Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road

Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road: "Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road".

Will Australia become "a Better Place"? Let's hope so.

Inhabitat Contortionist Folding Bike Rolls Up Smaller Than a Wheel

Inhabitat "Contortionist" Folding Bike Rolls Up Smaller Than a Wheel: August 5, 2009

Terrafugia: private car / aeroplane

>Is this cool or what!



The Transition is expected to be released in 2011. The estimated purchase price is US$194,000.

Moon landing + 40 years

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong & buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon. Where were you? I certainly know where I was. I remember it well.

I had a sore throat, so I missed school and spent the day at home. I probably would have stayed home anyway, as I wanted to listen in to as much of the live radio broadcast as possible. I was more interested than most, as I had been very interested in astronomy since about 1965 when I was 11, and saw Fireball XL5 on our first TV. Soon after I attended a few night sessions at the observatory owned by the amateur Whangarei Astonomical Society, and was taken there to look through their telescope a few times by a very kind senior member, Mr Kerr.

At that time got a transistor radio, so at night I would spend hours listening in to the first pirate radio, and more interestingly, to short-wave stations from all round the world. I got to know the times when the BBC and Voice of America stations transmitted towards New Zealand.

Soon after we moved back to Wellington. At my school there we had an American history teacher in 1969, Peter Maunder. He took us to the US embassy to check out their library. When the Apollo 11 mission was approaching, Voice of America advertised availability of a Moon Landing information pack from US Embassies. I posted a letter ordering it, and got it a few days before launch. It included a program tracker: a plasticy double layered round device with an aperture in the front layer, so you could read programmed events written on the bottom layer. There was a metal grommet in the centre so the front could be spun round relative to the back, to expose the program through the aperture, hour by hour as the mission progressed. I wish I had kept that tracker, as it would have significant interest value today.

I would never have thought that after Apollo 17, no one would go back to the moon. In those days I thought we would have been colonising it by now. However, since then some of us have learned a lot more about ourselves, and space, and what our urgent priorities should be. Fireball XL5 and the conquest of space were nice escapist dreams for childhood. Those memories remain, but that was another time, a long time ago. There is an enormous amount to do right here on Earth, if we are ever to be in any condition to venture back out into space in any sort of useful and meaningful way, and I cannot see that we will ever have the capability to actually get to any other inhabitable body anyway. Its time to concentrate on looking after this little planet and making seriously long-term plans for true sustainability, right here.

Across the ocean in a pedal-powered submarine - tech - 28 January 2009 - New Scientist

Across the ocean in a pedal-powered submarine - tech - 28 January 2009 - New Scientist

Ciamillo designed a carbon-fibre "tail" for divers, called the Lunocet. Modelled on Fish's CAT scans of dolphin flukes, the Lunocet has a hydrofoil profile, like an underwater wing. "As dolphins move their tails up and down, they create a forward-directed lift," says Fish. This lift becomes thrust, and lots of it: dolphins have been clocked at 54 kilometres per hour. They can turn 80 per cent of their energy into thrust, compared with a paltry 3 per cent or so for unaided human swimmers and about 10 per cent for people wearing ordinary swim fins.
(This article was saved in January, but lost in my cyberspace until now! I wonder how this project is coming along.)

'She can do it': Teen's sailing adventure - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

'She can do it': Teen's sailing adventure - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

While 16 is somewhat young, it is certainly not too young to achieve this. How old were Hannibal and Alexander the Great when they were commanding armies and conquering the world? As long as she has the experience, which apparently she has, and her parents and other judge that she has the maturity of mind, there is no reason why she cannot succeed, and have a very inspirational time of her life.

And that is probably the perfect size and type of yacht for her to go round in too.

Best of luck Jessica.

Ocean rowers: what do they REALLY do out there?

This post is really just a 'heads up' at this stage ...

Now that Olly Hicks, of Flying Carrot fame, has got taken ashore in New Zealand, I must stop procrastinating, and get round to writing up a waffle on my take of the exploits of ocean rowers I have kept tabs on in the past year or two, ie

* Roz Savage crossing the Pacific in stages.
* James Castrission & Justin Jones, Crossing the Ditch (ie the Tasman Sea, Australia to New Zealand)
* The late Andrew McAuley and his fatal attempt to cross the ditch further South,
* Olly's attempt to circumnavigate the planet even further South, via the Southern Ocean

Outside.online reports from the frontier

Outside.online's Top 10 Adventure Twitters is another great place to find adventurers, probably even a better place than here, presumably because the operator of that site has more time to devote than I do (which would not be hard).

