A few years ago I went to see SpaceShipOne and its carrier the WhiteKnight fly. It was great! SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo are about ready for roll out. Here's the article.

Entrepreneur Unveils New Tourist Spacecraft

Chip East/Reuters

Richard Branson and aircraft designer Burt Rutan unveiled two new aircrafts Wednesday in New York.

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: January 23, 2008

Burt Rutan took the cloak off of his new spacecraft on Wednesday.

Mr. Rutan, the creator of SpaceShipOne, the first privately financed craft to carry a human into space, traveled to New York to show detailed models of the bigger SpaceShipTwo and its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo.

The rest is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/science/space/23cnd-spaceship.html?ex=1359003600&en=462bf8c769b65f6c&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss

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Check out the darkest substance ever!

Carbon nanotube carpet darkest thing ever made

• Michael Kanellos
• 6 comments

A loosely packed "carpet" of carbon nanotubes is the darkest material ever made, according to researchers from Rice University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The carpet consists of nanotubes--hollow, honeycombed tubes made from carbon atoms-- standing vertically. Instead of being tightly packed together, the researchers went for a low density arrangement, complete with spaces and gaps, sort of like a box of dried spaghetti. Light striking the nanotubes as well as the gaps gets absorbed. When light gets absorbed, black (the absence of light) results. The nanotubes were also specially manufactured to have a more random arrangement of atoms, further reducing reflectivity. (Again, think of trying to look into a box of spaghetti. Not easy.)

The nanocarpet is in the middle. Former record holder to the left.

(Credit: RPI)

This resulted in a material that reflects only 0.045 percent of the light that strikes it. (Put another way, 99.955 percent of the light that hits it gets absorbed.)

Conventional black paint reflects 100 times more light. The previous record holder for darkness, a nickel-phophorus alloy pitted with light-trapping craters, reflected four times as much light.

The rest is here: http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9855485-1.html?tag=nl.e501

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When are they going to stop selling crappy cell phones?

I’ve been kicking myself ever since I bought a Samsung SCH-U740. The QWERTY keyboard and the music player appealed to me, and the dual flip was just too cool! It might be one of the smallest phones on the market with a full QWERTY keyboard. At first, the phone appears to be well designed and have all the right features, but soon the critical flaws show up.

Why so many of the Samsung phones do not have a standard 2.5 mm headphone jack I will never know. When I got the phone, I went out and bought a nicer set of headphones than those that came with the music kit. Unfortunately, soon after trying to listen to music and work around the yard, I found that the adapter would slip out of the non-standard jack. After just a few attempts to work and listen to music, I switched to an IPod Shuffle. I’ve never had the wire slip out unless I caught it on something and really yanked it. Another problem for middle aged eyes is the small keys make it hard to see, but I could have lived with that if not for the other problems.

Since it’s impossible to use the phone to listen to music this way then you’d think that stereo Bluetooth would be the answer, right? Nope. The phone doesn’t support it.

Since the phone isn’t working for me and I use a Palm Pilot, I thought I’d try to replace it with a Treo 700P. I spent several days bidding on EBay and finally won a phone at a good price. The 700P has a standard headphone jack and even supports stereo Bluetooth (with third party software).When it came though, it was a 700W (The P stands for Palm OS, the W for Windows OS, get it?) making it incompatible with my current Palm Pilot data files. Wow, I got to box it up and ship it back (after multiple emails to the vender).

Once again I spent several days bidding and won another phone—from the same vendor. This time when it came it was the right one. But it was not in as good a shape as the first and the headphone jack didn’t work in stereo. The right side headphone wouldn’t work. Once again—emails to the vendor and I got to box it up and will ship it back tomorrow. This time I noticed what I failed to notice with the 700W, it uses only midi ring tones and I can’t find a way to add my own. Plus the camera has no flash, which is strange. I’ve never seen a camera phone with no flash before! So I think I’m glad this one was broken. It would have been nice to consolidate my phone with my Palm but, basically Palm took a Palm Pilot and added a poor phone to it. It’s a shame, since it could have been a great product.

I’ve been looking around for a phone that offers a QWERTY keyboard, a great music player with a standard headphone jack, stereo Bluetooth headphone music capability, a decent camera, and of course, the other goodies--ring tones, speakerphone, etc. I couldn’t find anything better than my son’s LG enV! The only thing it doesn’t have, that it should, is the ability to multi-task (play music while doing other things with the phone) but that’s apparently a brand new feature so I’ll have to wait for the successor to the enV. I can’t get another phone through Verizon for another year anyway (and I’m not finding affordable enV’s on EBay). There will probably be better phones by then. Maybe an IPhone style phone without all the mistakes Apple made with theirs. You know, like no stereo Bluetooth capability!

