Noomi Rapace Interview

'Millennium' girl tells all, ahead of Cannes

USA Today is featuring "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo"

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Interviews

A book that sold over 8 million copies is now a film. I saw it last Saturday and highly recommend the movie.Noomi Rapace was stunning as the character Lisbeth Salander. Interesting to read her approach and reaction.

Noomi Rapace Interview with spoilers for the series of books


Noomi Rapace interview: the world’s most seductive sleuth

Podcast: Film Weekly meets The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Meet the Real ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”: Exclusive Clip from the New Movie, and an Interview with the Director


Noomi Rapace's Lisbeth was a suicide mission

Wind power: Ouch

Wind farms failing to produce enough power... because there's not enough wind

Newer technology that will allow more power to be generated in low winds may help, but that is a few years away from reality.

Shakespeare's 'lost' play ?

Shakespeare's 'lost' play is published... or is it just a Double Falsehood?

Tangled relationships, women disguised as men, intrigue laced with tragedy and comedy - some might say it has all the hallmarks of Shakespeare.

But for the best part of 280 years The Double Falsehood, or the Distressed Lovers, has been dismissed as a falsehood in more than just title.

Eighteenth century scholar Lewis Theobald always claimed his play, first performed on a winter's evening back in 1727, was a version of a lost original by William Shakespeare.

Literal movie trailer

Playstation Move: Interactive controllers

PlayStation Move motion controller, starter kit to be under $100 with game

The demos are pretty impressive -- Sony's not kidding when it says the Move is incredibly precise. There's also going to be a secondary "subcontroller" with an analog stick for shooters -

Great photos always at Rex Features

Rex Features always has interesting photos. I recommend linking to it on your browser, as a matter of fact I will add it to my links page now.

Rex Features photos

Getting Orgainized

Spring cleaning

The 5-S Process for Getting Organized

Pluto is a planet

I am still mortified that Pluto has temporarily been stripped of a planet status.

Justifiable mail from children on the subject.

Seed Savers Exchange

A non-profit organization of gardeners dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds.
Seed Savers

Time to think about planting and growing things.

Internet Radio

Create a station that plays artists or genres that you like.

Pandora

Darth Monet

Finds Your Lack of Artistic Appreciation Disturbing

The Secret Machines - "Atomic Heels"

Sounds like Phil Judd and The Swingers meets ???

The ice floes of reality

The news of the shipping trapped by ice in the Baltic could not have come at a worse time for the warmists.

The end of fishing as we know it?

I personally am morally opposed to fishing, but think others should be able to peruse and indulge in recreation and as a business, if they wish.

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation's oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

That's a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning.

Gas pipeline probe uncovers shipwrecks in Baltic Sea

A dozen previously unknown shipwrecks, some of them believed to be up to 1,000 years old, were discovered in the Baltic Sea during a probe of the sea bed to prepare for the installation of a large gas pipeline

Due to its low temperatures and oxygen levels, the Baltic Sea is known as an ideal environment for conserving shipwrecks, which can remain virtually unblemished for hundreds and even thousands of year.

According to Norman, some 3,000 shipwrecks have been discovered and mapped in the Baltic, but experts believe more than 100,000 whole and partial wrecks litter the sea bottom.

Ready To Go

Saffron stars in this video of the UK mix of "Ready to Go" a gret song to start the night before going out clubbing in Stavanger, Norway

Scribble maps: Customize, save, and share maps with others

This looks very useful.

Scribble Maps

- Draw shapes and Scribble!
- Pace Markers and text
- Create a Custom Widget
- Save as KML/GPX
- Send maps to friends

Whether it is planning a vacation, or plotting a hiking trail, Scribble Maps can help you out!

Click: 400 views and Jack London sails through the South Pacific

Sometime yesterday we passed over 400 views of this blog, so thanks for the visits.

To celebrate this occasion here is an online version of
Jack London's The Cruise of the Snark, a non-fiction account of a cruise in the South Pacific in 1907


My favorite passage in the book was acquiring the art of navigation and the power that he felt on this learning

More on the Snark

And the boats that Jack London owned in his life.

Technology: Smartphones and travel

I have often felt the information filter while in an airport, having a smart phone for travel arrangements and getting around the issues that show up would be nice.

Smartphones have changed the way we travel

Europe's 100 sexiest summer villas

The Sunday Times reveals the best places for hire around the Mediterranean and Europe this summer

Poverty is falling fast in Africa

Increases in wealth lead to declining birth rates which means more productivity and wealth per ca pita, so this is a good trend.

Poverty falling fast in Africa

For a long life, smile like you mean it

How you can live longer.

If you want to live to a grand old age, then smile – and make sure you mean it. Pro baseball players in the 1950s who genuinely beamed in their official photographs tended to outlive more sullen-looking sportsmen and those who put on fake smiles.

