From the fine folks that brought us "get perpendicular" about perpendicular magnetic recording for hard drives, here's a piece about how big a terabyte is.
With a Surge in Iron and Steel Prices, Thieves Are Stealing Metal Manhole Covers - NYTimes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:26 pm EDT, Jul 23, 2008
Francis McConnell is a field supervisor for the Philadelphia Water Department, but lately he is acting more like an undercover police officer.
Several hours a day, five days a week, he stakes out junkyards. Pretending to read a newspaper, Mr. McConnell sits near the entrances and writes down descriptions of passing pickup trucks and shirtless men pushing shopping carts.
His mission is to figure out who is stealing the city’s manhole covers and its storm drain and street grates, increasingly valuable commodities on the scrap market. More than 2,500 covers and grates have disappeared in the past year, up from an annual average of about 100.
Uprising Against the Ethanol Mandate - NYTimes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:23 pm EDT, Jul 23, 2008
The ethanol industry, until recently a golden child that got favorable treatment from Washington, is facing a critical decision on its future.
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to temporarily waive regulations requiring the oil industry to blend ever-increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline. A decision is expected in the next few weeks.
Mr. Perry says the billions of bushels of corn being used to produce all that mandated ethanol would be better suited as livestock feed than as fuel.
Hero Complex | “WarGames” back in U.S. theaters for 25th anniversary | Los Angeles Times
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:09 pm EDT, Jul 18, 2008
On July 24, there’s a great chance to revisit director John Badham’s cerebral 1983 thriller “WarGames” at theaters across the country . Those theaters will also be showing new interview footage with cast and crew and a preview of a new sequel “WarGames: The Dead Code,” a direct-to-DVD release being made available on July 29.
Gore Calls for Carbon-Free Electric Power - NYTimes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
4:17 pm EDT, Jul 17, 2008
A shift away from fossil fuels would make the United States a leader instead of a sometime rebel on energy and conservation issues worldwide, Mr. Gore said. Nor, he said, would the hard work of people who toil on oil rigs and deep in the earth be for naught. “We should guarantee good jobs in the fresh air and sunshine for any coal miner displaced by impacts on the coal industry,” he said by way of example. “Every single one of them.”
“Of course, there are those who will tell us that this can’t be done,” he conceded. “But even those who reap the profits of the carbon age have to recognize the inevitability of its demise. As one OPEC oil minister observed, ‘The Stone Age didn’t end because of a shortage of stones.’ ”
Ewa sucked into storm and lives to tell - National - smh.com.au
Topic: Miscellaneous
2:00 pm EDT, Jul 17, 2008
A German paraglider survived lightning, pounding hail, minus 40-degree temperatures and oxygen deprivation after a storm system sucked her to an altitude higher than Mount Everest.
Ewa Wisnierska, 35, passed out due to a lack of oxygen and flew unconscious for up to an hour covered in ice after reaching an altitude of 9947 metres - near the cruising height of a jumbo jet.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday issued a ruling requiring updates of some planes' fuel systems _ a change which carriers say could potentially cost millions of dollars.
The Feed - The Man Who Dared to Question Ethanol - NYTimes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
9:22 pm EDT, Jul 12, 2008
IT wasn’t too long ago that a loose coalition of anti-ethanol forces was bemoaning the futility of its fight.
After failing to block huge new ethanol mandates in the Senate last December, Jay Truitt, until recently the chief lobbyist for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, complained about the “fervor” and “spirituality” that surrounded ethanol on Capitol Hill.
“You can’t get anyone to consider that there is a consequence to these actions,” he said, adding, “We think there will be a day when people ask, ‘Why in the world did we do this?’ ”
Economic View - What if the Candidates Pandered to Economists? - News Analysis - NYTimes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
9:19 pm EDT, Jul 12, 2008
IN the months to come, John McCain and Barack Obama will be vying for the support of various voting blocs. It is safe to say, however, that one group won’t get much attention: economists.
The American Economic Association represents only a small fraction of 1 percent of the electorate. In every election season, we economists expect to be largely ignored, and, unlike many of our other forecasts, that one often turns out to be right.
But suppose it were otherwise. Imagine that those running for office tailored their economic positions to attract the experts in the field. What would it take to put the nation’s economists solidly behind a candidate?
Lost amid the furor about ICANN's rule change that may (or may not) lead to a flood of TLDs is the uncomfortable fact that almost without exception, the new TLDs created since 2000 have been utter failures. Other than perhaps .cat and .mobi, they've missed their estimates of the number of registrations by orders of magnitude, and they haven't gotten mindshare in the target community. So what went wrong? Users stopped caring about TLDs.
