IPS Computer Monitors

Last weekend I saw my first IPS computer monitor. Although the core patent was issued in 1990, it has taken this long for the technology to be consumer friendly. The image quality leaps out and grabs you, it’s impossible not to notice.  At   Canada Computers its $359. It’s another beautiful piece of technology first developed by the amazing Fraunhofer Institute.

Surfing the 100 foot wave

I tried surfing once in the gentle 1 to 2 m waves of Waikiki beach. It was really difficult and just getting into position to ride the waves exhausting. The biggest waves I have ever played in would be around 3 meters and the force with which they slammed me around helpless and out of control is hard to fathom.

GarrettMcNamara is a 45 year old professional surfer and he routinely tackles waves up to 100 feet. IMHO this is the greatest feat of skill and courage any athlete could demonstrate. 

Dreamdestroyer

Update Feb 21, 2013.

The Dreamliner uses four times the electricity of a traditional airliner.  Heating the wings and other tasks current airliners do with heat from the engines are done with electricty on the Dreamliner. This may turn out to be a fundamentally bad decision. Is it too early to declare the Dreamliner is a dream for Airbus?

The Dreamliner nightmare continues. New planes are complicated machines and ironing out the kinks is part of the normal practise. Has there ever been a new model that was launched within target? Has there ever been a new model that did not need post production tweaks? However what is happening with the grounded 787 is a fundamental engineering failure.  Boeing decided to place a greater emphasis on generating and storing electricity than using jet engine heat for various tasks. The key to this was large lightweight lithium ion batteries.  Overheating is a characteristic of these batteries.  Eldon Musk the creator of the Tesla automobile faced this engineering problem as well. He claims Boeing has essentially designed a deathtrap. Instead of distributing the power into thousands of small cells that can fail without triggering a meltdown in the neighbour, Boeing went with the traditional design of 8 large cells.  One cell overheats and due to the domino effect the whole battery flames out. Eldon has offered to help Boeing so far they remain welded to failure.  The very real reason is that a major change in the engineering of the planes electrical systems could leave the plane grounded for a year or more. It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out, and the suits at Boeing must have their hair on fire now that Eldon Musk has pointed out that the emperor has no clothes.

This is a good illustration of the fact that business is not infallible. Replacing public institutions with private ones is in fact a guarantee that when something blows up, no one will be held to account.

Fringe Dies

Fringe goes out on top.  Using time travel to fix the ending is a timeless device of Sci Fiction. Fringe played it beautifully. The whole season developed the ending.  Fringe really had two concluding seasons. First the war with the alternative universe was concluded when it looked like a season five was a fantasy. Then a single season focus on the war with the observers was developed when some accountant probably figured out Fringe will be a classic and five seasons are needed to give it some push.  The end of Fringe is also an end of an era of great sci fi produced for the small screen. Dystopians with or without alien invasions are as much of a procedural as cop shows. What I would like to see next is a HBO type project bringing Harry Harrisons Stainless Steel Rat to life.  Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy is also just waiting to be harvested. Similarly Peter F Hamilton has a good 20 seasons of quality work that only needs money and love to become something special in the zeitgeist.

The last image of Fringe is the drawing of the White Tulip, a symbol of redemption first seen in episode 88. Walter mails it to Peter. It’s a message of hope and faith that somehow navigates through a time paradox. A white tulip to JJ Abrams, with Fringe you restored some of the fabric of the universe of disbelief ripped asunder by LOST.

Canadian Jihadists

Canadian Jihadists trouble me. A Canadian passport of convenience is nothing new. In the run-up to the handover of Hong Kong to the Peoples Republic citizens of that British colony flocked to our shores, got a passport and went straight back with the world’s best insurance policy in their brief case.   The criteria that brands Kadir and other jihadist as terrorists/enemies of the state could be applied to famous dissenters like Dr. Norman Bethune.  It is not unimaginable that fifty years from now a Middle East solidly ruled by Islamists is triumphant, Israel no longer exists and people like Kadri are viewed by future Canadians with the same affection we have for Dr. Bethune and Che Guevara.

So the question is how much of the past do we destroy to protect our future from the present? Does it make any sense pass new laws or even change the constitution to prevent outliers from abusing Canada?  I propose a citizenship retention act.  Native born Canadian are going to have to jump over a very high bar to be refused Citizenship.  Behaving like Conrad Black comes to mind. Even the antics of the Kadri clan would not warrant being made stateless. For those granted citizenship the bar is much lower, and why not be proactive? Let’s run the numbers and see how many paper citizens exist. If they fit the criteria of scallywag they will have to go to an embassy, or maybe appear on a reality tv show and demonstrate why they should continue to be privileged enough to have their face on a Canadian passport.

