Category: News

Here’s another bit from Famitsu. Koei has revealed the main characters of Hokuto Musou in the Japanese gaming mag’s pages. Hit the jump for details.
 
Thanks to Peter for the tip!

Damien Bouic, who graciously allowed me to use his very cool renderings of Earth with rings in my article about, um, the Earth with rings, has translated that post into French. I took French many years ago, and all I can still say is Je suis desole, Madam, mais nous n’avons pas du jambon aujord hui. So I hope he did a good job.

Alons-y!

On the scorecard the play is marked simply as an “error.” But that hardly conveys the magnitude of the blunder committed by Chicago Cubs outfielder Milton Bradley. It is June 12, 2009, in a home game against the Minnesota Twins. Top of the eighth, one out. Bradley catches a routine fly ball. Thinking he has just ended the inning, he tosses the ball into the stands and poses for pictures. Only then does he remember that there are three outs in an inning, not two. The Twins score a run. The Cubbies eventually lose the game. A rookie mistake? Actually, Bradley was a seasoned pro executing moves he had performed thousands of times. Rather, it is a classic example of a brain fart—an inexplicably stupid error in a straightforward task made by someone with abundant skill and experience. We are all prone to them, although most brain farts are less spectacular (and less humiliating) than Bradley’s—calling your spouse by your ex-spouse’s name, for instance, or zipping straight past the freeway exit that you take every day on your way home from work.

Filed under: Plants/Manufacturing, Chevrolet, GM

The Big Block. Rat Motor. Call it what you will, we can now officially add a final epitaph to the long-running engine’s gravestone: R.I.P. The final L18 big block rolled down the assembly line at General Motors’ Tonawanda plant in New York last week, and that engine was signed by all the workers at the plant and is on its way to the GM Heritage Center in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

The first big block Chevy engine was introduced way back in 1958 and was used in both passenger cars and trucks. The engine’s legacy includes such classic nameplates as Chevrolet Impala, Chevelle, Camaro and Corvette with displacements ranging from the venerable 396, 409, 427 and 454 to, finally, the 496-cubic-inch Vortec 8100 that ended the production run.

Naturally, the death of the big block brings with it other casualties as well, such as the 150 laid off hourly workers that are hoping GM sees fit to bless them with a new powerplant to build along with the RV and marine industries. Thanks for the tip, Corey H!

[Source: The Buffalo News]

REPORT: Last GM big block engine rolls off the line originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With the rapid growth of services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite, location-based mobile social networks seem to be a dime a dozen these days, but they’re only fun and useful if your friends are using it, too.

Each time that I’ve tried one of these services, I find myself trying to convince my friends to use it so that I can have meaningful contacts to keep track of. Some of them don’t have the right phone, or are worried about blasting out their GPS coordinates to the world.

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Stalqer, available as a free iPhone app since earlier this month, has solved this problem by connecting to your Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare accounts and providing a map of your friends based on information it gathers from those services, even if they don’t use Stalqer.

If your friend uses a geo-tagged Tweet, or if they check in on Foursquare, Stalqer knows where they are. Stalqer can even pull your friends’ location from their Facebook profiles if they publicly display that information, but in most cases this is limited to the city level.

You can also view your friends’ locations in a list, or even in an augmented reality view by turning the phone on its side while in the map view, but Stalqer’s killer feature is its workaround of a pesky iPhone limitation.

Since iPhones lack the ability to run applications in the background, Stalqer piggybacks their service on one of the phone’s core services with periodic updates. By cleverly monitoring the data exchange on your iPhone when the Mail app checks for new messages, Stalqer can update your location as often as your phone checks for email.

After running Stalqer’s custom mail settings configuration tool, I took the app on a test drive, and sure enough, there I was moving along the map with each check of my email.

Not only is this an innovative iPhone workaround, it’s an interesting way to increase check ins without games, badges or rewards like those found in Foursquare.

The San Francisco-based company appears to understand that forcing users to create yet another online account would limit the app’s potential, so instead, you log in immediately through Facebook Connect. In this sense, Stalqer isn’t trying to become another popular social network – it wants to be the aggregator of your friends’ locations.

