Eideard

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

With a bend of the knees and an arch of the back, a Japanese engineer today set a world flight record for a paper plane, keeping his hand-folded construction in the air for 26.1 seconds.

Using a plane specially designed for “long haul” flights, Takuo Toda narrowly failed to match his lifetime best of 27.9 seconds, a Guinness world record set in Hiroshima earlier, but achieved with a plane that was held together with cellophane tape.

Today’s flight, inside a Japan Airlines hangar near Haneda airport in Tokyo, was the longest by an unadulterated model. “I felt a lot of pressure,” Toda told the Associated Press after his feat. “Everything is a factor ‑ the moisture in the air, the temperature, the crowd.”

The record was all the more satisfying for having been achieved with a plane that stayed true to the traditions of origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding. He folded his 10cm aircraft by hand from a single sheet of paper and did not use scissors or glue…

He will again try to achieve the origami plane equivalent of Roger Bannister’s sub-four-minute mile: keeping his plane aloft for a full half a minute.

“I will get the 30-second record,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Bravo!

Donated by the Forestry Commission, the £400 tree was taken 15 miles from the New Forest to skate park designer Mr Howe’s six-bedroom home in Bournemouth, Dorset

There, it was cut into three carefully measured sections to create a Christmas illusion that has passersby in the street doing double takes.

With a little help from Mr Howe’s friends, the lower parts of the tree were passed through doors and windows. Finally a borrowed crane was used to place the top tier on to a little roof turret.

With careful alignment, the Howe Christmas tree appears to be bursting through the roof.

The whole operation, including decorating the branches with 200 baubles and 2,000 LED lights, took five days.

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Why is this man smiling?

Amazon.com on Saturday released its annual post-Christmas statement on holiday sales and made one thing clear: the Kindle was king…

“We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history,” said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

In another milestone for the e-reader, the company noted that on Christmas Day, for the first time ever, Amazon customers bought more Kindle books than physical books. The company didn’t offer specific numbers for either category.

The peak shopping day for the online retailer was December 14, when customers ordered more than 9.5 million items worldwide, “a record-breaking 110 items per second.”

Among those items bought between November 15 and December 19, the top electronics, following the Kindle, were Apple’s iPod Touch 8GB and the Garmin Nuvi 260W GPS.

In the video game category, top sellers were the Wii Fit Plus with Balance Board; New Super Mario Bros., and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

RTFA for lots of detail – including some too boring to ever need mention. My favorite?

The last Local Express Delivery order that was delivered in time for Christmas, was placed by a Prime member and went to Seattle. It was a Kindle that was ordered at 1:43 p.m. on Christmas Eve and delivered at 4:57 p.m. that evening.

Outstanding. Having spent a number of boring years in traffic management, I’m astounded at what contemporary commerce can offer.

The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA’s Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

“Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system,” explains lead author Merav Opher… “This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all.”

The discovery has implications for the future when the solar system will eventually bump into other, similar clouds in our arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers call the cloud we’re running into now the Local Interstellar Cloud or “Local Fluff” for short. It’s about 30 light years wide and contains a wispy mixture of hydrogen and helium atoms at a temperature of 6000 C…”The observed temperature and density of the local cloud do not provide enough pressure to resist the ‘crushing action’ of the hot gas around it,” says Opher.

So how does the Fluff survive? The Voyagers have found an answer.

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Better suited to overseeing an inquisition
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

In an apparent split with Roman Catholic bishops over the abortion-financing provisions of the proposed health care overhaul, the nation’s Catholic hospitals have signaled that they back the Senate’s compromise on the issue, raising hopes of breaking an impasse in Congress and stirring controversy within the church.

The Senate bill, approved Thursday morning, allows any state to bar the use of federal subsidies for insurance plans that cover abortion and requires insurers in other states to divide subsidy money into separate accounts so that only dollars from private premiums would be used to pay for abortions.

Just days before the bill passed, the Catholic Health Association, which represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals across the country, said in a statement that it was “encouraged” and “increasingly confident” that such a compromise “can achieve the objective of no federal funding for abortion.” An umbrella group for nuns followed its lead.

The same day, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops called the proposed compromise “morally unacceptable…”

In practical political terms, some Democrats — including some opponents of abortion rights — say that the Catholic hospitals’ relative openness to a compromise could play a pivotal role by providing political cover for Democrats who oppose abortion to support the health bill. Democrats and liberal groups quickly disseminated the association’s endorsement along with others from the nuns’ group, other Catholics and evangelicals…

“We have known for quite some time that the Catholic hospitals and also the nuns are really breaking from these hard-line bishops and saying, ‘This really is our goal: to get more people into health care coverage,’ ” said Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado.

It would be funny if it weren’t so bloody criminal, callous and egregious – to witness these ethical bottom-feeders calling any solution “unacceptable” on the basis of their superstition.

A great deal of courage is required for hospitals and nuns to oppose these princes of piety.

There are at least 20 million households in the United States awaiting the launch of this satellite – though probably 99% or more are unaware of it’s nearness or even that it’s taking place.

They may have noticed a phrase or two added to the latest commercials from DirecTV. “Coming Soon – capacity for another 50 high definition channels” – and that’s about it.

There are several hundred satellite TV geeks allied with DirecTV who track every satellite from inception to launch.

Since D12 launches Monday evening – US time – we have our own countdown in progress and follow photos and blog comments from the Baikonur Cosmosdrome with rapt attention.

