Project Orion Test Video

@wiki Project Orion was the first engineering design study of a spacecraft powered by nuclear pulse propulsion, an idea first proposed by Stanisław Ulam in 1947. The project, initiated in 1958, was led by Ted Taylor at General Atomics and physicist Freeman Dyson, who at Taylor's request took a year away from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study to work on the project. The first such think-tank of its kind since the Manhattan Project, Project Orion is recalled by many of its team as representing the best years of their lives.[citation needed] By using energetic nuclear power, Orion offered both high thrust and high specific impulse — the holy grail of spacecraft propulsion. It offered performance greater than the most advanced conventional or nuclear rocket engines now under study. Cheap interplanetary travel was the goal of the Orion Project. Its supporters felt that it had great potential for space travel, but it lost political approval because of concerns with fallout from its propulsion. The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 is generally acknowledged to have ended the project.

Bill Gates e-mail

Click the title for the whole e-mail, here are some highlights:

From: Bill Gates
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. This site is so slow it is unusable.
(.....)
This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?
(.....)
just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.
(.....)
Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?
(.....)
the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.
(.....)
Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.
But that is just the start of the crap.
What an absolute mess.
(.....)
I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.
(.....)
The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)

Hitler tamed by prison

Vacuum Tube Train

We've discussed the concept of an intercontinental vacuum maglev train more than once. Some people in Norway have concluded that they are feasible, but very expensive.

Neutrally buoyant vacuum tunnel submerged 150 to 300 feet beneath the Atlantic's surface and anchored to the seafloor, through which zips a magnetically levitated train at up to 4,000 mph.

Here is a nice render of such a vacuum tube:

Rejected crayons

I've also played with piclens, the add-on camel posted some time ago.
Check out the random picture gallery!

Only on the internet...

For my previous post I first googled for an "starvation" image, this was the second image to show up on google images: This can only be found on the internet labeled as "starvation".

New Personal Pasta Carbonara record!!!

Last night I made my usual pasta carbonara but because my refrigerator (still) isn't delivered I was forced to cook all the ingredients thinking that I would throw away most of it after dinner. Yet my competitive side took the wheel and I ate it all. I think I have a new personal record on this one, I made about half the portion of what I made for the five of us 2 weeks ago...

An overview: 250 gr. Tortellini -> 992,5 kcal 150 gr. Union -> insignificant 125 gr. Mushrooms -> insignificant 250 gr. Bacon -> 2205 kcal 0,5 l milk -> 225 kcal Carbonara -> 292,8 kcal Total -> 3715,3 kcal in 775 gr. of food. The amounts of kcal are written on the package except for the bacon which I googled and found here. Tried to find a comparison to an average UN Food Package, none is found as of yet... Help me?

RIP George Carlin

When the culture began to change in the late 1960s — when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the War in Vietnam — George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it's hard to think of Carlin as one of America's most radical and courageous popular artists. But he was. Time Article...

Zwitser schiet op luidruchtige Turken

Een 56-jarige Zwitser uit Unterkulm was het lawaai van feestvierende Turkse voetbalsupporters zo zat, dat hij de fans met een pistool onder vuur nam. De politie heeft de man zaterdag aangehouden.De Turken vierden feest nadat hun ploeg vrijdag in de kwartfinale van het EK op wonderbaarlijke wijze had afgerekend met Kroatië. In de laatste minuut van de blessuretijd van de verlenging maakte Semih Sentürk gelijk (1-1), waarna Turkije de strafschoppen beter nam. Niemand raakte overigens gewond bij het schietincident in Unterkulm. iets voor jou Kamielkaze?

Game Over

turkeys celebration of winning a football match

The turkeys won a quarter final match in the Europe cup and this how they celebrated it! I got a good View of the party straight out of my window so I filmed some of their celebration! Hope you guys like it because this party (and honking) kept me awake for some hours. Driving around with flags out of the car and constantly using the klaxon has got a new word in the Netherlands "rondturken" freely translated as turking around.

Mars Phoenix Tweets: "We Have ICE!"

animated gif here

Photographic evidence settles the debate over the nature of the white material seen in photographs sent back by the craft [Phoenix Mars lander, latest Mars lander]. As seen in lower left of this image, chunks of the ice sublimed (changed directly from solid to gas) over the course of four days, after the lander's digging exposed them.

"It must be ice," said the Phoenix Lander's lead investigator, Peter Smith. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice."

Next step is analysing the water!

Sinds wanneer speelt het Nederlands elftal in oranje?