The app provides push notifications for nearby friends, and you can even move your friends around on the map for them if you know their whereabouts. This is another great feature that Stalqer hopes will keep people coming back to the app, or that will encourage new users to sign up.

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Art Hobson, an Emeritus physicist at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, has reviewed our book for the American Physical Society’s educational forum, and it seems he liked it. A quote:

Summarizing its prescription, the book’s final chapter states “We must fundamentally change the way we think and talk about science education,” and this means rethinking the education of scientists as well as the public school and college education of non-scientists. “We don’t simply need a bigger scientific workforce: We need a more cultured one, capable of bridging the divides that have led to science’s declining influence. …We must invest in a sweeping project to make science relevant to the whole of America’s citizenry.” I couldn’t agree more.

You can read Hobson’s full review here.

by Brad Johnson

First published at Wonk Room.

Now that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have returned from Copenhagen with a draft accord committing China, India, and the United States to a new era of climate action, the onus lies on the U.S. Senate to pass ambitious clean energy legislation. “Not a chance in hell that after the president put American prestige on the line in Copenhagen that the Senate is going to give this issue anything less than a major push,” Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) told reporters. “This is big—big—bigger than any individual agenda.” Unfortunately, many members continue to treat the dire need to reduce emissions and rebuild our economy as a political football. In particular, members who previously used China and India’s lack of commitment to emissions reductions as an excuse for inaction are now trying to redefine the Copenhagen Accord as meaningless. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) led the pack, calling the accord a “nothing-burger”:

It’s a nothing-burger.

McCain then admitted he hadn’t actually read the agreement. But he is joined by fellow members on the right and left of the aisle who are continuing to argue that energy reform is too difficult to attempt. They are attempting to move the goalposts, as well. Even though China has now committed to transparent emissions reductions, senators are arguing that because China can’t really be trusted, we still shouldn’t act:

Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio): “If we don’t do this right, a company in Lima, Ohio, shuts down and moves to Wuhan, and we lose jobs.”

Bob Casey (D-Pa.): “The reality for states like Pennsylvania is, even as we move forward with any kind of climate change legislation, there are going to be cost impacts. We want to make sure we’re not adding yet another cost impact that other countries don’t have to shoulder.”

Susan Collins (R-Maine): “Right now, I would say that cap-and-trade is stalled.”

Chris Dodd (D-Conn.): “It will take a lot of work. We need to take a break around here and step back before we try anything of any controversy.”

Ted Kaufman (D-Del.): “If China will not let us verify, we’re going to have a heck of a time here. An agreement’s no good if you can’t verify.”

Carl Levin (D-Mich.): “Unless India and China are bound and we know what the details are—I don’t think necessarily that their agreeing to goals or whatever it was they agreed to will have an effect on cap-and-trade. If there was a binding agreement that tied them into limits that were meaningful, then I think that would have advanced the legislation. From what I understand of this, it’s more of agreeing to goals.”

Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.): “I think that the Chinese are perfectly capable of being on board for something and then not doing it.”

George Voinovich (R-Ohio): “I know for a fact that even though the government of China says they are committed to X and Y, the economy in China is run by the governors of the state.”

However, as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) explained, the do-nothings in the Senate are dangerously misreading China’s role. The real concern should be that China and other nations are already taking the “green leap forward” and are far ahead in the climate race. The inability of the U.S. Congress to set a price on carbon and direct investment into a clean-energy economy is dooming American competitiveness and American jobs now, as well as the fate of future generations:

We have a responsibility to deal with this issue. We have to acknowledge the obvious. China, one of our great competitors in the world, is taking the green leap forward, as they say. They are committing themselves to this new energy-efficient economy, and they are building companies even in the United States that will make those products. Will the United States stand by the sidelines or will we be part of this leap forward? I don’t want to lose those jobs.

Related Links:

Copenhagen coal in the stocking?

Time to bust the filibuster

What you need to know following the Copenhagen climate summit

Early organisms apparently survived the Late Heavy Bombardment—which may have made our planet a much comfier place to live.