William Orbit - Time to get wize

Orbit has some interesting music. The vibe and energy of this song and this video makes for a nice funky chill out moment.

Air

Air's Youtube Channel supporting their 2010 tour.

Navy Captain of the guided missile cruiser U.S.S. Cowpens stripped of command

Captain Queeg or Bligh? And those both had extenuating circumstances,
this article seems to paint this Captain in a much worse light.

The Rise and Fall of a Female Captain Bligh

Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson - Colours

Climate: Australian News follows the money

A big push behind the need for data to show global warming may be the money lining up to be part of it. Massive fraud has been found in the European carbon trading market. Very good reporting.

Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil's supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking.

The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the money? So I did and it's chilling. Greens and environmentalists need to be aware each time they smear with an ad hominem attack they are unwittingly helping giant finance houses.

The money trail

Hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements failed to find the pattern of upper trophospheric heating the models predicted, (and neither Santer 2008 with his expanding "uncertainties" nor Sherwood 2008 with his wind gauges change that). Two other independent empirical observations indicate that the warming due to CO2 is halved by changes in the atmosphere, not amplified.[Spencer 2007, Lindzen 2009, see also Spencer 2008]

Without this amplification from water vapor or clouds the infamous "3.5 degrees of warming" collapses to just a half a degree — most of which has happened.

Could the Mono Lake arsenic prove there is a shadow biosphere?

Do alien life forms exist in a Californian lake? Could there be a shadow biosphere? One scientist is trying to find out

Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a geobiologist, is interested in the lake not for its scenery but because it may be harbouring alien life forms, or “weird life”. Mono Lake, a basin with no outlet, has built up over many millennia one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth. Dr Wolfe-Simon is investigating whether, in the mud around the lake or in the water, there exist microbes whose biological make-up is so fundamentally different from that of any known life on Earth that it may provide proof of a shadow biosphere, a second genesis for life on this planet.

It's official: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs

And you are thinking you are having a bad day.


"We now have great confidence that an asteroid was the cause of the KT extinction. This triggered large-scale fires, earthquakes measuring more than 10 on the Richter scale, and continental landslides, which created tsunamis," said Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London, a co-author of the review.

When spinmeisters attack

Rather then clean up science, National Academy of Sciences scientists say attack, attack, attack

After the embarrassing emails and revelation of true "data"sources, I recommend cleaning up the science instead of trying yo spin.

I would like to see some reliable open data, please. An ad does not fix the lack of scientific process. If this is a belief system then go ahead, but I thought this was a scientific debate.

and

Climategate: ‘The Science is Settled,’ They Told Copernicus

Sun still at low levels, but more active then last year.

There is some evidence that solar activity influences the Earth's climate.
How and by how much? some theories have been formed and links between the sunspot cycle and specific monsoon patterns has been published. And there was a little ice age monitored in Europe when there was an extended period on no sunspots.

Sunspot numbers have been tracked for about 400 years.


Sun wakes up from a prolonged slumber, the sunspot level for February was 31, not a high number, but last year we had two months with zero sunspots and by some measures the Sun was a quiet as it has been in 50 years and 100 years depending on how you interpreted the data.

Previous post: Solarcycles: Is the Sun coming out of a minimum

Other climate influences are the Earth's tilt. orbit, and geology. As the Himalayas formed the rain that now falls in India and surrounding countries fell in other regions. And the monsoons do erode the mountains. A very complex system makes up our climate.

Stealth Energy: Wind

Secret Energy Turbine: rooftop wind power in stealth mode

The sliding trombone house

Want more room, push a button.

The Amazing Expando House - with Video

Slide away: how the design works

1 At the press of a button, four 24V electric motors powered by car batteries start up, and the 20-ton “shell” – 52ft long, 20ft wide and 23ft high – moves in either direction 104ft along a pair of concealed rails

2 There are three options (see pictures, top left). The shell can slide forward as a shady canopy; retract right back, covering the annexe and yard, leaving the bathroom open to the sky; or stop halfway, covering the bathroom but revealing the conservatory

3 For safety reasons, there’s always an exit in case the mechanism jams. As one door is closed off, another opens

video: Air - La Femme D'Argent and San Francisco Steetcar from 1905

A great song from the debut of the French band Air and a chance to see what did San Francisco look like 105 years ago.

shot from a streetcar traveling down Market Street in San Francisco in 1905. Before the earthquake/fire of 1906 destroyed the area.

can download video from the
www.archive.org . Search for
" trip down 1905 " without quotes.

