The End Of Disc Media?

Discs of some description have carried music and movies for over a century. But with advances in solid state memory and miniaturization, discs are done.

This week, Paramount Pictures announced it will deliver full-length feature films on Kingston flash memory products. Goodbye DVDs, hello USB and SD cards. But read the comments. With Internet downloading, do consumers really need this?

Learning Lego Language

According to writer and Lego Dad Giles Turnbull, it turns out families have their own individual systems for naming Lego parts. Who knew? I thought everyone called it a clippy bit.

Great chart. One could print it off and toss it in the Lego bin.

Bird Drops Baguette - Hadron Collider Shuts Down

A bird has dropped a baguette into the Large Hadron Collider causing overheating and shut down of the system yet again.

As PopSci reports,

With freak accident after freak accident piling up over at CERN, the idea of time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched.

Update: Much more technical detail at The Times. Very geeky.

Not Presidential

Boy have I ever taken flak these last 12 months for saying out loud that Barack Obama is not presidential. And that's been from Canadians! But if you ever needed iron-bound proof, this totally surreal clip is it:



Things are at a pretty pass when even your hometown mainstream media are calling you out for your "frightening insensitivity":

The situation called for not only his trademark eloquence, but also grace and perspective. But instead of a somber chief executive offering reassuring words and expressions of sympathy and compassion, viewers saw a wildly disconnected and inappropriately light president making introductory remarks.

Galloping Gertie And Sturdy Gertie

Here is a great high school video project produced in 2007 on 'Galloping Gertie', the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge that failed in spectacular fashion on November 7, 1940.

The video was produced by students Koyo Kim and Raluca Ifrim and took first place in the Junior Group Documentary category at the 2007 Washington History Day competition.

A New Ocean Forming In Ethiopia?

Via Watts Up With That, this is fascinating news from the University of Rochester. A 35-mile long rift that opened up in the Ethiopian desert in 2005 is now confirmed as the beginnings of a new African ocean. How cool is that?

Anthony wonders how long it will be before we see emails from beachfront land speculators in Nigeria and Ethiopia. He also comments that this is another example of Planet Earth doing pretty much what it darn well pleases despite our protestations.

Canada Votes To Repeal Federal Gun Registry Law

MPs voted 164-137 yesterday to repeal the failed billion-dollar Canadian long gun registry. The 33 vote margin signaled considerable support in the opposition parties beyond Stephen Harper's minority conservatives. The bill to repeal still has to go to public hearings, a second vote in parliament and then to the Senate.

Candice  Hoeppner, the conservative backbencher who sponsored the bill to repeal said, "Unfortunately, the long-gun registry didn't do anything to stop criminals from having guns. It was a huge waste of money and it targeted the wrong people."

More details at the National Post.

Leftists Out-Of-Sync With Reality?

In the Wall Street Journal, John Steele Gordon writes about how history is pulling away from traditional leftist paradigms:

Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, recently explained the White House war on Fox News as an example of "speaking truth to power." Much of the American political world collapsed in laughter, pointing out that her boss was president of the United States, the most powerful man on earth. His every word is news around the world. Fox News is a cable channel rarely watched by more than a few million people at a time. How could she have so blithely said something completely out-of-sync with reality?

Simple: She's a liberal.

Germany Furious With GM

After vacuuming 1.5 Billion Euros out of the German treasury in bridge loans, General Motors has decided not to sell Opel to Magna after all. Naturally the Germans are furious. Seems like GM finally figured out that selling Opel to the Canada/Russia Magna-Sperbank consortium would deliver state of the art GM small car technology right into the hands of the Russians.

UPDATE: Magna shareholders appeared relieved early today. Shares of Magna International Inc were up more than 7% on news of the GM Opel fiasco.

Kilimanjaro Snow Job

As is usually the case with global warming alarmists, it's better to be 'correct' than to actually be, you know, 'right'. Take Mount Kilimanjaro. Here's the subhead of a story in the London Telegraph this morning:

The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will have disappeared within two decades because of global warming, claim scientists, changing forever one of the world's most beautiful landscapes.

And here's the reality from Anthony Watts:

Oh no, not this Kilimanjaro rubbish again! Gore started this. Note to journalists everywhere: IT’S THE EVAPOTRANSPIRATION STUPID!

The snow on Kilimanjaro is receding because of heavy local deforestation which reduces humidity which causes "freezer burn" on the mountain. The temperature at the top of Kilimanjaro remains below freezing and has not risen in over 30 years. It's got nothing to do with global warming. It's just another one of the warmists many errors. See Error #5 in 35 Inconvenient Truths.

Gore, Pelosi, Others Making Big Money Off Global Warming

From the New York Times:

...Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

Other public figures, like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who have vocally supported government financing of energy-saving technologies, have investments in alternative energy ventures. Some scientists and policy advocates also promote energy policies that personally enrich them.

How's That "Change" Thing Working For You?

Glenn Greenwald writes at Salon:

...as predicted -- the DOJ continues to embrace the very same "state secrets" theories of the Bush administration -- which Democrats generally and Barack Obama specifically once vehemently condemned -- and is doing so in order literally to shield the President from judicial review or accountability when he is accused of breaking the law.

Change you can believe in.

How's That Green Economic Stimulus Working For You?

A huge, utility-scale wind farm in Texas underwritten by $1.5 billion in US stimulus funds will buy its windmills not from US firms, but from China. Naturally some people are perturbed.

How Women Shop For Shoes

Here's a hilarious - and absolutely, completely and utterly true - story about women and shoes from Cracked.com.

Shoes are hollow objects that humans enjoy sticking their feet into as a means to keep them warm and dry, and to protect them from rough terrain. Interestingly, men and women have widely differing opinions on such a simple invention.

So here are two flowcharts - one for girls, and one for guys - on how to decide if you should buy more shoes.

Large Hadron Collider Coming Back On Line

Will they create a mini black hole that will devour the Earth? Will they create a Higg's Boson that will cause a time warp so that it's own creation will be thwarted? Will they simply create another huge electrical short circuit? All very interesting questions now that the Large Hadron Collider is slowly coming back up to speed in Switzerland after last year's disastrous accident. You would think that accidents would be expected with something named a collider. Wouldn't you?

An Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop And Other Useful Free Stuff

At makeuseof.com here are 15 free and useful guides. Some of the titles include Internet Guide for the Movie Addict, for the Audiophile, the Mac Manual, Underground Guide for the iPhone, Building a Home Theatre, Linux, and much more.

I especially like An Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop. This 30-page guide starts right at the very bottom, assuming no knowledge at all, and walks you through all basic aspects of the application. The guide comes with three full pages of shortcuts and cheat sheets.