tropical storm, wind and rain warnings for most of the island.

At 151500 NDT this afternoon the barometer in my front hall is still rock solid at 101.4 kps and really hasn't budged since yesterday. It is overcast and incredibly muggy. Temperature is 27 C in the garden but humidity of almost 80% is pushing the feel of that well into the 30s.

The rain hasn't started yet and there is virtually no wind but opening the back door still feels like going for a swim. It is the classical calm before the storm. The next 12 hours will tell the tale.

Update: At 6PM there is not a breath of wind outside. The barometer is now off a point or two. It is 27 C (81 F) inside and outside the house. With the humidity that feels more like 33 or 34 C (about 92 F). Needless to say we have no A/C.

Sweltering.

Update 2: At 10:30 PM the wind is up considerably out of the south and the temperature has dropped suddenly in the last hour to 19 C. The temperature in the house has also mercifully dropped to a cosy roaring-fire-in-the-woodstove temperature of 25 C. St. John's harbour is sheltering dozens of ships tonight under the pea soup fog that has rolled over the city.

11:15PM - Much lightening. And loud, but faraway thunder. The heavy rain has started.

Vaccinating Against Alinsky

Andrew Breitbart wrote a great piece in the Washington Times last week on the "politics of personal destruction".

George Bush, Sarah Palin and her family, Joe the Plumber, The Mormons, Rush Limbaugh, the beauty queen who dared to express a contrary opinion, the Cambridge cop...

When put on the media stage, these individuals and groups have been isolated for destruction for standing in the way of a resurgent modern progressive movement and for challenging its charismatic once-in-a-lifetime standard-bearer, Barack Obama.

The origins of manufactured "politics of personal destruction" is Saul Alinsky, the mentor of a young Hillary Rodham, who wrote her 92-page Wellesley College senior thesis on the late Chicago-based "progressive" street agitator titled, "There Is Only the Fight."

Mr. Obama and his Fighting Illini, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, have perfected Mr. Alinsky's techniques as laid out in his guidebook to political warfare, "Rules for Radicals." In plain language, we see how normal, decent and even private citizens become nationally vilified symbols overnight - all in the pursuit of progressive political victory.

Read the whole thing.

Collossal Collisions

Wired has some fantastic satellite photos of impact craters. Not on Mars or the Moon but right here on Earth.

Hurricane Bill

So we await the arrival of Hurricane cum tropical storm Bill, sometime late on Sunday the 23rd or early Monday the 24th.

Here on the island of Newfoundland we are expecting a direct hit. A tropical storm watch is now in effect and could be upgraded as the true path of Bill becomes more established over the next 24 hours.

Right now, at 003500 Newfoundland time the temperature in my garden is 21.7 C but the humidex is 28. This is an extremely high nighttime temperature for us.

The air is damp and heavy and the wind has been rising all evening out of the southwest. The barometer is steady at 101.2 but I expect it to fall off a cliff as the storm approaches. We are expecting wind gusts of around 130 kph and 100 mm of rain.

Here are the dynamically updating Coastal Watches/Warnings and 3-Day Track Forecast Cone from the US National Hurricane Center. Why am I linking to US sources? Because although the Meteorological Service of Canada has plenty of data in text form the US charts are the most, er, graphic. When it comes to nasty weather, a picture really is worth a thousand words.