The Benefits of Driving a Stick
Here's a happy one I hadn't thought of. Apparently, it's a deterrent to carjacking.
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Here's a happy one I hadn't thought of. Apparently, it's a deterrent to carjacking.
This is officially the least eagerly anticipated news story ever... at least by me.
Perhaps next they'll get live footage of a gargantuan spider eating a pair of English schoolboys...
Sweet! Mad Max's Interceptor for sale on eBay! This is definitely the car I would want to drive through the post-apocalypric wasteland if the apocalypse had arrived in 1978.
From science-fiction to reality, sometime soon?
Defense Tech: Marines in Spaaaaaace!This idea has been a staple in science-fiction stories for years, of course. It seems to me that, engineering hurdles aside, this strategy also has to address the tactical challenge dramatzed in many of those stories, namely that the bad guys see you coming and have plenty of time to shoot you down. I wonder how they propose to deal with that?
"After three years of being laughed out of meetings, the U.S. Marine Corps' futuristic plans to deploy through space may finally be getting some traction," notes Aviation Week's spunky new spin-off, Defense Technology International.
“Although the chuckle factor hasn't altogether disappeared, the Air Force Research Laboratory and Darpa are beginning a study of options for a reusable upper-stage space travel vehicle -- the same kind of technology that the Marines might need for a ride halfway across the globe.”
According to exit polls, Gerhard Schroeder is out as chancellor in Germany. Glenn Reynolds: “Gateway Pundit notes that crapulent anti-Americanism didn't work for Schroeder this time.” Good.
You see? You see what happens? I leave, and suddenly, 25 years later, the place is sliding into the ocean.
A silent tectonic event, so powerful it has shifted southern Vancouver Island out to sea, but so subtle nobody has felt a thing, is slowly unfolding on the West Coast.It's not just Canada, actually, it's also the Pacific Northwest of the US. It's probably just as well that CWSS coblogger Russell’s has been away on vacation for the last week, as it means he's missed half the period during which the odds of an apocalyptic, NBC-worthy earthquake near Seattle are, it’s estimated, about 30 times the normal odds.
The event is called episodic tremor and slip (ETS). It involves a slow movement of the Juan de Fuca and North America tectonic plates along the Cascadia margin of southern British Columbia. Faults associated with the plates have been the sites of major earthquakes -- akin to the colossal tsumani-causing quake last December in Indonesia -- every 500 years or so, the geologic record shows. The last such temblor in the area struck on Jan. 26 in the year 1700.Word from Vast Right Wing Conspiracy headquarters is that the president has Rove and Hallibruton working overtime to find a way to set off the Big One, because George Bush doesn’t care about latté sipping tree-huggers.
The movement was predicted. Scientists recently learned that these ETS events recur about every 14 months. It has been detected by Global Positioning System instruments.
The event does not mean an earthquake is imminent, but geologists are eager to study it and learn more and they say sooner or later an ETS event is likely to trigger a major quake.
"The probability of occurrence of a megathrust earthquake is about 30 times higher during this approximately two-week window, than during the rest of the 14.5 month cycle," [Geological Survey of Canada lead geologist John] Cassidy told LiveScience. "Having said that, 30 times a small number is still a small number."
Reading back over the coverage of Katrina, I ran across this quote from Randy Barnett from September 2, shortly after the storm:
Second, government at all levels has obviously not lived up to its promise of being able to anticipate and react to disasters and other social calamities better than nongovernmental institutions. This should not be surprising. Governments are comprised of ordinary human beings with the same limitations of vision and self-interests as those in the private sector (and often, but not always, with far worse incentives)--that is, these human beings confront pervasive problems of knowledge, interest, and power. I have the same reaction every time there are calls for increased government oversight in the aftermath of some failure in the private sector. What gives anyone confidence that government institutions will act with any more prescience?A good question, I think.
As I've said elsewhere, I thought Transporter 2 was a terrible film.
However, seeing it did have one useful side-effect: because I saw it, I finally know that the very cool musical cue from the Sin City teaser trailer is Cells by UK band The Servant.
The song didn't appear on the Sin City soundtrack, no doubt because it doesn't appear in that film, only in its trailer, but there's a version (with vocals) on the Transporter 2 soundtrack. You can get it, if you like, via iTunes (I found it listed as "Le Transporteur 2") or from Amazon here. I'm still looking for an instrumental mix, though.
Three plague-infected mice have disappeared from a New Jersey bio-defense lab.
So tell me… Is there anything less reassuring than a New Jersey state official trying to be calm the public? State Health Commissioner assures us that mice infected with plague die "very fast," so "the risk to the public ... is probably slim to none. We didn't think -- nor did the CDC think -- there was any public health threat..."
“Probably?” That’s terrific, because it’s not like fleas from infected rodents ever wiped out half of Europe, or anything.
Jonathan Adler notes that today, “Senator Biden argued that because Senators must disclose their views on specific issues when they stand for election, Judge Roberts should be willing to tell the Judiciary Committee his views on specific questions, such as whether there is a fundamental, constitutionally protected right to refuse life-saving medical treatment on behalf of one’s critically ill relatives.”
The judge managed to reply without reminding the Senator of his own words during the 1993 Ginsberg confirmation hearings, when a Democratic president was nominating a liberal judge:
"…you not only have a right to choose what you will answer and not answer, but in my view you should not answer a question of what your view will be on an issue that clearly is going to come before the court in 50 different forms, probably, over the next —over your tenure on the court.” (Joe Biden, Committee On The Judiciary, U.S. Senate, Hearing, July 22, 1993)The RNC, of course has not been so circumspect—they’re apparently passing the quote around. Really, it’s hard to blame them, isn’t it? Senators are so practiced at pretending to stand on principle that it’s just rewarding when you catch one in the midst of such transparently feckless hypocrisy.
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