Just weeks before the 2008 LA Auto Show, hybrid car and powertrain maker AFS Trinity is pulling out after saying that show management “muzzled” them by disallowing claims that their highly modified Saturn Vue plug-in hybrids can achieve 150 mpg.

In a statement, AFS Trinity said that “carmakers continue to seek tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, ostensibly to develop fuel-efficient vehicle technologies, but their conduct is evidence they are reluctant to embrace solutions they didn’t invent.”

EPA has been struggling with how to rate the fuel economy of plug-in hybrids — the most recent being a spat between EPA and GM about how to rate the upcoming Chevy Volt. So, for the LA Auto Show management to claim that AFS Trinity is not using approved EPA methods to estimate fuel economy, they’re kind of off base, because even the EPA doesn’t really know how to rate fuel economy with some of the new alternative powered vehicles. more at Gas2.0

Related articles

• Cranking the Volt to 100 M.P.G.
• 2009 Green Car Of The Year Finalists Announced [La Auto Show]
• Top 13 most fuel-efficient cars

“We availed ourselves of the option as others do to have the aircraft removed” from a Federal Aviation Administration tracking service, a GM spokesman, Greg Martin, said yesterday in an interview. He declined to discuss why GM made the request.

Flight data show that the leased Gulfstream Aerospace G-IV jet flew Nov. 18 from Detroit to Washington, where Chief Executive Officer Richard Wagoner Jr. spoke to a Senate committee that day and a House panel the next day on behalf of a $25 billion auto-industry rescue plan. More at Bloomberg.com

Related articles

• Auto CEOs flew private jets to ask for bailout
• GM’s Gas Pains, Loses $3.3B in 1st Quarter

 

Related articles

• Birmingham council faces challenge on atheist websites ban
• A Non-Believer in Church: Unitarian Universalist in Oxford
• One in five would not vote for a Muslim or an atheist poll finds

   Impact Your World: The global food market’s shelves are getting bare and hunger activists say it will get worse. As the nation marks World Hunger Relief Week, more people are asking: Why are so many people starving and what, if anything, can be done to eradicate hunger? Learn how you can help.

David Schechter – CNN Senior National Editor.

     The young man, wearing a shirt and a tie, turned up just as the pantry operated by an Iowa food bank was closing for the night.

He knew it was after-hours. That’s why he was there.

He kept his gaze downward as he told the woman from the food bank that he had lost his job, had a wife and kids and was too embarrassed and ashamed to stand in line to receive a bag of groceries that hopefully would feed his family for a week. Continued at CNN…

Related articles

• Food banks struggle with more people, less food
• Long lines, empty shelves are signs of times at food banks
• Food banks face long lines, empty shelves

Warning: array_count_values() [function.array-count-values]: The argument should be an array in C:\AppServ\www\wp-content\plugins\pixplugin-autoinsert\pixplugin.php on line 80

Warning: arsort() expects parameter 1 to be array, null given in C:\AppServ\www\wp-content\plugins\pixplugin-autoinsert\pixplugin.php on line 81

Warning: array_keys() [function.array-keys]: The first argument should be an array in C:\AppServ\www\wp-content\plugins\pixplugin-autoinsert\pixplugin.php on line 83

Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Invalid arguments passed in C:\AppServ\www\wp-content\plugins\pixplugin-autoinsert\pixplugin.php on line 83

 

$4.28 trillion dollars. That’s $4,284,500,000,000 and more than what was spent on WW II, if adjusted for inflation, based on our computations from a variety of estimates and sources.

Not only is it a astronomical amount of money, its’ a complicated cocktail of budgeted dollars, actual spending, guarantees, loans, swaps and other market mechanisms by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and other offices of government taken over roughly the last year, based on government data and new releases. Strictly speaking, not every cent is directed a result of what’s called the financial crisis, but it arguably related to it. read the rest at CNBC

When future historians argue over the legacy of George W. Bush, the question they confront may be just which bracket of presidential failure he belongs in. Nixon and Johnson? Or Herbert Hoover? President Bush earned his place in the pantheon of disgrace even before he presided over an epochal financial crisis. Absent the atrocities of 9/11, he might have been a mediocrity: a big spender too prone to trust his shallow instincts but able to clear the competence threshold and lacking the sophistication to be truly dangerous.

Then came that epic morning, which Bush answered by giving the hijackers far more than they could accomplish with four planes. His grand democratization plan reduced Iraq to rubble, drove Iran to arm, and provided terrorists with the ultimate recruiting tool. America, once renowned for her decency, became the aggressor her foes alleged.

At home, our failed attempt at global liberation has left us less free than ever before. Ancient liberties, cultural imperatives, even basic solvency were subsumed by the war effort. And the conservative movement that gave Bush his margin sanitized his radicalism at the cost of its soul.
All he touched turned to dross. Yet he departs unbowed, still a Churchill in his own mind.

Ouch, I had to re-read a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t satire or sarcasm…. The American Conservative Magazine

This structure covers 538 square feet and travels 26 feet into the earth. In it’s construction, the colony moved 40 tons of soil. Each load weighed four times as much as the worker ant, and in human terms, was carried over 1/2 mile to the surface.

In the video, the scientists pour ten tons of liquid concrete into the ant colony, wait several weeks for it to set then excavate it. See the mesmerizing results here:

ACHTUNG!
ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENPEEPERS!
DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKSEN.
IST NICHT FÜR GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS.
ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.

Blinkenlights is a hacker’s neologism for diagnostic lights on old mainframe computers and modern network hardware. The Jargon File gives the following etymology:
This term derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled mock German that once graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking world.

This "silliness" dates back to least as far as 1955 at IBM and had already gone international by the early 1960s, when it was reported at the University of London’s ATLAS computing site. There are several variants of it in circulation, some of which actually do end with the word blinkenlights.

more info at Wikipedia.