Bush, The 'misunderestimated' president?
All politicians are prone to make slips of the tongue in the heat of the moment - and President George W Bush has made more than most.
The word "Bushism" has been coined to label his occasional verbal lapses during eight years in office, which come to an end on 20 January.
Here are some of his most memorable pronouncements.
ON HIMSELF
"They misunderestimated me."
Bentonville, Arkansas, 6 November, 2000
''I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe - I believe what I believe is right." Rome, 22 July, 2001
"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."
Nashville, Tennessee, 17 September, 2002
"There's no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead."
Washington DC, 11 May, 2001
"I want to thank my friend, Senator Bill Frist, for joining us today. He married a Texas girl, I want you to know. Karyn is with us. A West Texas girl, just like me."
Nashville, Tennessee, 27 May, 2004
Oz Anglicans embrace Darth Vader
Those of you requiring proof that Oz's Anglicans are indeed a broad church should cast your eyes over this remarkable shot captured recently in Bondi, NSW, by reader Howard Owens:
Yup, it's clear Darth Vader has shunned the dark side and is well on his way to redemption. Give him a couple of years and he'll be aplogising for Apple. ®
Bootnote
Yes, we know the Pope's a Catholic, but suggest that since Darth Vader doesn't really exist, a little bit of interdenominational licence is allowed.
Marriage proposal triggers UFO alert
BERLIN - Police say a young man's creative marriage proposal triggered reports of unidentified flying objects from worried Germans. Bavarian police say several people called late Wednesday evening to alert them to what they thought were UFOs and unusual lights drifting across the sky above the sleepy town of Plattling.
They say a police patrol set off to investigate — but was disappointed in its quest for unusual visitors.
A police statement Thursday said officers found a 29-year-old man who had just proposed to his 27-year-old girlfriend.
He had accompanied his proposal by sending up 50 paper lanterns that glowed in the night. Police say his girlfriend said "yes."
Cat hired as station chief brings passengers back
By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press Writer Mon May 26, 7:34 AM ET
TOKYO - A money-losing Japanese train company has found the purr-fect pet mascot to draw crowds and bring back business — tabby Tama.
All the 9-year-old female cat does is sit by the entrance of Kishi Station in western Japan, wearing a black uniform cap and posing for photos for the tourists who are now flocking in droves from across the nation.
Tama has been doing such a good job of raising revenue for the troubled Kishikawa train line that she was recently promoted to "super-station-master."
"She never complains, even though passengers touch her all over the place. She is an amazing cat. She has patience and charisma," Wakayama Electric Railway Co. spokeswoman Yoshiko Yamaki told The Associated Press Monday. "She is the perfect station master."
Appointing a cat to turn around fortunes makes cultural sense in Japan, where cats are considered good luck and are believed to bring in business.
People are snatching up novelty goods — postcards, erasers, notebooks and pins — decorated with Tama's photos. There's even a special 1,365 yen ($13) book of photos of Tama called, "Diary of Tama, the Station Master."
Tama had been on the brink of losing her place to live, with the nearby store where she was raised being torn down. Now, the station is home.
Kishi Station started running without any workers in April 2006 as part of cost cuts.
The Kishikawa line had been losing 500 million yen ($4.9 million) a year as passenger numbers fell steadily to as low as about 5,000 a day, or some 1.9 million a year.
After Tama's appointment last year passengers have been gradually returning, recently rising 10 percent to about 2.1 million a year.
In December Tama was rewarded with bonus pay — all in cat food.
Climate profs 'can't recommend' enormo-space-parasol | The Register
Global-warming brains lukewarm on 'Sunshade World' ploy
Bristol-based researchers have said that they "can't recommend" the idea of solving global warming by putting a giant sunshade in space so as to cool the earth down.
In their report Sunshade World, Professor Paul Valdes and Dr Dan Lunt of Bristol Uni's School of Geographical Sciences - with colleagues - examine the likely results of artificially reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth. The scientists say that previous studies have estimated that space-based architecture could perhaps achieve this in around 25 years' time, at a cost of "several trillion dollars".
According to a Bristol Uni statement, when compared to scenarios involving "uncontrolled" future climate change, the predicted shifts for a future high-carbon parasol-equipped Earth are relatively small. "In this respect," according to the climate boffins, "the research found sunshade geoengineering to be highly successful".
Nonetheless, the sunshade climate model still showed potential problems.
"We found significant cooling of the Tropics, a warming of the polar regions and related sea ice reduction,” said Lunt. "We also found important differences in the hydrological cycle, with Sunshade World being generally drier than the pre-industrial ‘natural’ world. Average precipitation decreased by five percent with the largest decreases being in the Tropics."