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Well, will you look at this. A 300 mpg car and congress didn't mandate it! This is free enterprise at it's best.

Aptera: The 'Wingless Bird'

A California startup says its airplane-inspired vehicle can deliver 300 mpg for under $30,000.

By Jacob Gordon of TreeHugger.com

Slated for initial production in late 2008, the Aptera will come in all-electric and plug-in hybrid models. Its name means "wingless" in Greek, and the Aptera's body materials and aerodynamics are borrowed from light aircraft.

When Steve Fambro got bored building robots at a San Diego genetics company, he figured he could help keep his brain busy by building a kit airplane in his spare time. But his wife deemed the hobby too dangerous, so Fambro decided to build a car instead, one with low emissions and absurdly high mileage. Called the Aptera (Greek for "wingless"), the machine now exists as a working prototype. It has 2.5 seats, three wheels, weighs a feathery 1,500 pounds, and Fambro says his company will put the Aptera into production next October.

Specs may change between now and autumn 2008, but the current numbers look like this: 300 mpg, a price tag below $30,000, and 0-60 acceleration of 11 seconds (about a second slower than the Toyota Prius gas-electric hybrid).

See the rest at http://editorial.autos.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=444375&topart=passenger.

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Another great energy story:

Left: Frank Pringle [right] and Hawk Hogan [left] feed the Hawk recycler, which extracts oil and gas from waste like tires.

Green Tech
THE MICROWAVE MAGICIAN

Frank Pringle has found a way to squeeze oil and gas from just about anything

I’m not sure if I’m watching a magic trick, or an invention that will make the cigar-chomping 64-year-old next to me the richest man on the planet. Everything that goes into Frank Pringle’s recycling machine—a piece of tire, a rock, a plastic cup—turns to oil and natural gas seconds later. “I’ve been told the oil companies might try to assassinate me,” Pringle says without sarcasm.

This is amazing! You need to read the rest here at http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/innovator_2.html.

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Newt Gingrich gave a speech where he talked about our war with radical Islam. Here's a piece of it:

Published: November 29, 2007

Sleepwalking Into a Nightmare

Speech by Newt Gingrich

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich delivered the following remarks to a Jewish National Fund meeting Nov. 15 at the Selig Center.

...We need first of all to recognize this is a real war. Our enemies are peaceful when they're weak, are ruthless when they're strong, demand mercy when they're losing, show no mercy when they're winning. They understand exactly what this is, and anybody who reads Sun Tzu will understand exactly what we're living through. This is a total war. One side is going to win. One side is going to lose. You'll be able to tell who won and who lost by who's still standing. Most of Islam is not in this war, but most of Islam isn't going to stop this war. They're just going to sit to one side and tell you how sorry they are that this happened. We had better design grand strategies that are radically bigger and radically tougher and radically more honest than anything currently going on, and that includes winning the argument in Europe, and it include s winning the argument in the rest of the world. And it includes being very clear, and I'll just give you one simple example because we're now muscle-bound by our own inability to talk honestly....

The rest is here: http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/terrorism.php?id=1385641

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More new technologies:

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News

January 14, 2005

Scientists have invented a plastic solar cell that can turn the sun's power into electrical energy, even on a cloudy day.

The plastic material uses nanotechnology and contains the first solar cells able to harness the sun's invisible, infrared rays. The breakthrough has led theorists to predict that plastic solar cells could one day become five times more efficient than current solar cell technology.

There's more here.
I neglected to put the link to this article up so here it is now. This article concerns solar films:

Green Tech Nanosolar Powersheet The New Dawn of Solar

Imagine a solar panel without the panel. Just a coating, thin as a layer of paint, that takes light and converts it to electricity. From there, you can picture roof shingles with solar cells built inside and window coatings that seem to suck power from the air. Consider solar-powered buildings stretching not just across sunny Southern California, but through China and India and Kenya as well, because even in those countries, going solar will be cheaper than burning coal. That’s the promise of thin-film solar cells: solar power that’s ubiquitous because it’s cheap. The basic technology has been around for decades, but this year, Silicon Valley–based Nanosolar created the manufacturing technology that could make that promise a reality.


