A friend sent me a link to a video of a walk along the side of a mountain, I believe in Mexico or South America. Interesting, and a little scary.
The video is a little shaky at times, so if that makes you dizzy or you are scared of heights, you may want to only watch a small portion of this thing.
Mountain Walk

Looking at my desk this morning, I think I’ll just throw a few things in the blog. Haven’t had so much time lately so the collection of ideas and things to post is growing on my desk. I started with a file folder in a rack, thinking I’d put stuff there until I had a time to look into them and post. Well, that’s now jammed, and a pile is growing on my desk. So here we go....

UC Berkeley officials are defending a $2.1 million payout to the police chief, who is still working. She was eligible for full retirement at almost her full pay. So they worked a deal where she cashed out her retirement benefits for $2.1 million, in addition to receiving $4621 a month for 10 years from a deferred compensation plan. She previously had been earning over $200,000 a year. She now “only” earns $194,000 a year.

Her comments? “When I leave, I’ll have to be self-insured. If I don’t do a good job investing all that money, I could be out on the streets with a tin cup.” “I’m only 54, and I want to continue to contribute to the big U”

Well I don’t know about you, but I can’t see that there’s a big chance of someone with over 2 million being found on the streets with a tin cup. I think it has less to do with contributing to the big U, and more to do with sucking up as much money as she can. Public servant, or fiscal vacuum cleaner, I can’t tell the difference. Considering the astronomical level of UC fees right now, “contributing to the big U” would better served by donating a chunk of that money to students currently attending UC.

Joining her at the trough is the new UC president, who is going to be getting $591,000 salary, plus $8916 yearly car allowance, plus supplemental pension benefits totaling $228,000 for the next two years, and various amounts after that. He can also live in the UC President’s Residence, a 13,239 square foot mansion that costs UC $300,000 a year to operate. One of his goals is to make UC more affordable for students. I believe this is known as “unclear on the concept”. Or more realistically, just rhetoric to please the masses while you take their money. Pehaps he’s got a future in politics?....

UC has fallen in line with the large corporations unfortunately. While all the higher ups mouth platitudes about wanting to work for a great university, help students, etc, it basically has become a enshrined program of financial theft. Everybody up top gets buckets of money, the janitors and others at the bottom get some crumbs, and the students get shafted.

In the corporate world, you’ll be pleased to note that in 2004, a US Government Accountability Office study found that 61% of American corporations paid no corporate income tax between 1996 and 2000. One gimmick is to set up shell companies offshore, a process that may cost the US Treasury over $100 billion a year. KBR, the largest Iraq war contractor, admitted to “reducing tax obligations” by setting up two Cayman Islands divisions to avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicare and Social Security taxes. They were joined in the Islands by 23 of the largest federal contractors. You might think that when this came to light, those corporations would be punished by perhaps losing contracts or paying penalties. If so, you thought wrong.

Here in the Bay Area, the city of Oakland is doing its part to fight poverty. To avoid a legion of city employees walking the streets with tin cups, it currently pays 1,333 of them (almost one third of the total workforce) salaries exceeding $100,000.
No wonder they fought tooth and nail to prevent the local newspapers from obtaining salary information.

A friend sent me the link below to a news story about the damage a pelican did to a F-111 jet in Australia. The picture is really amazing. I have read occasional stories about bird strikes, but this is one of the few pics I’ve seen. Link to the story is here:
F-111

So that got me wondering, and I looked around and found a fair amount of info on Wikipedia. Some of the tidbits:
The impact of a 5 kg (12 pound) bird at 240 km/h (150 mph) equals that of a 1/2 ton (1000 pound) weight dropped from a height of 3 meters (10 feet).
Most large commercial jet engines include design features that ensure they can safely shut-down after "ingesting" a bird weighing up to 1.8 kg (4 lb). The engine does not have to survive the ingestion, just be safely shut down. This is a 'stand alone' requirement, i.e., the engine must pass the test, not the aircraft.

Modern jet aircraft structures must be able to withstand one four pound bird collision; the empennage (tail) must withstand one 8 pound bird collision. Cockpit windows on jet aircraft must be able to withstand one 4 pound bird collision without yielding or spawlding.

