Virtual Street Reality

Julian Beever is an English artist who is famous for his art on the pavements of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium. It's peculiarity? Beever gives his drawings an anamorphosis view, his images are drawn in such a way which gives them three dimensionality when viewing from the correct angle. It's amazing !!!

Click here for the article and all the photos.

(2005-07-21 22:21:53 SGT) [Musings] Permalink

US Congressman Bartlett speaks out again on Peak Oil

peakoil.com -> xecu.net, lifeaftertheoilcrash.net :

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, if you go to your computer this evening and do a Google search for peak oil, you will find there a large assortment of articles and comments. Like every issue, you will find a few people who are on the extreme, but there will be a lot of mainstream observations there. One of the articles that you will find there was written by Matt Savinar. Matt Savinar is not a technical person. He is a lawyer, a good one, and he does what lawyers do. He goes to the sources and builds his case ...

... Mr. Speaker, the challenge that we have now is to reduce the amount of energy we are using so that there is a surplus of the available energy to make investments in the alternatives that we are going to have to turn to as we run down Hubbert's peak.

I think that our country, Mr. Speaker, needs something like a melding of the Manhattan Project, the urgency of the Manhattan Project and the commitment that we had in putting a man on the moon. Short of that, Matt Savinar could be correct when he said, "Dear Reader, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon."

One of the great attributes of being in America is that we are entrepreneurs. We do very poorly at avoiding crises. We do very well at responding to a crisis. We now are approaching a crisis. I think the Federal Government and the Congress needs to take the lead in challenging our people, our entrepreneurs, our creative spirit, to address this problem ...

- inline links added.

Indonesia Hit by Petrol Shortages

peakoil.com -> bbc.co.uk :

The oil crisis is hitting Indonesia - one the world's biggest oil producers - as it struggles to end subsidised prices for petrol ... Indonesia is an oil producer, the only member of Opec in East Asia. But a lack of investment in the oil sector over the past decade, coupled with a rapid increase in domestic demand has meant that Indonesia now has to import extra fuel to make up the difference.

Civil servants have been told to go easy on the air conditioning and some street lights in major cities are being switched off. Television and radio stations have been asked to close down overnight (although there is an exemption for European football games!) and ministerial motorcades will be reduced, all in a bid to save power.

But a growing number of economists and business leaders are sceptical that such energy conservation measures will have a major impact. The real issue at the heart of the problem, they say, is the ballooning subsidies the government pays to keep fuel prices low. As oil prices rise, so does the cost of the subsidies ...

Kodak to cut another 10000 jobs

dpreview.com -> altustimes.com, boston.com, washingtonpost.com

Eastman Kodak Co. said Wednesday it is cutting as many as 10,000 more jobs as the company that turned picture-taking into a hobby for the masses navigates a tough transition from film to digital photography. The lightning transition to a world without film is forcing an extreme makeover at the world's biggest maker of the product and coincided with the disclosure of a second-quarter loss ...

On top of 12,000 to 15,000 layoffs targeted 18 months ago, Kodak is reducing its payroll by almost a quarter from where it stood in 2004, when a string of recent acquisitions is taken into account ... Kodak plans to make as many 25,000 job cuts by the middle of 2007 and trim its traditional manufacturing assets to about $1 billion, down from $2.9 billion in January 2004.

- and the people who held these jobs are going to go where??

RIP : "Beam Me Up" Scotty

slashdot.org -> cnn.com, news.yahoo.com :

Actor James Doohan, best known as the feisty, Scottish-accented chief engineer on television's original "Star Trek" series - a role immortalized by the catchphrase "Beam me up, Scotty" - died on Wednesday at age 85, his manager said. Doohan died at his home in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, Washington, of complications from pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, about a year after he was diagnosed with the degenerative neurological illness, manager Steve Stevens said in an interview.

He is best remembered for playing Lt. Commander Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, the can-do chief engineer aboard the starship USS Enterprise on the original "Star Trek" series, which ran from 1966 to 1969 on NBC. He reprised the role for several big-screen "Star Trek" features. One of Scotty's chief functions on the show was to operate the transporter device used to "beam" crew members aboard the Enterprise from distant planets - often in response to the order: "Beam me up, Scotty."

- RIP, Scotty. You will be missed.

(2005-07-21 12:59:15 SGT) [Musings] Permalink

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