This is the first time we’ve covered BlueGold Capital Management so here’s their background: Founded by Pierre Andurand and Dennis Crema, BlueGold is a London based hedge fund that trades in commodities markets, primarily in oil derivatives. Before founding the firm, they were both senior oil traders at Vitol S.A. and they seek absolute returns “through discretionary fundamental trades, directional and relative-value.” They were up a whopping 209.4% for 2008, a year in which many other hedge funds struggled. Year to date for 2009, BlueGold is up 59.8%. Given that BlueGold primarily trades crude oil, we’d be remiss if we didn’t include a technical look at crude oil for reference.

Their November investor letter provides some interesting commentary on the economy on a macro level. Specifically, their macroeconomic thoughts are pinpointed in a few main talking points. Firstly, Stephen Jen (the author of this section of the letter) feels that the world will gradually recover and should continue on this course at least until next summer. He feels recent risks such as Dubai’s crisis are more-so a temporary distraction rather than a fundamental problem that will begin a wave of sovereign defaults.

Read more at Market Folly >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• 10 Countries That Will Survive The Sovereign Credit Meltdown Of 2010
• Deutsche Bank: Sovereign Debt And Tighter Money Are Big Risks, But Equities Will Gain 20%
• David Rosenberg’s Last Thought Of The Year: Time To Freak Out About Sovereign Debt

The iPhone is already touted for its gaming prowess almost endlessly, but it looks like things are about to take a pretty big leap forward. Epic Games has been crackin’ away at an iPhone port of their Unreal Engine 3 — the engine that powers such jaw-droppingly beautiful games as BioShock, Mirror’s Edge, Gears of War 2, and a bunch of others — and they’re now far enough along that they’re looking to show it off.

The first person lucky enough to get some hands-on time with the engine was Anand over at Anandtech, who seems to have walked away impressed. The stuff we’ll see on the iPhone obviously aren’t going to be pixel-for-pixel matches with that found on the current generation of consoles; textures will be downsampled, lighting and shading effectswill be toned down, etc. With that said, it ought to be pretty dang gorgeous.

It’ll still be a while before we see any games powered by the engine. Epic currently has no plans to get into the iPhone space for themselves, though they plan to license the engine some time in the near future. Epic has been been far more aggressive in pricing their engine licensing lately than they have in years prior, going as far as to give it away for free for noncommercial/educational use. Will they keep things cheap for the iPhone variant? We sure hope so.

Lastly: They’re not giving any specifics, but Epic’s also planning on showing off the engine running on a different mobile platform at CES. All things considered, it’s probably not webOS or BlackBerry OS – and that only leaves so many options. Any guesses?

[Via Engadget]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

A family dog in New York state has the distinction of becoming the first canine in the United States to be officially diagnosed with the 2009 H1N1 virus.

The thirteen year old mixed breed is thought to have contracted the virus from his owner, who tested positive with the flu himself earlier in the month.

The dog was brought into the vet after his owner suspected pneumonia, but with a critically high temp of 103 degrees, blood tests confirmed he had the flu. After a stay in the pet hospital the dog has fully recovered and isn’t thought to have passed it on to anyone or anything else. Though the swine flu has been known to pass from humans to pets, there has been no indication that pets have passed it on to people.

Dog and cat owners who have been ill with the H1N1 virus themselves should keep an eye on their pets for flu-like symptoms such as lethargy, loss of appetite, sneezing, coughing, fever, discharge from eyes and/or nose, and changes in breathing.

[image: sxc]

Post from: Blisstree

New York Dog Diagnosed with Swine Flu

Taptu, a mobile search engine that specializes in indexing mobile-friendly websites, just launched a new version of its iPhone app. The new app now includes real-time search results, which are powered by OneRiot. In addition to including these real-time search results, Taptu also worked hard on improving the speed of the app and on providing more relevant search results. Taptu offers apps for the iPhone, iPod touch (iTunes link) and Android, as well as a mobile optimized website.

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Taptu first integrated real-time search results from OneRiot in its mobile web interface and in its Android app last month. The mobile apps definitely provide a far superior way of using the service than the mobile site, however.

There are two ways to access real-time search results in the app. The homepage now displays the hottest trending topics, and a single click on one of these opens up OneRiot search results.

In addition, you can also do a normal search and then select “latest buzz” from the options menu right next to the search box. This same menu also allows you to restrict search to images, videos, blog or Wikipedia articles, as well as to sites and blogs about sports, news or apps.