Wat de uitslag Nederland-Roemenië vanavond ook wordt, Oranje stormt door op het EK. „Sinds wanneer speelt het Nederlands elftal in oranje tenue?”, vraagt Yula Altchouler uit Amsterdam. Leestijd 1:20 Ik heb vandaag ook zelf een vraag ingezonden: Waarom spelen we op de WK's wel een troostfinale om de derde plaats en op de EK's niet?

Didn't we think about this a while ago?

Americans driving in Iraq

A video of US Military troops driving a Humvee in Iraqi traffic. In order to avoid insurgent attacks they cant stop or slow down no matter how bad traffic gets.

Sometimes it rains cement

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian air force planes dropped a 25-kg (55-lb) sack of cement on a suburban Moscow home last week while seeding clouds to prevent rain from spoiling a holiday, Russian media said on Tuesday. "A pack of cement used in creating ... good weather in the capital region ... failed to pulverize completely at high altitude and fell on the roof of a house, making a hole about 80-100 cm (2.5-3 ft)," police in Naro-Fominsk told agency RIA-Novosti.

Firefox 3.0 download day

manson shows his remorse

This guy is either a genius or insane. I can't decide

BMW Builds a Shape-Shifting Car Out of Cloth

Article and pictures @ Wired.com Too bad this car is going straight to the museum and no more will be built.

Time Lapse of Ants Eating A Gecko

Beware of Odin

Republicans

Virtual Replay Euro 2008

Virtual Replay allows you to watch every goal in 3D.

my little secret

Orange cookies!

Euro 2008 statistics

Euro 2008 player running distance and position statistics.

New cellphone special price for you

this sexy compact looking model got a nice camera on it!

And this sweety got a camera and a real deal vibration function

also we can make homemade cellphones with game functions!
And we got a new function in our shops where we can customize youre ears so it can be used as an headset. Real handy and a must have in 2008!

WTF!?!?

Japan's Floating Airports

How different groups voted (Obama vs Clinton)...

in a nice visual way.

Fail Bomber Flies... Briefly

Skip to the half way point to see the action.

Unit cost: $737 million to $2.2 billion. Time for a new tag? :)

Fail for McCain and Win for Obama

"Fox News bashing the Republican, praising the Democrat. This truly was a historic night"

First water slide looping in germany

Wtf, I wonder what would happen if you'd purposely try to slow yourself down.

Muscle dog!

Found this picture of a extreme muscled doggy. Its probably photoshoped or otherwise his is on something like dog steriode or something. It still would look good for the lady doggies.
-edit found this on Internet of some kind of dog steriode.

Reproductions of the Eiffel Tower

When Gustave Eiffel (the architect of the Eiffel Tower) designed the Eiffel Tower, he probably couldn't imagine that it would still stand in 2008. And not in his wildest dreams could he imagine that there are around 14 Reproductions (on scale) of the Eiffel Tower these days.

Here are some of them,

This 165 m high replica in the city of fake (las Vegas) is the highest Eiffel tower replica in the world. Build on 1 on 2 scale.

China: the country that specialized in imitating everything have 2 Eiffel Towers with a hight of 100m+ each.

To bad the Eiffel Tower is only built at a smaller scale than the one in Paris. Would be nice if the Germans build one twice as big as the Eiffel Tower to teach the nationalistic French a lesson :)

EPIC Fail

The Blogosphere

It's one of the little joys of life, learning new ridicules little stuff like a new word: The Blogosphere. Wiki: Blogosphere is a collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections. It is the perception that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social network. Now this might be allready familiar to you guys but not for me, so I thought I'd share my highlight of today (as this is my highlight, you can imagine how badly my day sucks today). Anyway at the bottom of the wiki page there was an interesting part of tracking interconnections between blogs. It just a small piece of text. But it fascinated me (I'm sexually inactive for over a month now, hence the fascination). It will probably the highlight of my day tomorrow: learning about interconnections between blogs...

The Fact Checker

The purpose of this website, and an accompanying column in the Post, is to "truth squad" the national political debate in the period leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Our goal is to shed as much light as possible on controversial claims and counter-claims involving important national issues, such as the war in Iraq, immigration, health care, social issues, the economy, and the records of the various presidential candidates. When we come across a statement or claim that is at variance with the facts, as best we can establish them, we will point that out.

Be sure to check out Obama's little slip-up:

The Fact Checker regarding Obama vs. Auschwitz

What gaming platform to buy?