The rest is here. There's an animation here.

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More great technology! A nuclear battery ten times more efficient than old designs.

Nuclear Battery Efficiency Raised

Advanced Battery Technology, Jul 2005

Scientists in the U.S. claim to have increased efficiency on batteries based on nuclear sources tenfold. University of Rochester researchers raised the efficiency by increasing the surface area of the silicon detector.

See the rest here.

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I just saw Amazon's new Kindle. I'm really impressed. I want one! Of course at nearly $400 I'm not getting one any time soon. Click on the picture for an informational video. This thing will hold over 200 books! It connects to Amazon wirelessly not with WiFi, but with the cell network. Books are about $10 each.


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Our dependence on oil is coming to an end in the near future. I keep seeing new experimental energy sources. Some of them will probably work. Here's the latest:

Yahoo News:

New technique creates cheap, abundant hydrogen: report

Mon Nov 12, 5:12 PM ET

CHICAGO (AFP) - US researchers have developed a method of producing hydrogen gas from biodegradable organic material, potentially providing an abundant source of this clean-burning fuel, according to a study released Monday.The technology offers a way to cheaply and efficiently generate hydrogen gas from readily available and renewable biomass such as cellulose or glucose, and could be used for powering vehicles, making fertilizer and treating drinking water.

AFP/DDP Photo: View of a hydrogen plant. A study just released reveals US researchers have developed a...

Read the rest at Yahoo news.

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Since the school district in its stupidity has locked us out of our “C” drives and therefore made the computers next to worthless, I’ve been trying to find some cheap flash drives so I can try to get along without the “C” drive. I’ve been using one that’s about the size of a stick of Dentine, the Kingmax in 1 GB, but I haven’t had much luck in finding another except for a company on Amazon, that wants to charge almost as much for shipping as the price of the flash drive. Every time I find one on sale it’s sold out. I’m also shopping for a cheap computer to take to school, but by the time I add all the software I would need it ain’t cheap anymore. I have some software that I use to make Power Point presentations and it must access the “C” drive, so it’s just not useable anymore. No wonder the district can’t keep teachers.

We have a three day weekend (the kids have 4) this weekend and Thanksgiving the weekend after next, so that’s two weeks in a row with short weeks, yay!

I also lit the first fire today. It’s been cool enough for heaters and the AC is not done down stairs so we used the old fashioned wood flame. Ah warm!

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Monday I got my replacement phone. I needed to reenter the contacts so I used BitPim which doesn’t support my phone yet, but I used the settings for a similar phone and uploaded my wife’s address book onto my computer. That worked just fine. When I downloaded them to my phone it cut off the first four numbers of each phone number. It was still easier to put them in that way. BitPim won’t transfer anything else, so I hope they get a version of BitPim that works with my phone soon. Plus I’m now using a backup service that Verizon is offering free to those who have a web account with them.

I bought a 2 gig memory card for the new phone because the one in the other phone (0.5 gig) was too small. It’s got all the music on my laptop on it and isn’t even half full. Sweet!

I bought my wife a book written by a former polygamist. The book finally came today and I recognized nearly everyone in the book! Apparently the author is related to my wife.

Last week I rewired the lights in the cellar so I could turn them off and on in two places. Then I realized I had to move the air conditioning unit, so yesterday I had to move the lights again. After I finished and started hooking up the a/c again, I realized I’ve got to move one of the lights yet again.

I’ve dug in as far as I need to, so now it’s time to widen my hole and make the room. If I didn’t have that sewer line right in the way I’d pour a concrete floor. But I’m not going to do much of that if I have to scoop concrete out of one wheel barrow into another, to get it across the pipe. If the guest house were empty I could cut the pipe and replace it when I’m all done. Oh well….

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My wife comes home a few days ago and tells me her car is falling apart, so yesterday we go car shopping. In St. George the car dealers are lined up all in a row, so we stopped at Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Ford, and Mitsubishi. I really like the Nissan Altima, it has many of the features that were in the $100,000 BMW Ivan let me drive just before he left for Chili, but when the salesman made his initial offer my wife stood up and walked out! She was a bit (no a lot) angry at the insulting offer. We ended up buying another Gallant. We could have gotten a ’08 but we got a great deal on a new ’07 so that’s what we brought home.

The poor salesman didn’t know what hit him. My wife is so much fun when we’re buying a car, she’s brutal!

