Short post — I want one.
Longer post. I can’t afford to buy one right now and unlike Steven Colbert I can’t beg for one on television.
So here’s the deal I made with myself.
I can buy myself an iPad when I can pay for it entirely with monies earned from my writing. Not from my day job, not from tax overpayment returns and not from any gift cards, but solely from money paid to me for my writing.
It could be a long time before I get one.
So here a link to a report that I found interesting.
The basic upshot is that this scientist, Wolfgang Knorr, did a study to see what has happen to the atmospheric fraction of carbon dioxide over the last 150 years. The assumption is that increasing fractions of carbon dioxide will drive a ‘greenhouse effect.’
In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.
I found that very interesting.
Over Christmas we had another attempted terror attack against America. By now I assume that everyone reading this blog knows that a young man smuggled explosives aboard an International flight — the bomb making materials were apparently in his underwear — and after determining that the aircraft was in American airspace, attempted to detonate it.
Only by a combination of luck and in competence did the device not explode, but merely burned. Even that could have been very bad had passengers not acted quickly and subduing the terrorist and putting out the fire.
It stupid that this man was able to smuggle the bomb-making material aboard. We have the technology to catch this crap. It’s back scatter x-rays.
These devices can image right through clothing down to the skin. The likelihood of getting contraband through such a system is much lower than with our current wand and pat down system. (Nothing is assured – a dopey scanner operator can still miss things, but this is so much better than what we have now.) We have not instituted these scanners because it is able to image people in the nude, right through their clothing.
Horrors, someone might see my wang.
Bloddy hell people, I’d rather have TSA people seeing an endless parade of naughty bits than not be able to see bombs. Hmmmm, nude or dead, I know which I’ll want to be.
The only reason to hold back this technology is that we are so scared of skin we’d literally rather die than have someone see some.
To quote Plan 9 from Outer Space…
“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”
Xcor, a southern California rocket company, as signed a deal with an agency in South Korea for funding to operate Xcor’s sub-orbital rocket plane. It’s always a good sign when money changes hands,
Here’s the link to the press release…Xcor and South Korea.
And here is some fin commentary at Transterrestrial Musings.
And h/t to Instapundit.
Not that I had gotten much push back on it, but I am now vindicated on my choice for a blu-ray player.
When I was looking into blu-ray players one of my prime concerns was compatibility. There was already Blu-ray 1.0 and 1.1, and 2.0, the basic discs would work in any machine, but some special features would only work if you have the latest version of the blu-ray playing software. Because of that I selected the Playstation 3 as my blu-ray player. Its internet connectivity allowed it to update its firmware as the needs arose and keep up to date on playing blu-rays. I have been quite happy with its performance and not regretted buying it for a moment.
Today the specs were released for something I knew was coming, Blu-ray 3D; 3-D movies with full 1080p quality from you home TV. Sony a prime backer of blu-ray is going to have a firmware update for the Playstation 3 to show the 3-d Blu-rays.
No hardware upgrade for me.
So I spent today setting up my christmas present from my sweetie-wife.
My wife and id usually do not engage in trying to figure out the perfect gift for each other and instead buy gifts from each other’s wish lists.
A few months ago I had commented in the $99 walmart special audio system I owned couldn’t keep up with the high end data and audio coming off the PS# when it played blu-rays. My sweetie-wife offered to buy em a new sound system for Christmas. I did the research, found an affordable system that met my needs, and gave her the information.
This week Fry’s had it on sale for a very good price so my sweetie bought it and I set it up today.
It is a Sony STR Dh 700. I am very happy with the sound I am getting out of this system. (I also had two speakers that some former owner of the condo left behind when he moved out.)
The most frustrating aspect of the set-up was the speaker connections for the front speakers. I had never seen anything like these and my sweetie-wife and I puzzled over it for a few moments before figuring out how to connect the wires in.
Then I allowed the systems to self balance itself. (It has a very nice auto-diagnostic routine to figure out where the speakers are and how to balance them.) After that I went through each component of our entertainment system and made sure all the outputs were the highest quality.
Man this sounds great. I put in blu-rays and got blown away by the quality, but even older DVD with mono soundtracks – like Destination Moon — sounded great.
So I have now read a few books on my Ezreader pro and I’ve discovered another advantage to reading on the eReader vs reading a dead tree edition.
I have a better idea of the quality of the writing than from just the dead tree.
It’s all about the ending. When I read 1633 I was shocked when there were no more pages turns left. The book felt incomplete. Too many loose ends left unresolved and so forth.
With other books I could feel that the author was bringing me safely back down to the end of the story. The arc of the narrative flowed and there was no sudden feeling of where the hell is the rest of the book.
I just finished reading Trading In Danger by Elizabeth Moon. (A book I would not have read had it not been for the EzReader Pro. Mysterious Galaxy had it in e-formats but not dead tree.) Even though the author left many threads open for further stories and novels, the story felt complete. Even though I could not see how many page turns I had left, I could feel the resolution of the ending unfolding. This did not happen with 1633.
I’m currently reading, and enjoying very much, Soulless by my friend Gail Carriger.
If you look up in the upper left hand area of this site you see a new page, Visitor Map.
This is from a cool little plug-in that records all my visitor and displays them graphically.
h/t to Fish for clueing me into the plug-in.
In the afternoon we were taken to the vehicle room. Here they had on display ‘hero’ vehicles used in WB productions. By hero vehicles they mean the car and such that were used in normal shots, not in stunt photography. These vehicles were the actual ones. not reproductions.
Here is a car and a flying vehicle used in the movie A.I. I’m a genre fan but it is a film I have never seen.
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Here is the Batmobile used in the two Tim Burton Batman movies.
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The Sunbeam convertible used the feature film version of Get Smart.
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Here is the Tumbler used in Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the Batman franchise, Batman Begins and again in The Dark Knight.
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And the Batpod also used in The Dark Knight after the Tumbler is destroyed.
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Here is the Gran Torino from Clint Eastwood’s film, Gran Torino. Beyond you can the General Lee from the film version of The Dukes Of Hazzard, and beyond that a hint of the sedan from the Matrix films.
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Our tour guide in front of the flying car — it doesn’t really fly of course – from Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets.
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The Mach 5 from Speed Racer.
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Hugo Weaving was filming some Matrix related materials and showed up in the vehicle room. No, he didn’t – this is a Hugo Weaving dummy. They made a lot of these for the duplication scenes in the recent Matrix films, but it looked too good not to get a picture of it. There were more of these in the museum, but I discuss that and the prop and costuming departments in my next post.