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The Count is the gent in the Homburg, on the right of the driver.

The gyroscope is behind the door in the middle of the car. It appears that the car is balancing while stationary.

In 1912 the Russian Count Peter P Schilovski, a lawyer and member of the Russian royal family, visited the Wolseley Tool and Motorcar Company, and laid before their engineers plans for a two-wheeled gyroscopically-stabilised car. At that time Wolseley were a sizable manufacturer producing ordinary cars, double-decker buses, taxicabs, lorries and even powerboat engines.

The Wolseley men were clearly impressed, as the job was accepted, and work began immediately, under the supervision of A W Dring, the Chief Experimental Engineer. The chassis took a year to build, which seems impressively fast given the amount of experimentation that must have been needed.

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A British official was involved in drafting rules permitting extreme interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad, centre of the controversy over the use of torture by US forces against Iraqi prisoners.

Last night it emerged that the government has been forced to retract claims that no British military officer had seen or been involved with the crucial document allowing guards to subject detainees to interrogation methods including the use of dogs, sleep deprivation and stress positions, in breach of the Geneva Convention.

Last year the jail achieved notoriety when photographs emerged of guards forcing prisoners to strip naked and simulate sex acts. Other photographs showed detainees being set upon with dogs and beaten.

The Armed Forces Minister, Adam Ingram, has admitted in a letter to a Plaid Cymru MP, Adam Price, that a senior British Army lawyer assigned to the coalition’s legal department in Baghdad contributed to ‘comments provided by his superior’ when drafting the document.

It is not known if the officer supported or opposed the document, but the revelation raises serious questions about who in the Army’s chain of command knew of the interrogation techniques being employed at Abu Ghraib and when.

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While the effect of human activity on the global climate is hotly debated, physical signs of environmental change are all around us.

Some scientists say an increase in the rate of melting of the world’s glaciers is evidence of global warming.

Argentina’s Upsala Glacier was once the biggest in South America, but it is now disappearing at a rate of 200 metres per year.

Other scientists say its reduction is due to complicated shifts in glacial dynamics and local geology.

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Petrels, albatrosses, cormorants, frigatebirds, gulls etc. are mysterious and inspiring birds: often the subject of poetic stories and lots of myths around the world.� Albatrosses as the incarnated souls of drowned seamen following ships on motionless wings were a bad omen to many living sailors. The horrifying screams of petrels and shearwaters coming to their burrows after sunset have given rise to all kinds of superstitions.

The coastal species are often well known, but many stay out of sight and are seldom seen by most people. In many cases only known when found dead on the beach. And then there is often not much left of them because of their scavenging fellows. Luckily the skull or at least a part of it is often still present.�

In general bird skulls are the easiest parts of a skeleton to identify the species for the average birder. The shape and size of the skull, its structure and the coloration of the bills are often very helpful for the identification of the – not seldom partly decayed – carcasses that can be found on the world’s coasts.�The Seabirds Skull Gallery is the first website that focuses on the recognition of seabird skulls.

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The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office will invoke the state’s “stupid motorist law” for the first time, after a Cave Creek man drove around traffic barricades and tried to cross a flooded street last week in his Hummer.

The driver, Paul Zalewski, 47, reportedly ignored warnings not to enter Creek Canyon Road in Cave Creek on Friday.

But “Hummers are made to float,” sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Paul Chagolla said. “Other people told him not to go in there, and he did it anyway,” endangering himself and six passengers, including three children.

Zalewski was cited for reckless driving. If he is found guilty of the charge in Cave Creek Municipal Court, he will be prosecuted under the state’s stupid motorist law, which was passed in 1995 and requires drivers to reimburse the state for the cost of rescues.

Shouldn’t the “stupid motorist” law be enforced when you buy the Hummer?

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The Department of Homeland Security has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to protect ports since Sept. 11 without sufficiently focusing on those that are most vulnerable, a policy that could compromise the nation’s ability to better defend against terrorist attacks, the department’s inspector general has concluded.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars has been invested in redundant lighting systems and unnecessary technical equipment, the audit found, but “the program has not yet achieved its intended results in the form of actual improvement in port security.”

In addition, less than a quarter of the $517 million that the department distributed in grants between June 2002 and December 2003 had been spent as of September 2004, the inspector general found. The report also questioned whether grants allocated for small projects in resort areas and some remote locations should have been considered as critical to national security needs as larger projects at ports that are more vital to the national economy.

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The audit results appear to support criticism voiced last September by Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, who complained in a letter to President Bush that the methods used to grant the awards did not make sense.

“Your administration awarded port security grants in the states of Oklahoma, Kentucky, New Hampshire and Tennessee,” Mr. Lautenberg wrote. “While there may be some form of maritime facilities in these locations, I question whether, of the nation’s 361 maritime ports, these locations are truly the front lines on the war on terror.”