I know, I know, Katie Brown did not make their top 10, but she IS in the site somewhere, and climbing a tree is good too :-).

Steph Davis is their #2 and some of her movies on her site are great. She does some cool climbs, with definitely over "three feet of air" in most of her jumps.

Helen Baxter

Feature: The geek squad by Olivia Kember | New Zealand ListenerIt seems that Helen Baxter and husband were born on the frontier. Interesting article, eg "They view with satisfaction the internet’s rout of traditional business models."

Cruising Scarier than Somali pirates - the real danger in our oceans

Plastic: Scarier than Somali pirates - the real danger in our oceans. What is floating around the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre? ... and the other similar gyres in each of the other of the world's oceans.

More clashes between cultures and nations

I have linked to Mahesh Rajasuriya on Facebook, after he read my article 'Global Enslavement or the Collapse of Western Economic Model' and emailed me about it. Naturally I decided to check his background out, and subsequently I emailed him:

'I have read a little background at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6703831204 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_Tiger. We hear about the Tamil Tigers from time to time here. Are you against their aim of "The creation of a separate Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka"?'

His answer is captured here in the interests of more enlightenment, especially to those that read any of my stuff, because it is giving me food for thought, and an insight into yet another struggle on this planet. I have stuff to say about this, and must get it down here soon, perhaps after a day or three of reflection:

Dear David,

I took longer than usual to reply because I wanted to do it after careful thought. Today every citizen in Sri Lanka is very concerned of the international image of our country.

I can write up a book in reply to your question, but here are some important points. It is up to you to synthesise the answer.

* Many years back I strongly supported the Chechen "freedom fight". I was passionate about their cause. But suddenly one day I thought: why I support Chechens? I did not have a good answer. I did not know much about their history. It was just because they were the minority, underdogs in the fight, that I supported them. When I was in Melbourne recently for two years, I felt many Ozzies feel the same way about the Tamil cause in Sri Lanka.
* Tamils are a great nation but unfortunately they do not have a country of their own in the world. It is not a surprise that all Tamils consciously or subconsciously would support formation of a homeland, like the Jewish people did.
* The LTTE (Tamil Tigers), current leaders in the fight for a separate state for Tamils in Sri Lanka, would not have an existence if the war ended. They will have to continue fighting just to stay in power, and if they form a country, they will have to use military rule. One Tamil friend of mine confessed that he did support LTTE, but when they killed one of his university teachers, a strong human rights activist, he realised what their agenda was.
* Sinhala and Tamil cultures are fundamentally different from the Western culture. Further, Sinhala and Tamil cultures have many unique features on their own. Amalgamation of these cultures in an artificial way is a crime. If it is successfully done, then we would have a new nation, be it Tigon, or Liger, or whatever, that would look like the current Aborigine nation in Australia, a nation whose cultural backbone is broken.
* Natural amalgamation of the cultures is a wonderful phenomenon in the history of humankind. There are people in a certain part of the district I am currently working in that have a Sinhala name and a Tamil name, can speak both languages, or speak Sinhala and write Tamil. Along the A9, highway from Kandy to Jaffna, there are villages where the travellers, especially truck drivers, used to rest on their long journey from Colombo to Jaffna in the olden days. There was a unique culture in these villages. It was difficult to spot if they were Tamil or Sinhala without careful scrutiny. They ate, sang, traded and also slept with the Tamils.
* Many elements that thought Westernisation is the solution to our plights deliberately instigated racial hatred in 1980s. Many Tamils were killed, burnt alive and had their property looted. But what nobody knows is how thousands of Sinhala people risked their lives to protect many Tamil families. And many more silently wept inside.
* The Sinhala, as well as the Tamil, nations have gone through a great transformation during the last quarter of the century. True, we have not bridged our gaps yet. But there is a strong feeling that we will. Learning Tamil is mandatory for every child today. There has not been a single racially motivated killing since 1983.
* Sri Lanka or Ilankai, in Tamil, has a bright future. It has to evolve its own way of dealing with today's challenges. We have been great in the management of environment and natural resources in the history. If we are to successfully cope with the current challenges of global warming and economic collapse, we need to use some of our cultures' inherent qualities.
* Shall we march ahead with so much hope and dreams or shall we divide and create pure Tamil and Sinhala states?

Kind regards,
Mahesh.