The salesman tells us he used to be a cop. When they wouldn’t transfer him from child abuse cases, which were just too hard on him, he quit and is now a car salesman. Later the people at the next desk turned to him and asked, “Weren’t you the cop that arrested us a few years ago?” (He was.) It was quite the day.

Our wonderful senator, Harry Reid, violated his oath of office to condemn a private citizen (Rush Limbaugh) on the floor of the Senate the other day. He even got 40 other senators to sign the letter, including three presidential candidates. The letter was sent to Clear Channel asking them to condemn Limbaugh (for condemning our troops and that is something he didn’t do, and Harry Reid knows he didn’t do it, though Reid has done it)! Clear Channel gave the letter to Limbaugh who decided to auction it off on e-Bay with the proceeds going to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation. It sold for 2.1 million dollars—a record for e-Bay—with Rush matching with another 2.1. What makes the letter so historic is the blatant violation of the oath of office of the signers. Reid made a speech on the senate floor in which he tried to take credit for the 4.2 million charitable donation. It just made him look like the fool and Gadianton Robber that he is. Limbaugh clearly won this round!

Click for the full article

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Another look at solar power satellites, the real answer to our energy problems.

Solar array in space could provide all the world's energy

Lately we've been hearing a lot about alternative ways of generating electricity, and the idea of a solar power-gathering satellite sounds like the best plan yet. Its proponents say an orbital power station placed in a position where it's constantly bathed in unfiltered sunlight could provide enough power to run the whole world seven times over.

story continues here.


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On a sad note Cox and Forkum, after many great political cartoons, have decided to take a final bow. They will be missed!
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Can levitation be around the corner? Some physicists have apparently solved it. Check it out here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/06/nlevitate106.xml

Then you can check out the 4 September '07 Mike Shelton cartoon about Democrat hypocrisy with moral standards at http://www.townhall.com/Funnies/cartoonist/MikeShelton. Surprisingly The Orange County Register fired Shelton when he refused to allow them to steal work he did on his own time. Amazing!


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Oho! And now we have this!

Sizzling study concludes: Global warming 'hot air'
'You can spit, have same effect as doubling the carbon dioxide'

Wow, global warming is not man-made! Imagine that!

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Walter Williams has this to say:

Environmentalists, with the help of politicians and other government officials, have an agenda that has cost thousands of American lives.

In the wake of Hurricane Betsy, which struck New Orleans in 1965, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed building flood gates on Lake Pontchartrain, like those in the Netherlands that protect cities from North Sea storms. In 1977, the gates were about to be built, but the Environmental Defense Fund and Save Our Wetlands sought a court injunction to block the project.

Find the rest here.

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We flew up to Post Falls Friday. We went by way of Portland on an Alaska Air Boeing MD-80. That’s the one with three seats on one side and two on the other. Since first class has two by two that makes you have to negotiate a little dog-leg with your luggage where the aisle moves from the middle to off to the side. Then we got on a Horizons (run by Alaska) Bombardier Q-400 which is a 74 passenger prop (I call it a puddle jumper) plane. That one makes for a rough ride. We went on to Spokane in that one.

The next day we went all the way to the Canadian border and visited Gardner cave, the third largest (or second—depends on who you talk to) cave in Washington. We got to go in about 500 feet. It used to belong to a moonshiner who would walk his customers a few hundred yards north of the cave to finish up the sale. Once when a federal agent tried to put him under arrest he laughed and said, “you can’t, we’re in Canada!” (The cave is right on the border!)

We also saw Boundary Dam which was the dam where they built the city run by the rock star Tom Petty in the movie “The Postman.” You might remember the line where the postman asks him, “Weren’t you famous?” What was really cool is we got a personal tour. It’s not like Hoover Dam. This dam is really out of the way so there aren’t a lot of tourists. we got to see a lot of it. We were walking down a tunnel and we started to walk on a grate. Raegan looked down and when she realized it was four stories down she jumped off the grate and wouldn’t walk on any kind of grate the rest of the day! I think this dam is way cooler than Hoover. It’s built like a piece of egg shell, so when you’re on the walkway below the dam it’s curving out above your head. It’s only eight feet thick at the top (thirty-five at the base) and looks flimsy, but the curve is very strong—like an egg shell! We had a great time and the grandkids loved it.

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Michael Ramirez is on a roll! These are great!

links: Las Vegas Review Journal (where I got these) and Investor's Business Daily (where they originally appeared).

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