The first reported bird strike was by Orville Wright in 1905, and according to their diaries Orville … flew 4,751 meters in 4 minutes 45 seconds, four complete circles. Twice passed over fence into Beard's cornfield. Chased flock of birds for two rounds and killed one which fell on top of the upper surface and after a time fell off when swinging a sharp curve
The greatest loss of life directly linked to a bird strike was on October 4, 1960, when Eastern Air Lines Flight 375, a Lockheed L-188 Electra flying from Boston, flew through a flock of common starlings during take off, damaging all four engines. The plane crashed shortly after take-off into Boston harbor, with 62 fatalities. Subsequently, minimum bird ingestion standards for jet engines were developed by the FAA.

Aircraft continue to be lost on a routine basis to birdstrikes. In the fall of 2006 the USAF lost a twin engine T-38 trainer to a bird strike (ducks) and in the October 2007 the US Navy lost a T-45 jet trainer in a collision with a bird.
In the summer of 2007 Delta Air Lines suffered serious incident in Rome, Italy, as one of its B-767 aircraft, on takeoff, ingested yellow legged gulls into both engines. Although the aircraft returned to Rome safely, both engines were damaged and had to be changed. United Air Lines suffered a twin engine bird ingestion by a B-767 on departure from Chicago's O'Hare Field in the spring of 2007. One engine caught fire and bird remains were found in the other engine.

To reduce birdstrikes on takeoff and landing, airports are required to engage in bird management and control.
Other approaches try to scare away the birds using frightening devices, for example sounds, lights, pyrotechnics, radio-controlled airplanes, decoy animals/corpses, lasers, dogs etc.[2]Firearms are also occasionally employed.

A successful approach in recent years has been the utilization of dogs, including German shepherds, English pointers and border collies, to scare away birds and wildlife. Another alternative is bird capture and relocation.
Falcons are sometimes used to harass the bird population, as for example on John F. Kennedy International Airport.[1] At Manchester Airport in England the usual type of falcon used for this is a peregrine falcon/lanner falcon hybrid, as its habitual flight range is about the right size to cover the airport and not also much irrelevant land around.
An airport in New Zealand uses electrified mats to reduce the number of worms that attracted large numbers of sea gulls.[1]

Link to full wikepedia entry is below:
WikipediaBird

Very interesting article in the paper this week about nanotechnology and cancer detection. Stanford researchers are working on a test to detect cancer using nanoparticles with molecular latches that are designed to latch onto cancer cells. The body is then scanned with a laser light, which picks up these locations to show where the cancer cells are. This new test would pick up much smaller concentrations of cancer cells than now is possible, and do away with the injection of radioactive tracers that are currently used.

The link to the article is below:
Nanotechnology & Cancer

The idiots at “Earth Liberation Front” have apparently struck again, setting fire to an upscale housing development in Washington state that ironically was built using Green Building techniques. The story was widely covered so there’s no shortage of links to search if you google it or check news websites. I think these guys should win the "unclear on the concept" prize for this month. You'd think an environmentalist would support the promotion of green building ideas. Unfortunately, the ELF and similar groups are more about power and destructive thrills than about positive ideas for change.

This comes on the heels of problems with animal rights fanatics in California. The University of California had to get restraining orders against several groups. Last week six masked people (cowards) tried to force their way into the home of a UC Santa Cruz researcher, hitting her husband on the head. Fortunately a witness got a license plate and it looks like there are some solid leads. In LA, Molotov cocktails have been left at researcher homes, and one house was flooded by someone who broke a window and poked a garden hose into the house.

I hope that they throw more of these idiots in jail and hit them with some hefty fines and civil suits as well. They are no better than the Islamic religious police in the middle east who attack and beat up those that are improperly dressed. They are also no better than the US abortion foes that target and terrorize doctors and clinic staff. Free speech does not include terrorizing and attacking people, or destroying property. In the past, I think there’s been a tendency to go light on punishment for some of these people, which sends the wrong signal and ensures they will continue attacking people and property. If there’s no punishment, the message going out is “Go ahead and do what you want, you’ll just get a slap on the wrist if you get caught”.