Three wrenches and 1467 hacksaw blades if Craftsman is true to form...

Another great read that I use a class material (though you have to buy it) is "The Thinker's Toolkit", by Morgan Jones, who taught analytic techniques at the CIA.

The analysts work very hard at sorting out the data for hard decisions with incomplete information given by very human subjects. It's a pity that their agency and policy makers have floundered so badly with the results.

Where's the ink leak at the bottom?

As a scientist and engineer working in food-related studies, the "nutritionism" problem is substantial.

Our nutrition "information" results from industry/commodity-organization sponsored studies that generate a (usually statistically marginal) physiological effect in animal models, which is immediately converted into the latest nutrition fad by a toxic (and very convenient) combination of passive scientists, industry overmarketing, and technically ignorant media. This allows food companies to continue to "grow" a largely stagnant commodity-processing industry and to remain profitable while doing so.

If there were a "smoking gun", the miracle food that would allow you to beat cancer, stay young and never get fat (or thin -- fashion ads in the late 1800's were about gaining rather than losing weight), there would be a population that would have found it by munching around at random many thousands of years ago.

The "eat (real) foods, mostly plants, and not too much" is about the best advice you can get, regardless of the source.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Interestingly, the plastic bottle/DEHP furor (@ROSSINDETROIT) is the exact mirror image of this. Animal model effects converted into media hype and thence into a health scare.

If this had been ADM, Monsanto et. al. who could field a platoon of lawyers, the patent would still be in force.

as MKULTRA points out, there are so many memory devices floating around that the laptop gambit is the usual pointless harassment and theater.

A $20- SD card the size of a postage stamp will carry any sort of perfidy you might have in mind -- just change the suffix to .jpg. Ditto the memory card in your cell phone, GPS etc. etc.

as MKULTRA points out, there are so many memory devices floating around that the laptop gambit is the usual pointless harassment and theater.

A $15 SD card the size of a postage stamp will carry any sort of perfidy you might have in mind -- just change the suffix to .jpg. Ditto the memory card in your cell phone, GPS etc. etc. I'd very much like to see TSA rummaging through every IPod/MP3 player, though it wouldn't surprise me much to see it happening.

I'm thinking that Monsieur Curie will save us all a lot of stud punching. Apply heat -- mourn for lost data.

cf. "Curie Point"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_point

Their Air Ray is even more elegant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxPzodKQays

A railgun driving an explosively formed penetrator? Yawn. Now if they can get the radios to work...

You invent such a great toy for the elimination of pointless hucksterism and booshwah and waste it on a minor eruption of corporate twaddle?

It's an election year -- unlimited free targets!!!

The last time I looked, a 500 Gb USB drive was about $130, and they're asking $600 just to sign up...?

Lovely photo platform, but I dread the fleet of these things that will start clogging the skies as every news station, paparazzo and police department wants one to snoop around with.

I wonder what the FAA thinks of nearly invisible collision hazards in the air...?

Land propellers -- neat!

For those of us in cold climates, these advanced devices are called "garages" or "back porches" and are commonly in use from three to seven months of the year. The portable version, often referred to as a "car trunk" is capable of storing frozen foods for long periods in multiple locations, as well as keeping sweaty gym clothes from decomposing.

A better page on his bike at http://www.evalbum.com/1133 -- he's also retrofitting a Geo Metro!