Overall, however, the scientists seemed to imply that most of the severe catastrophes foretold in a runaway carbon-driven warming scenario would be greatly reduced by a massive space sun-brolly. Still, the Bristol climate scientists thought it was a bad idea:
Other problems, however, remain unsolved by this form of geoengineering. In particular, the potential effects of ocean acidification on certain types of plankton – the base of the ocean food chain – could lead to an unforeseen impact on ecosystems in Sunshade World.As a result, the team could not recommend sunshade geoengineering as an alternative to the reduction of carbon emissions.
That's not altogether a surprise, as we can assume Professor Valdes for one was already firmly committed to pushing for carbon-emissions reduction. He is a non-executive director at Greenstone Carbon Management, a consultancy advising businesses on how to reduce their carbon emissions. Valdes' colleagues on the Greenstone board include the well-known Dr Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester, whose views on energy are well known - everyone should simply use less, in particular by not leaving their TVs on standby.
Greenstone also appears to endorse biofuels as a viable carbon-reducing plan. Funnily enough, one of the company's co-founders is biofuels biz kingpin Andrew Stone, also a director of Grainfarmers UK - a company which would naturally love to see increased takeup of crop biofuels.
A space-based global sunshade is a pretty wacky idea, no doubt about it. But it isn't really a lot more wacky in many people's view than trying to run the world on food-crop biofuels. And a space sunshade makes a great deal more sense than worrying about TVs on standby - certainly if those TVs are in houses which also contain baths, cookers, irons, washing machines etc. (Seriously: Anderson should be advocating that we all stop ironing our clothes if he's really serious. An hour's ironing saved equates to keeping the TV off standby for three months.)
All in all, it seems safe to say that Dr Lunt and his boss Prof Valdes will not have started their recent work well-disposed to the idea that we can emit as much carbon as we like and then deal with the consequences using a global space parasol. Nonetheless, Sunshade World appears to offer a far from disastrous prediction.
The notion's possibly a good backup plan to have ready, then, just in case all the governments of the world don't come together in the next few years and massively clamp down on global carbon emissions. (Either that or it's time to look at the Futurama wheeze of dropping a big ice cube from space into the sea every year, anyway.)
Read all about it from Bristol Uni here (includes paper reference). ®
Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies
Illustration: Valdemar Duran
Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth?
If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.
With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities "with diverse social, political, and legal systems."
"Decades from now, those looking back at the start of the century will understand that Seasteading was an obvious step towards encouraging the development of more efficient, practical public-sector models around the world," Thiel said in a statement.
It might sound like the setting for the videogame Bioshock, but the institute isn't playing around: It plans to splash a prototype into the San Francisco Bay within the next two years, the first step toward establishing deep-water city-states, or what it calls "seasteads" -- homesteads on the high seas.
Within the pantheon of would-be utopian communities, there's a particularly rich history of people trying to live outside the nation-state paradigm out in the ocean. The most ambitious was Marshall Savage's Aquarius Project, which aimed at nothing less than the colonization of the universe. There was also Las Vegas millionaire Michael Oliver's attempt to create a new island country, the Republic of Minerva, by dredging the shallow waters near Tonga. And the Freedom Ship was to be a mile-long portable country costing about $10 billion to construct.
None of these projects has succeeded, a fact that The Seasteading Institute's founders, Google's Patri Friedman and the semi-retired Wayne Gramlich, are keenly aware of throughout the 300-page book they've written about seasteading.
Instead of starting with a grand scheme worthy of a James Bond villain, the Institute is bringing an entrepreneurial, DIY mentality to creating oceanic city-states.
"There's a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing, and the idea is to do it in a way that's not crazy," said Joe Lonsdale, the institute's chairman and a principal at Clarium Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund.
The seasteaders want to build their first prototype for a few million dollars, by scaling down and modifying an existing off-shore oil rig design known as a "spar platform."
This schematic illustrates the ballasting system that Wayne Gramlich imagines would keep the seastead from tipping over. The amount of water in the ballasts could be raised or lowered to move the seastead up and down.
In essence, the seastead would consist of a reinforced concrete tube with external ballasts at the bottom that could be filled with air or water to raise or lower the living platform on top.
The spar design helps offshore platforms better withstand the onslaught of powerful ocean waves by minimizing the amount of structure that is exposed to their energy.
"You have very little cross-sectional interaction with waves [with] the spar design," Gramlich said.
The primary living space, about 300 square feet per person, would be inside the tube, but the duo envisions the top platform holding buildings, gardens, solar panels, wind turbines and (of course) satellites for internet access.
To some extent, they believe the outfittings for the seastead will be dependent on the business model, say aquaculture or tourism, that will support it and the number of people aboard.
"We're not trying to pick the one strategy because we think there will be multiple people who want one for multiple reasons," Gramlich said.
Solar bra brings conservation closer to the heart - Yahoo! News
TOKYO (Reuters) - Ladies, take your battle for the environment a little closer to your heart with a solar-powered bra that can generate enough electric energy to charge a mobile phone or an iPod.