Air is touring the US in March, they are supposed to be amazing to see live:
March
13 - MIAMI - USA (Fillmore) - Book
14 - ORLANDO - USA (Hard Rock Live) - Book
15 - ATLANTA - USA (Centerstage) - Book
17 - WASHINGTON DC - USA (9:30 Club) - Book
18 - PHILADELPHIA - USA (Electric Factory)- Book
19 - NEW YORK - USA (Terminal 5) Book
20 - BOSTON - USA (Berklee Performance Center) Book
22 - MONTREAL - Canada (Metropolis) Book
23 - TORONTO – Canada (Phoenix Concert Theatre) Book
24 - CHICAGO - USA (Riviera Theatre) Book
26 - OAKLAND - USA (Fox Theatre) Book
27 - SAN DIEGO - USA (4th & B) Book
28 - LOS ANGELES - USA (Walt Disney Concert Hall)

Less but better: Design according to Dieter Rams

Legendary industrial Dieter Rams has always focused on doing ‘less but better’ – a credo David Sharp found he even applied to a rare interview with The Local.

Dieter Rams' Ten Principles of good design:

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

Covers: Ananda Shankar and Jumpin' Jack Flash

Blesssed are the Cheesemakers

World cheese contest expands as it ages, and will be in Madison again soon

Sabrina, 1954, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden

Audrey Hepburn's follow on to "Roman Holiday" and teb years before "My Fair Lady."

quieter, more productive wind farms

Rubber trailing edge flaps could result in quieter, more productive wind farms

Risoe DTU is now looking towards production and testing of a full-scale prototype. Its trailing edge flap is reminiscent of a forward edge design for turbine blades, previously covered in Gizmag.

Ice, ice, baby

Thick Baltic ice causes ferry havoc

Kate Bush - "King Of The Mountain"

Elvis, Rosebud and King of the Mountain.
Kate Bush knows how to produce a unique sound.

Crowded House Italian Plastic live 1996

Written by the late great Paul Hester

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale

After this the only thing from the 60s that remains to be made into a movie will be
the Alberto Culver hair spray ad in the pounding surf.

Big Screen Gilligan

Space: Moon's North pole has a lot of water

NASA radar finds at least 600 million tons of ice at the Moon's north pole

Music: Trying to remeber a song's name

Help! I cannot remember the band or song name but the words go something like this ...

Finding a song when you can't remember the name

It takes a Potemkin village

Recession? What recession? Fake shopfronts built to cover up High St stores that have been closed down

Potemkin villages "were purportedly fake settlements erected at the direction of Russian minister Grigory Potyomkin to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787."

History as a wave

Something to look forward to, another great age of exploration.

21st Century waves

"...Patterns in long-term trends over the last 200 years...point specifically toward the human colonization of space in the next 20!"

The Next Maslow Window (2015 – 2025) Will Be Spectacular :
Patterns in economics, technology, and exploration over the last 200 years enable us to make forecasts for the next 20+ years, including for the 2015-2025 Maslow Window. Our expectations should realistically include humans on Mars, solar power satellites in Earth orbit, and tourists on the Moon.

Porsche unveils a futuristic hybrid supercar

Porsche unveils 'green' supercar for petrol-heads

Strategy and Tactics: John Boyd and the Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act process

John Boyd developed the OODA, Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act,decision loop and influenced US fighter design. The lessons learned by the OODA loop are now being applied to areas outside of the military.

Developing the Warrior Mind: Boyd’s OODA loop and Cooper’s Color Code lay the foundation

A book on Boyd

Boyd was asked to look into the overweight design of the FX, the initial concept for the F-15 Eagle. He used energy-maneuverability to reduce its weight and cost and increase its performance. His follow-up project, the F-16, increased the U.S. Air Force's inventory with the ultimate air-combat fighter.

The Publishing Revolution

A wise person once told me that software sells hardware.

The attempts to new royalty structures with artists receiving 70% for
electronic books and songs versus 10% for paper printed and manufactured music
seems to point to a glut of content appearing in down loadable form.

The Publishing Disruption

Thus, without many people even noticing the murmurs, we can predict that the next 3 years will see the biggest transformation in book production and consumption since the days of Johannes Gutenberg. That is a true demonstration of both the Accelerating Rate of Change and The Impact of Computing.

Wilderness Survival Videos

Self shot. I especially like the Iceland trek as I know someone who has hiked there several times. You can reserve huts to sleep in and the scenery is supposed to be amazing.

Wilderness Survival Videos

Main Page with trek across Iceland

"My name is Michel Blomgren and my greatest interest is survival in the wilderness and primitive, but comfortable, outdoor life. I have earlier shared my outdoor experiences and experiments through photographs and stories. This engagement has now resulted in the making of a short movie series about survival with a documentary touch"

Earthquake may have changed the Earth's rotation

The quake, the seventh strongest earthquake in recorded history, hit Chile Saturday and should have shortened the length of an Earth day by 1.26 milliseconds, according to research scientist Richard Gross at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Strong earthquakes have altered Earth's days and its axis in the past. The 9.1 Sumatran earthquake in 2004, which set off a deadly tsunami, should have shortened Earth's days by 6.8 microseconds and shifted its axis by about 2.76 inches (7 cm, or 2.32 milliarcseconds).