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A student named Jay (who wants his last name to be withheld) at Brick Township High School in New Jersey, had his chair pulled out from under him after he refused to stand for the national anthem. The class started out that morning with Mantel yelling “I don’t want to hear a sound! Not a sound! Morning exercises will come on, you will stand, you will stand quietly, you will pay attention! Any Questions!?…Now stand up and keep your mouths shut!” Students stood up as the national anthem began playing.
In the middle of the anthem, Mantel walked over to Jay and demanded that he stand up. Jay silently refused, and Mantel yelled again, “Stand up!”. Jay then said “I don’t have to stand up”. To which Mantel insisted “You have to stand.” Jay said “No I don’t”. Mantel then reached over and pulled Jay’s chair out from under him. Jay responded to Stuart Mantel’s outrageous behavior by asking Mantel “Are you serious?”, to which Mantel yelled “I am damn well serious.”
Jay said that he didn’t have any political reasons for his refusal to stand but that he wanted to sit because he feels it is his right to do so and that right was being threatened by Mantel. Jay said that he thought Mantel might tell him to stand, but he never expected to be physically forced to do so.
Jay’s friend who was in the class at the time, Corey, says that their teacher had been strict in the past in demanding that students stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance. That’s why they brought in a camera – to expose the teacher in case he did anything again. “The teacher and school principals wanted him (Mantel) to press charges against us…they tried to blame it on us like it was premeditated, like we did it just to get him on tape, which is false. We knew he was gonna go nuts because he frequently used to” said Corey.
Jay’s other classmate Steve got suspended for 10 days for filming the incident. The school told Corey that it “violated the teacher’s constitutional rights” for them to film the teacher without his permission.”I think that its crazy that people are getting in trouble for this or things they say. There have been so many kids video taping and no one ever got in trouble for it. So why now?” Jay asked. It sounds as if the school is punishing this student now because of the nature of what’s on the tape, not the fact they were taping the teacher without his permission.
When I asked Corey if Mantel was being punished for pulling out Jay’s chair, he said “Nope…I asked (the principal) ‘What are you doing to discipline Mantel?’ and they said ‘we talked’. Teachers do anything they want”. Seeing acts like Mantel’s go unpunished will likely inspire teachers to continue intimidating their students into standing for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance.

If you would like to let Brick Schools know how you feel about their handling of this situation, you may contact them here:

Brick Township Public Schools
Board of Education
101 Hendrickson Ave
Brick, NJ 08723
732-785-3000

Brick Township High School
346 Chambers Bridge Road
Brick, NJ 08723
(732)262-2500

download the movie here

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As George W. Bush was first moving onto the national political stage, he often turned for advice to an old friend who secretly taped some of their private conversations, creating a rare record of the future president as a politician and a personality.

In the last several weeks, that friend, Doug Wead, an author and former aide to Mr. Bush’s father, disclosed the tapes’ existence to a reporter and played about a dozen of them.

Variously earnest, confident or prickly in those conversations, Mr. Bush weighs the political risks and benefits of his religious faith, discusses campaign strategy and comments on rivals. John McCain “will wear thin,” he predicted. John Ashcroft, he confided, would be a “very good Supreme Court pick” or a “fabulous” vice president. And in exchanges about his handling of questions from the news media about his past, Mr. Bush appears to have acknowledged trying marijuana.

Wead is a total dick for releasing these tapes, but now that they’re out, they paint an interesting picture..

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Daniel Tammet is talking. As he talks, he studies my shirt and counts the stitches. Ever since the age of three, when he suffered an epileptic fit, Tammet has been obsessed with counting. Now he is 26, and a mathematical genius who can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall pi to 22,514 decimal places. He also happens to be autistic, which is why he can’t drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left. He lives with extraordinary ability and disability.

Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn’t “calculating”: there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”

Tammet is a “savant”, an individual with an astonishing, extraordinary mental ability. An estimated 10% of the autistic population – and an estimated 1% of the non-autistic population – have savant abilities, but no one knows exactly why. A number of scientists now hope that Tammet might help us to understand better. Professor Allan Snyder, from the Centre for the Mind at the Australian National University in Canberra, explains why Tammet is of particular, and international, scientific interest. “Savants can’t usually tell us how they do what they do,” says Snyder. “It just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That’s why he’s exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone.”

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In 1969, the Italian conceptual artist Alghiero Boetti (1940-1994) designed a world map, with each country represented by the patterns of its national flag as if that were its essential identity. Boetti then commissioned weavers in Afghanistan, where he traveled frequently, to embroider the map. Updated versions were produced over succeeding years to reflect territorial changes. The last map under Boetti’s supervision was completed in 1993, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

While the extended project was in progress, Afghanistan itself experienced drastic changes. The Soviet invasion sent many people to Pakistan, including weavers, all of whom are women. The fraught conditions inspired the invention of a genre of ”war carpets” incorporating images of guns, tanks and warplanes. And the so-called ”Boetti style” took on a commercial life of its own in rugs.

The Esso show, put together by Kevin Sudeith, a dealer and collector, is made up of both styles, as well as hybrids of the two. Although war carpets have been international commodities for some time, those here are unusually ambitious in scale and design. In the earliest, dated 1983, checker-patterned helicopters hover over images of animal-filled parks and palatial buildings, themes adapted from traditional models. The same weaver is responsible for woven portraits of contemporary political leaders on view in the gallery’s second room.

I posted about these war rugs quite a while ago. It’s a pity I can’t visit New York, it’s worth it! I’ll see if I can get some images from the exhibition…