I offer this video [large version] not only to those of you who are space geeks – or TV geeks – but, just as a snippet of time in the preparation for launch of one of the biggest long-serving rockets around. Also some pretty damned good camerawork.

BTW – if you are a DirecTV subscriber, channel 577 has been activated and you can tune in to the launch, Monday, 28th – at 7PM EST.

Physicists working in space plasmas have made clever use of the Ulysses spacecraft and the solar minimum to create a massive virtual lab bench to provide a unique test for the science underlying turbulent flows…

However University of Warwick plasma astrophysicists Professor Sandra Chapman and Dr Ruth Nicol have found a particularly elegant solution to fill the…experimental gap employing Ulysses spacecraft and two solar minimum to map the turbulence in the energies of the turbulence in the solar wind – a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow.

Normally the ‘noise’ from violent eruptions on the sun would disturb the turbulent flow. Ulysses’ controllers had cleverly contrived for the spacecraft to pass over each of the Sun’s poles during two different solar minima making it possible not only to gather data but also to be able to compare two different energy levels in a turbulent flow. The level of turbulence is down by a factor of 2 in the most recent solar minimum compared with the previous one.

The spacecraft was able to record the state of the turbulent flows flowing past it at 750kms a second at a distance of up to 2.83 Astronomical units from the Sun. This in effect allowed the spacecraft to record the developing turbulence as it flowed up to the satellite’s position which then became like a weir in space creating a virtual confined laboratory box to test the development of flows over a time – but a confined box which was over 200 million miles in size…

They found that in all the polar passes of the spacecraft the evolution of turbulence in the Solar wind was governed by the same generalised scaling function no matter how much energy was in the system. This suggest that there is a universal basic property governing the evolution of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence over finite distances – in this case a finite distance of over 200 million miles.

Professor Sandra Chapman notes…the results come to the attention of colleagues interested in how turbulence evolves in confined plasmas on earth – which will aid their efforts to generate fusion energy.

Indeed.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Howard Dean ran for president in 2004 as the outsider ready to battle an entrenched establishment in Washington. And so, four years later, did Barack Obama.

Now, one year into Mr. Obama’s presidency, a sharp dispute between the president and Mr. Dean over the health care bill the Senate approved Thursday — Mr. Dean denounced it as a sellout, while Mr. Obama heralded it as a historic breakthrough — is illustrating the roots of the ideological breach within the Democratic party.

It is not just that the left wing of the party thinks that its centrists hold too much sway and are too quick to cave when faced with pressure from the right. It is also that this White House, stocked as it is with insiders, people whose view of politics is shaped by the compromises inherent in legislating, is confronting a liberal base made up largely of outsiders to the lawmaking process who are asking why they should accept politics as usual.

As much as Mr. Obama presented himself as an outsider during his campaign, a lesson of this battle is that this is a president who would rather work within the system than seek to upend it. He is not the ideologue ready to stage a symbolic fight that could end in defeat; he is a former senator comfortable in dealing with the arcane rules of the Senate and prepared to accept compromise in search of a larger goal. For the most part, Democrats on Capitol Hill have stuck with him.

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When John Spears gets home from his sales job in New York, he sits down at his computer with a bottle of beer and starts patrolling the US border. And to do it, he does not need to stir from his sofa.

He is one of tens of thousands of people around the world who are volunteering to patrol the 1250-mile long stretch between Texas and Mexico via the web.

The controversial $4 million Texas Virtual Border Watch Programme invites civilians to log on to Blueservo.net.

There they can monitor live feeds 24/7 from 21 hidden surveillance cameras placed at intervals along the border.

Supporters see the initiative as a step forward in US efforts to curb illegal immigration, drug smuggling and border violence.

Critics say it is encouraging vigilantism and stoking anti-immigrant feeling.

Since the site went live in November 2008, it has received more than 50 million hits, and more than 130,000 people have registered to become ” virtual deputies”. They are located as far afield as Australia, Mexico, Colombia, Israel, New Zealand and the UK.

Has to be more fun than watching cricket or baseball.

Half of urban teenage girls may acquire at least one of three common sexually transmitted infections (STI) within two years of becoming sexually active, according to a new study…

The researchers followed 381 girls enrolled at ages 14 to 17 years and found that repeated infection with the organisms that cause chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis also was very common.

“Depending on the organism, within four to six months after treatment of the previous infection, a quarter of the women were re-infected with the same organism,” said Wanzhu Tu, Ph.D…

Within two years, about three-quarters of participants with an initial sexually transmitted STI were diagnosed with a second STI, although not necessarily of the same type. Within four years of an initial STI, virtually all (92 percent) of the participants had a subsequent STI.

“To our knowledge, this study provides the first data on the timing of the initial STI and subsequent STI following the onset of sexual activity in urban adolescent women,” said Dr. Tu.

The study also found that screening for STI may not be initiated until several years after sexual activity begins, especially for girls with earlier onset of sexual activity…

The study focuses on lower income urban adolescents; a group characterized by early onset of sexual activity, multiple sexual partners, and high STI rates.

As a result of their findings, the researchers call for STI screening in sexually active teenage girls within a year after first intercourse and for retesting of infected girls every 3 to 4 months. Continuing surveillance may be necessary…

Eeoough! Maybe I shouldn’t miss being a young dude, after all.