Chile earthquake may have slength of day

When nations behave badly

The BBC let's us know what is going on in South America.

Spanish judge: Venezuela 'helped Eta and Farc plot against Columbia

As in plot to kill their leader. Looks like Chavez is trying to destroy two nations, Venezuela and Colombia.

This should be a major story in the US right now. If not why not?

Backpack Hydroelectric Plant Gives You 500 Watts on the Move

A human-portable hydroelectric generator that weighs about 30 pounds and generates 500 watts of power may soon be a new option for off-grid power.

Developed by Bourne Energy of Malibu, California, the Backpack Power Plant can create clean, quiet power from any stream deeper than 4 feet.

Backpack Hydroelectic Plant

Mars Rovers: Videos of six years of exploration

Short videos on the rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

Spirit: Six Years of Roving Mars

Opportunity: Making Tracks on Mars

Current status of Spirit

What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

Most governments all over the world are spending too much money. And there will be great wailing about reducing any aspect of any part of any government. We can always save some money somehow in our personal lives. I predict there will be an eventual backlash against attempts to avoid cuts in government spending.


BBC Director defends cuts 
and from last week here BBC signals end to an era of expansion.

I think over the next few years we will settle into a era where people will have some sense of shred sacrifice.
Sitting behind a wall, in German "Mauer," and asking everyone else to sacrifice is not an option.

Only then may we say, "What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?"

Show it, don't say it

Amazing to look at these 30 day moving ratings for the past two years.
Fox News looks more variable and is building audience, while the competition all seems to be blending toghether and approching 1 million or a half million viewers.

Fox's gain in audience over two years is two to four times the total audience of any single competitor .

Cable news ratings graphs

Not sure what it means, but there is probably some fascination data analysis in these numbers.

Shall we play a game>

Sheepshead is a German card game which is popular in Wisconsin and other American regions.

The rules of Sheepshead and also here

Play Sheepshead on line: Jack of Diamonds partner 5 handed

Keep it dark

In the dark people may be less honest and
More light leads to more honesty

When hiding climate data is a standard practice

Simply amazing.

Head of 'Climategate' research unit admits he hid data

The scientist at the heart of the 'Climategate' row over global warming hid data 'because it was standard practice', it emerged today.

Professor Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's prestigious climatic research unit, today admitted to MPs that the centre withheld raw station data about global temperatures from around the world.

Harsh Climate Conditions or When physicists attack

Some very good points basiclly asking,
"Where's the science?"

Some concerns over the lack of science by the "Global Warming clan"

Memo to self, never thick off a physicist.

Looking for clues

I thought I solved this mystery decades ago.
Total eclipse + vein = Dracula

Carly Simon says You're so vain mystery not solved

I think the "controversy" resurfaces every time she releases a new record.

Media: Understanding the Participatory News Consumer

A Pew study, they do interesting media research, show, that the
Internet is climbing as news source passing by newspapers and raio and climbing towrds television news and national television news.

When I screened calls for PBS talk shows people seemed to crave being able to talk back with mass media and it seemed to me that mass media always wanted to pretend to listen. The Internet and social networking sites are changing the rules, people can participate and organizations are springing up to "astroturf" pretend to be people commenting to try to spin the news and attitudes of real people.

People have fewer places to talk to others, so the lure of a media that allows people to listen and communicate back is understandable. The old media may not see the trend in anything else but diminished use.
Most US newspapers are rapidly losing readership.

Winter Gardening (With Plans!)

Get a jump on the growing season.

Plans for building a cold frame for Spring gardening.

and a  50 Dollar hoop greenhouse and a 
Wood framed Greenhouse

Climate: Issues with source data and "data massaging"

Something is fishy with the claim that the Arctic is warming.

Using weather data from 1000 kilometers away?

and another explanation of how the  rural data is "adjusted" and it shows warmer temperatures then actually happened , again this was supposed to be an adjustment to the urban temperatures to take out the "heat island effect", such as a temperature reading station being next to a hot air conditioner exhaust. Time after time the rural data is made warmer. Something is rotten in the state of temperature data.

It would be nice to have accurate data to see what is really going on. The Earth is warming out of an Ice Age, but how fast, in what ways, and do humans contribute, and if so by how much. There are too many problems with data collection and storage to say it is useful at this moment.

I think satellite data will cover more of the Earth and have less bias then ground measurements and the ground measurements have a troubling reduction in rural stations all over the world in the past twenty years.