Ferrari Land

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This video on WIMP.com got me started.

Bumper Sticker of the Day

HESS II

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Satellite view of the HESS II installation.
Namibia is in the news for the 2nd day in a row, at least on the Graham Hancock website. Yesterday there were rumors of a vast underground reservoir of water. All it takes is one look at the place to know that would be wonderful if it pans out. I don't think I've ever seen any place quite so desolate looking, except places known to be deserts, like the Sahara or the American Southwest. Not too long ago there was a story about "fairy circles" in Namibia, which are probably due to a fungus of some sort. Today's news is about HESS II, another crazy astronomy project, similar to the one in the Chilean desert in South America in that they both chose a location because of it's high elevation and low moisture content. Crazy, man.

HESS is being used to detect high energy particles, i.e. cosmic rays. It does this indirectly by detecting the blue light (Cherenkov light) generated when a cosmic ray impacts a molecule high up in the atmosphere. The HESS website has a better explanation.

Damaged Damages

Finished watching Season 3 of Damages (with Glenn Close and Rose Byrne as Ellen Parsons), and boy am I glad that is over. The first two seasons were pretty twisted, but they were at least partially believable. Season 3 though made no sense at all. It starts badly with Joe Tobin not making any sense, but before too long, nothing anyone is doing is making any sense. Made me wonder what the people who put this together were thinking. Were they like, let's write a hare-brained script, and people will watch it because they watched the first two seasons, which were pretty crazy, so if we make it even crazier, they'll like it even more? Or maybe they got 42 people to write one page of the screen play for each episode, and then they shufffled all the pages and dumped the result on the screen. I mean, they had good actors, they had a good story, why did they have to fuck it up so bad? I would not have been surprised if season 3 was the last one, but no! There is a season four and season five is in progress right now.

Obviously I'm missing something, I just wish I knew what it was.

P.S. I was looking for a picture of Ellen being serious, which is one of the main attractions of this show, but this is the only one that Google served up that fit the bill, and it isn't from Damages.

Sign of the Times

"KNOCK LOUDLY, the Dog is hard of hearing"

Quote of the Day

They created a robust Constitution and Bill of Rights, and wisely reserved the majority of power for the states and the people. That is why our government is the oldest on earth, while other nations–France, for example–have gone through five or more in the same amount of time. - Bob Owens, via Tam. Emphasis mine.

I was really surprised by this statement. Usually when we talk about history and who's been around the longest, we are talking about countries and civilizations, which implies that there was a government, but governments come and go, so maybe our government is the oldest on earth, although I think maybe the UK is older.

TSA All the Way!

Prompted by Jennifer's latest rant, I tried to find some numbers about air travel. The governement's website is down.

Figures, but then I found this on the International Air Transport Association's website:

Date: 24 October 2007

Passenger numbers to reach 2.75 billion by 2011

(DAMASCUS, Syria) The International Air Transport Association (IATA) released passenger and freight traffic forecasts projecting that in 2011 the air transport industry will handle 2.75 billion passengers (620 million more passengers than in 2006) and 36 million tonnes of international freight (7.5 million tonnes more than in 2006).

Syria? Seriously? Of course this was almost five years ago, back when the current unpleasantness was only simmering on low heat, not boiling over and onto the front page of the world's newspapers.

Air traffic fell off sharply after those crazy Saudi's hijacked four airliners and deliberately crashed them back in September of 2001. Air traffic has increased somewhat since then, but I don't think it has recovered completely, at least not in the US. The TSA (Transportation Security Administration) and their onerous "security" measures are partly to blame. Airline executives should have something to say, but I'm not hearing anything. I did find this one story that offers a couple of really feeble excuses.

Bonus quote from 2010 with lots of numbers from reDesign:

What the media don’t talk about is that flying is incredibly safe. 2 million people a day fly in the U.S. That’s more than 700 million people a year. In the last 9 years, there have been:

• More than 300,000 deaths in car crashes.
• More than 130,000 people murdered.
• Exactly zero fatalities from aviation terrorism in the U.S., 6.6 billion passengers and zero fatalities.

Everything we do in life has a risk to it. Taking a shower, walking down the street, going to the mall.

I travel between 50,000 and 100,000 miles a year most years. I also travel on larger planes and to and from foreign countries. My risk of dying in a terrorism-related plane crash is much greater than that of the average American. (16% of Americans have never flown; another 37% fly less than once a year.) But I’m not worried because I know the risk is so unbelievably tiny it’s not worth worrying about. The TSA’s new procedures don’t reduce that already insignificant risk.

The Cinnabon at the airport food court is a bigger threat to your health and well being than a terrorist is. And, by the way, what the TSA doesn’t want you to know is that the guy working behind the counter at the Cinnabon didn’t have to go through security.