Monday, January 18, 2010

Clinton Bush Haiti Fund  |  About the Fund

Clinton Bush Haiti Fund About the Fund

Friday, January 15, 2010

Monday, January 11, 2010

Race and Film

Does watching a movie that one likes makes one less likely to see issues with race? Case in point, while watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the racism jumped out at me. On the other hand, while watching Avatar, I completely missed what people are pointing out as racism. Is that true for others? Is doing or watching something you like makes you blind to other points of view? Perhaps.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Tower of Babel anyone?

Is it me or does the new world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, look a lot like the Tower of Babel? Heck, it's even in the right region of the world. Let the conspiracy theories begin, re 2012 and all that nonesense.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Avatar = New TV/DVD/Hardware

As many people out there, I loved the Avatar.  But upon coming home and gazing at my newly bought TV, I had to sign with exasperation. Now, as increasingly greater number of movies will come out in 3D, to view them anywhere near approaching the quality seen in theatres, you'll have to again buy brand new equipment. It just seems that BlueRay won over HD DVD in the past year or so, and now we'll have to see whether Sony will step up and make 3D integration. Any thoughts?

Friday, January 1, 2010

Shoot Low and Act Surpirsed

Note the following NASA article: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/31dec_uncertainfuture.htm?list912666. Specifically, the sentence that notes "The rovers began missions intended to last for just three months but which have instead gone on for six Earth years, or 3.2 Mars years." Why do they do that? It seems every mission that has ever been sent into space, from the Hubble to Voyager, has been intended to last some ridiculously short amount of time (not to mention ISS or Skylab or Mir). And, it's like a suprise that they make these things last for decades longer. Wow, we thought we sent up something crappy into space, but wow, it is really still working. Must have been designed by engineers or something. Not marketers. Hubble, launched in 1990, was supposed to have a life of something like 5 years, but 20 years later, it's still going. Yes, there have been multiple service trips, but it appears that, after the initial mirror repair, most of the service calls were just to update equipment and swap out some insulation. They make it sound originally like after some seemingly random time period (how they arrived at that specific time frame is never explained), there will be some catastrophic power failure and the piece of tech will just die. And it never happens. So, what I'm wondering is whether the ridiculously short time frames are just to cover their behinds (in case something goes wrong, they can always say, well, it was supposed to happen 20 years ago), or whether these are valid surprises as far as machines inexplicably working years past their alleged expiration dates in the dead of space.