This is allegedly due to a slip up in a report by the National Academy of Sciences:
~~~~~~~~~
"Paul Thomas of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington had
the best explanation.

The academy's Food and Nutrition Board publishes the U.S.recommended daily allowances. The first edition in 1943 didn't mention water. The next edition, in 1945, did.

'A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters (83 ounces) daily in most instances," the book states. "An ordinary standard for diverse people is 1 milliliter for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.'

Somehow, the final sentence was lost in the translation.Most doctors and nutritionists say people don't need to drink every one of those eight glasses of water if they eat the proper
foods."

"Skip those 8 glasses of water? Idea is all wet"
Chicago Tribune - Chicago, Ill.
Author: Bob Condor
Date: Feb 29, 2004

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Oh, and don't forget to start a 50 billion dollar industry based on nothing but the usual nutrition hucksterism and marketing and thereby creating an incredible amount of packaging waste.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Some appalling statistics for you slurpers out there:

Interesting bottled water statistics:

* Americans drink more bottled water than coffee, milk, or beer. (Don’t go rushing to sell your Starbucks or Anheuser-Busch shares quite yet though)
* In 1976, the average American drank 1.6 gallons of bottled water per year. Just last year in 2007, the average American drank over 28 gallons of bottled water. In over thirty years, we have increased our bottled water consumption by over seventeen times.
* Fiji Water produces 1-million bottles/day while 50% of the residents in Fiji don’t even have reusable drinking water.
* The only drink that outsells bottled water is carbonated soft drinks which totals to an annual consumption of 52.9 billion gallons.
* Bottled water is a 50-billion dollar industry worldwide with bottling companies like Arrowhead, Poland Springs, Crystal Geyser, and Saratoga Springs.
* 24% of US bottled water is tap water purified and repackaged by Coke & Pepsi (aka purified municipal water).
* Pepsi’s Aquafina is the #1 selling bottled water with 13% market share while Coke’s Dasani bottled water is #2 with 11% market share.

(http://happyinvestor.wordpress.com/2008/02/24/bottled-water-next-generation-commodity/)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

and the industry is lawyering up in Washington, retaining Van Ness Feldman to lobby against taxes such as the 5¢ per bottle tax that Chicago has put on the products, largely as a result of the huge amount of waste it generates.

The EULA hardly matters since they won't sell it to you on the web anyway:

"This item cannot be sold on the web. Please call 800.606.6969."

I'm not flying to NYC to fill out a form like that, much less talking to one of their schmucks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you check out this thing on Fuji's site, apparently it'll find your face in a photograph in the dark and read a magnetic stripe on the fly to boot -- big brother in a box.

http://www.fujifilmusa.com/JSP/fuji/epartners/proPhotoProductIS-Pro.jsp

This has been standard procedure (per Aenertia's post) for a very long time -- ANZ was doing that in the early 1980's, and the fumigant smelled of pyrethrins (food approved -- pretty harmless).

Per Wrybread's comment -- this seems to be a collision of institutional microgreed. Best Buy's daft installers botch a job to save $20 in parts (or the wait to get them) and the local repair shop smells blood, knowing there's an insurer somewhere who will pay in full and that Best Buy Corporate isn't paying attention anyway (as usual).

One other iceberg tip in the Moonie Loonie pantheon: He owns most of the Atlantic fishing fleet, where his disciples work for...well, nothing. Better still, they *own* sushi -- I couldn't make this up.

"The Moon followers' seafood operation is driven by a commercial powerhouse, known as True World Group. It builds fleets of boats, runs dozens of distribution centers and, each day, supplies most of the nation's estimated 9,000 sushi restaurants."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/chi-0604sushi-1-story,0,3736876.story

I love it! Secret bugging devices the size of a shoebox with huge batteries and all the serial numbers intact. Sell it on Ebay!

"Where am I?"

"In the Village."

"What do you want?"

"Information."

"Whose side are you on?"

"That would be telling…. We want information. Information! INFORMATION!"

"You won't get it."

"By hook or by crook, we will."

"Who are you?"

"The new Number Two."

"Who is Number One?"

"You are Number Six."

"I am not a number — I am a free man!"
(Laughter from Number Two.)

This isn't anything new to anyone with any knowledge of basic wiring or a cynical eye to overmarketing to stereo buffs. I always have fun teasing people who've spent huge sums buying pointlessly large cables.

Coathangers might sound worse over a couple of km or so though, and you certainly couldn't jump start your car with regular speaker wire :-)

I asked a TSA official on a call-in radio show some months ago about how they could consider a system where things are constantly being taken *out* of luggage to be secure, since things could just as easily be put *in*. His response was a 5 minute diatribe on how noble our baggage handlers are. What TSA has done is to create a system where neither themselves nor the airlines responsible for any loss or damage that happens to luggage so long as the suitcase gets there eventually. I'm sure the airlines, TSA and the handlers are all quite happy about that.

@Skarbreeze is correct. Music/media conglomerates and their ilk are, for all intents and purposes, obsolete in terms of distribution of content and should be concentrating on what they can sanely manage (Marketing, live events and mass broadcast). Develop a simple, secure system for artists to sell directly through ITunes/Amazon/Paypal/Cosco online. and all go away. This is roughly in the works already.

Try making "Jesus of Montreal" now...

Oh c'mon -- our military bureaucracy making a self-serving and idiotic decision? No way!

The best part of this isn't that they've salvaged an old steam engine & boiler, it's the building of the custom alternator that it's connected to. Sweet! How about a parts list and construction diagrams?

I do hope they have a good idea of what a boiler explosion is and inspect the whole thing regularly.

In other news, the British Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Rt. Hon. Ed Balls, announced that the plans to alleviate their current financial problems with sales of video to certain internet websites had suffered what he termed a "minor setback".

I question the basic assumption of the free market in this age of conglomeration and unsupervised monopolies and duopolies. In a truly free market, you can take your business elsewhere, but in the market that we actually live in, there are few alternatives other than complaint or abstinence of purchase (and the latter is anathema to a raging-consumerism society).

If you're in the U.S., you need look no farther than the little box that's carrying your internet information right now. Nearly every market in the United States is served by only two services, differing in type; a DSL line and a high-speed cable-internet connection. This not only provides substandard service (putting even well-wired Americans well behind many small European countries), but a very profitable lock on the markets for the telephone and cable providers (often the same company) that control them.

I question the basic assumption of the free market in this age of conglomeration and unsupervised monopolies and duopolies. In a truly free market, you can take your business elsewhere, but in the market that we actually live in, there are few alternatives other than complaint or abstinence of purchase (and the latter is anathema to a raging-consumerism society).

If you're in the U.S., you need look no farther than the little box that's carrying your internet information right now. Nearly every market in the United States is served by only services, differing in type; a DSL line and a high-speed cable-internet connection. This not only provides substandard service (putting even well-wired Americans well behind many small European countries), but a very profitable lock on the markets for the telephone and cable providers (often the same company) that control them.

I think this idea is only for masochistic steampunk fashionistas -- I can't imagine enjoying music for any time with these, much less running with them on and the Bakelite/metal construction would likely freeze your ears in winter.

Urea compounds are some of the oldest synthetic plastics (urea-formaldehyde "compositions" date *way* back)

http://www.plastiquarian.com/uf.htm

and self-healing (or, more properly, self-fusing) plastics have been used for quite some time in cutting and drafting board surfaces among other applications. The holy grail is a structural/engineering polymer that will repair itself, particularly when microcracking occurs.

What goes around comes around -- Dell marketed (and I have, though it no longer works) a little `386/W95 laptop that was about this size and even had a marble-sized trackball. Still my favorite portable machine of all time -- if this HP unit gets underway, I'll be among the first in line!

Somehow I just can't get away from the "pressed hams" joke...