For a closer look at Taptu’s feature set, also have a look at our review of the service’s web app.
Discuss

Filed under: Technology, Ford

Before we get into the nitty and/or gritty of what Ford is up to with their pending Sync app store, we should share with you a few facts FoMoCo shared with us. In 2010 fully 28 percent of the driving population will be between the ages of 16 and 31. These folks, known as Millenials (though us altecachers still prefer “Generation Y”) love their smart phones and social networks the way the Baby Boomers loved the Beatles and Generation X loved moping around and bad tribal tattoos.

As such, the number one access point to the internet is no longer a computer — it’s a mobile device.

Now we turn to Ford’s Sync, a piece of software developed with Microsoft’s help using the Seattle software giant’s Microsoft Auto platform. While on the surface Sync has often appeared as little more than a fancy way to spin songs off your iPod, in reality it’s a sophisticated piece of middleware that allows the vehicle to harness the power of a given mobile device. In other words, Sync allows whatever Ford/Lincoln/Mercury vehicle you’re driving to act as a controller for your iPhone/Droid/Pre/whatever.

Handsfree access to your favorite songs and phone numbers is one thing, but what about all those fancy-pants apps you’ve spent so much time (and maybe money) downloading? Are they to be totally forgotten while you’re in the car? Admittedly, you might be saying “of course,” but Millenials think different. Besides, what if there were smart phone apps that actually enhanced the driving experience? With your hands on the wheels and eyes on the road, how would you access them? Here’s a larger point, how does the internet work at 70 mph? Ford thinks it’s got the answers to most if not all of these questions.

Continue reading Ford goes open source, gets students to develop phone apps for Sync

Ford goes open source, gets students to develop phone apps for Sync originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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by Michael A. Livermore

On December 22nd, 2008, a quiet evening in the town of Harriman, Tennessee was interrupted when 1.2 billion gallons of toxic coal ash sludge burst out of a nearby landfill, poisoning the land and water in its path and causing untold hardship for families whose lives were turned upside down. A year later, the underlying cause of this massive environmental disaster is still unregulated.

Despite some rumblings and tentative first steps, the EPA has a long way to go before adopting rules that require safer storage of this dangerous muck. At the very least, the agency should move quickly to ban the slurry from being kept in unlined ponds where, even without a spill, it threatens public health by seeping carcinogens into the water supply.

Clean up of the spill is still ongoing—the Tennessee Valley Authority, the entity responsible for the plant in Kingston, says it’s likely to take another two or three years and at least $933 million total to finish the job. Add that to the health costs of contaminated water and respiratory issues of having this stuff around, and the benefits of regulations far outweigh the price electricity companies would pay to comply.

Last year’s spill was a consequence of TVA’s underinvestment in adequate protection.  What began as a dike designed to keep about 5 feet of coal ash from flowing into the nearby creek eventually had to contain a mountain of gelatinous waste that was a notable feature of the area’s landscape. With no regulation requiring it, only nominal improvements were made to keep the slurry in place and nothing was done to keep the toxins out of the drinking water.

This kind of behavior is just another way society hides the expensive consequences of burning dirty fuel. “Cheap” energy prices too often comes at the expense of hazards foisted onto unsuspecting neighbors. The families of Harriman experienced the true cost of cheap coal the hard way.

There is much more work to be done to uncover all the health risks associated with unlined coal ash ponds and to conduct a complete cost-benefit analysis of regulating these sites. But most of the missing information is on the benefit side of the equation, so further research is likely to strengthen the economic case for EPA to step in.

Hopefully many years will pass without another spill, but as the head of TVA has recently acknowledged, plants will need to change their storage practices to truly prevent another disaster like Kingston. It’s unclear that we can rely on these facilities to learn from TVA’s mistakes and protect their neighbors from harm without strong rules requiring adequate protection. The EPA should regulate quickly knowing that doing so will yield far more benefits than costs.

Related Links:

Copenhagen coal in the stocking?

The top green stories of the ‘00s

Top 10 worst Christmas gifts

Night, New Year’s Eve, in a snowy forest, as if by magic, flared festive lights on the Christmas tree. And all around the mysterious lights lit up! Sparkled snow drifts began to shine – as if covered with deposits of diamonds. Give yourself a sense of celebration!