Korea again

There is something happening there Mr Park. First Gangnam style, then Samsung racks up $8billion in profits while most CE firms post loses in that area. Now we see a bouquet of cool Sci Fi. I spent a couple of years during the last two decades of the 2oth century travelling through Japan, Korea and China. While it was obvious China was going to be a Economic powerhouse, I would never have predicted Korea would eclipse Japan. But despite these Korean flashes of fulminate, Japan has not relinquished its post as the top Asian civilisation. However in the first decade of the 21st century its Korea that has been making all the right moves.

Oscar

Oscar

Best Picture movies I have seen: 1)Django Unchained 2)Argo 3) Zero Dark Thirty 4) Lincoln 6)Life of Pi.

Lincoln would not be on my list. It was like watching CSPAN. Daniel Day Lewis was terrific; I found most of the other actors ridiculous due to costumes and dialogue. Life of Pi, Ang Lee is a great story teller, he tells this shaggy dog story without flaws, but its still a shagg dog story. Django Unchained should win. Looper was a good as either of the other two movies. I predict a win for Zero Dark Thirty.

Best Director

None of the nominees from the movies I saw should win.

Best Actor

Daniel Day Lewis

Best Actress

Jessica Chaistian

Best Supporting Actor

Christop Waltz (Alan Arkin and Tommy Lee Jones were character actors in my book)

Best Supporting Actress

Ann Hathaway

America beats Canada at World Jrs not an accident

Who is the hottest Russian female and male in the movies? Pretty narrow field and most of the time if your a stickler, you will find that Russian was really from the Ukraine. So how many Russkies are really on that team. It’s a conspiracy to beat Canada. As Don Cheery often immortalizes, even those people who could not find Canada on a map hate us cause we are just punching way above our weight if I might say a manly sport. Sport is a modern impediment of mortal combat. You are not playing a sport if you dance like dandelions on the lawn of battle. A cpu on low threat, not subject to the code at the core of our lizard brains, live and let die, motherfucker!


The CIA first identified hockey as a potential threat after a potential recruit for skullies set a standard no member of the skulls initiated since the landing of the Mayflower had ever done. The picking frozen olives off of lazyboy sized bricks of ice and filling your opponents net haze ritual was a good example of primitive psyk ops. The group can laugh hardest at itself when its members are doing ridiculous things like getting ice burns on delicate parts. Surveys mostly from FAUX news say, most have never tried to pick up a frozen olive from a brick of ice unsealing that very imprecise gluteus Maximus muscle, frog hop six meters to his cup, deposit your treasure and run back to pick up another but. The pledge with the top score wins.

Extraordinary was the ability of the few Canadians at that time to dominate. An observant man (Johnny Shrub) with a big future with the agency wanted some of these ice super soldiers for his future army. Thus began the Meta science of determining who would win a heart of darkness event. At that time Americans only excelled at a lot of sissy games. NFL football, boxing and skiing where the only sports with potential lethal outcomes. And with all due respect to the Femmes, downhill skiing is a sport, women's hockey is a pastime, along with figure skating and 150 other sports people win gold medals for at the Olympics. For the CIA this was a clear combat sport gap. They were deadly afraid a homosexual communist might make the water polo team. The CIA was behind the Miracle on ice.

US college teams of the 80's would never have been competitive in the CHL. They would be a good Jr B team, if they could take the pain. A group of boys beat large groups of men, future Soviet legends, the same men who shocked, shackled and shaved Canada's legendary team to a near draw just 8 years earlier.

The miracle on ice was a product of Shruby's integrated long term planning horizon SWOT thesis regarding regaining America manhood. Hockey was a perfect manifestation of that, and he had learned from his Skullies initiation hockey players have fire and ice.



The Shrubs success at the Olympics
paved his path to the big white house. This history is all well covered but the back story is fascinating as well. Young Shrub had been a raging hard on analyst of the captured Nazi super soldier program. The immunizations given to select American demography from 1957 to, well we don't know exactly how and when the program was terminated. However we do know every member of the US college team would fit the profile of having super soldier DNA.
Shrub while publicly ducking evolution like a Swede in the corner ducking a check like he has a dozen eggs stuffed into his jockstrap. Shrub was very confident of his DNA and with proper coaching this combination would keep American supremacy supreme. The work he did with his children is remarkable. His challenged son also gained the highest throne this round of civilization has created. The special children of America with regard to race or creed were examined and graded and given to or rejected the most expensive injection ever formulated. Today we see the product created with technology fifty years old. The latest incarnations from America are part of that team.
And the Russkies, well anything the Americans can do nasty, the Russians can do worse.

In Canada was none of this until
we got our own super soldier in charge. Select children of Exxon employees received a dose, same for all Fortune 500 companies.