Lingerie maker Triumph International Japan Ltd unveiled its environmentally friendly, and green colored, "Solar Power Bra" on Wednesday in Tokyo which features a solar panel worn around the stomach.
The panel requires light to generate electricity and the concept bra will not be in stores anytime soon, said Triumph spokeswoman Yoshiko Masuda, as "people usually can not go outside without wearing clothes over it."
But it does send the message of how lingerie could possibly save the planet, Masuda said, adding that the bra should not be washed or sunned on a rainy day to avoid damaging it.
Being eco-friendly is now fashionable in Japan, and the "Solar Energy Bra" follows the company's other green-themed undergarments that include a bra that turns into a reusable shopping bag and one that featured metal chopsticks to promote the use of reusable chopsticks.
"It is very comfortable and I can really feel involved in eco-friendly efforts as well," model Yuko Ishida said.
Swiss birdman in Alpine backpack-jetplane stunt flight | The Register
Famous backpack-jetplane pilot Yves Rossy has given his most daring public performance yet, leaping from an ordinary aeroplane to perform a variety of stunts above the Swiss Alps. He says he will fly his four-engined strapon flying wing across the English Channel later this year.
Only the most committed airheads need apply.
Credit: Stephanie Thomet
The Swiss birdman described his flight yesterday as "absolutely excellent", and his sponsors Hublot Watches (who prefer that he be called "FusionMan") issued a statement saying:
The spectacle was impressive. Yves Rossy leapt from the plane with his wing folded, then deployed his craft and began the flight proper. He made several “figure of eights” above spectators aware of being present at an exceptional event ...Yves Rossy represents the intensely close relationship between the development of a technology, a body honed to perfection which he uses to steer his craft, and a mind attuned to split-second coordination of flight parameters ... he flies like a bird ... The name FusionMan reflects this synergy of diverse skills that has made a dream come true.
Rossy has been working on his backpack plane equipment for years, following a madcap 1990s career of aerial stunts involving sky-surfing, fountain-surfing*, balloons, ordinary planes, parachutes and lord knows what else. In 2003, the former Swiss air force fighter jockey - currently an airline pilot in his day job - decided that his latest passion, gliding under an inflatable strapon wing, lacked a certain something - namely jet engines.
Many initial obstacles were overcome. Inflatable wings were found to be too bendy for jets, and were replaced with folding, rigid carbon-fibre jobs spread by an electric motor. In 2004 this prototype was "partially destroyed" after Rossy went into an almost-fatal spin at an air show. The next year he was back, and made successful flights in a twin-jet job, but this too was wrecked after "uncontrollable oscillations" led to another prang and saw Rossy prematurely resorting to his parachute yet again. The two engines, of a type normally used in model planes, were apparently a bit lacking in poke anyway, so Rossy was happy enough to rebuild again.
In November 2006, he was back with four engines on his back and a new wing. This time he seemed to have cracked it, making a successful five-and-a-half minute flight. But there was yet another pileup early last year, and once again the machine had to be rebuilt.
Now with sponsorship from Swiss watch company Hublot, Rossy is back once again with a new and even better wing - quadruple engines, much quicker gas-piston opening, almost 200lb of thrust allowing a climb rate of 1000'/min and fuel for ten minutes of powered flight at 185 mph. That should, as the intrepid birdman says, be enough to get him across the Channel and a bit to spare. It's a lot better than present-day vertical-takeoff jetpacks, which typically struggle to beat a minute's endurance.
Rossy's backpack jetwings won't be hitting the shops soon, though. The only controls or instruments are a throttle and an audible altimeter - the wing is steered using the body, and given his long history of crackups this plainly isn't easy even for Rossy. A flameproof suit is necessary to avoid leg burns from the jet exhaust, too. The only way of launching is to jump from a (great) height. Landing is by folding the wings and parachuting down - yet more skills to be mastered. (The latest wing has its own landing chute which deploys if it has to be jettisoned, which should ease the future development path somewhat).
The main application would seem to be stunts like yesterday's - or perhaps for certain highly unusual/barmy special-forces missions. Spelco, a military parachute company in Germany, is working on its "Gryphon" backpack deltaplane - an easier to operate, low-radar-signature, long-ranging version of Rossy's concept.
The cost of all this?
$285,000 so far, according to AP. And there may be other hidden prices to be paid. "I'm not married any more," says the 47-year-old Rossy, in a Hublot promo video. ®
*Apparently.
Walmart Cake | haha.nu - a lifestyle blogzine
Walmart Employee: “Hello ‘dis Walmarts, how can I help you?”
Customer: ” I would like to order a cake for a going away party this week.”
Walmart Employee: “What you want on the cake?”
Customer: “Best Wishes Suzanne” and underneath that “We will miss you”.
Walmart Employee: “Dat all? Okay, Bye.”
