Ken Nelson

The Road of Death… in Boliva:

Amazingly only #6 on the top 19 most complex and dangerous roads in the world.

After updating Picasa yesterday, something odd happened.  A bunch of faces appeared:

Apparently, Picasa now finds faces and tries to put a name to them. It asked me a few, mainly Brian, Jenny & Paula, and then it went off and automatically found them. It did a fine job.

But… it also told me, without a doubt, that my kids look like my wife, not me.

Every single “wrong answer”, and every single suggestion, was that Brian looked like Paula, or that Jenny looked like Paula.

Lucky kids!

Home schooled, practical pistol and rifle shooting, blogging, 12 year old

My 12 year old son, Brian, has a blog now. And he has learned to post to it. We reposted a couple things he wrote for my site, and then he wrote a fresh piece on the match he shot today.

http://www.briankevinnelson.com

Bookmark it today!

Whether finger style guitar, downhill skiing at 80+ miles an hour, or making incredible basketball shots, what humans can do astounds.

The shots are amazing even if shot conventionally. But behind the back in the air – sick! 

Amazon.com has done far more for me than any politician currently prancing around Capitol Hill or in the White House.

Don Boudreaux marveling about his new Kindle.

My family has three of them. Each day I see the orders my kids place as they scarf down new knowledge via their Kindle.

My own Christmas miracle was that I wasn’t sick this Christmas, making this Christmas markedly different from the past 40 or so Christmases.  But on to a truly amazing story and actual Christmas Miracle…

A woman dies of cardiac arrest during labor. An emergency C-section, with no anesthesia, brings out a dead baby as well. At this point:

"Half of my family was laying there in front of me, there’s no other way to say it, but dead," said Mike.

But then the miracles happened, his wife revived after being dead for minutes, and:

After the delivery, doctors rushed Tracey to the operating room to complete the surgery. In the meantime, Coltyn’s tiny, lifeless, body was handed to his father Mike. Doctors still worked to get the baby breathing. "They actually got him started right in my hands. That is an amazing feeling," said Mike.

Pretty scary but a great result. I’m glad for their family.

Alas the comment sections descend into rants about if God is real or not, proving that even the stupid can figure out how to get on the internet these days.

 
3D filter that goes in front of projector

My daughter wondered how 3-D movies worked. I explained the early ones used colored lenses and two different projectors sending different colors to slightly different spots on the screen, but that recent ones used polarization (orienting light in a common direction, so one lens of your glasses gets one view, the other another view, and the brain merges them to 3-D) and just one projector.

But Wired explains it better:

RealD cinema, currently the most widely used 3-D movie system in theaters, uses circular polarization — produced by a filter in front of the projector — to beam the film onto a silver screen. It does not require two projectors shooting out images in separate colors. The benefit of polarization is you can more naturally move your head without losing perception of the 3-D image.

In the case of Avatar, I felt the 3-D stuff helped the movie immensely and I recommend paying the extra few dollars and seeing it in 3-D.

Top 10 Fan made light saber fights, for example:

Very well done.

The side opposite St. George, UT would be very soggy:

http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/tool.html

(But I can save you the trouble… if you are in the US, the opposite side of the earth is wet).

It is the big black dot on the right

This is cool. A planet, twice the size of earth, but loaded with water, was found by a 16x telescope.  It could have been found a long time ago, if they knew where to look!

While the planet probably has too thick of an atmosphere and is too hot to support life similar to that found on Earth, the discovery is being heralded as a major breakthrough in humanity’s search for life on other planets.

But don’t expect life there, if any, to be similar to ours. The atmostphere is too thick and the planet too hot. But it is loaded with water, so perhaps this is similar to the Mon Calamari planet where Star Wars Admiral Ackbar is from?

Or not…

Here is a list of 10 cool trees, including this one which was the only tree in a 250 mile radius in Libya:

Alas, a drunken truck driver hit it and killed it.

A couple weeks back, I came across the worlds largest cottonwood tree during an ATV ride. We’d come across a lush oasis amidst miles of desert  and found this tree that was over 30’ in diameter.  I’ll probably do that ride again this winter and will snap a photo…

Review by Brian Nelson, age 12, as a home school daily writing assignment.

In October 2009 my Dad and I attended the Army Marksmanship Unit/MGM targets Junior Shooters Camp at Fort Benning, Georgia.  The camp lasted three days but Dad and I had never been to Georgia, so we stayed the rest of the week. At Fort Benning we visited the new National Infantry Museum, an innovative hands-on museum detailing the history of the United States Army Infantry from its founding in 1776 to the present day.

The Museum has been designed around a military saying that "the last 100 yards of the battlefield belong to the Infantry. The first thing you see upon entering the Museum is actually called "The Last Hundred Yards". The exactly 100 yard gallery contains mannequins dressed in authentic uniforms portraying one major battle in every war the U.S. has fought in. All the exhibits in the Last Hundred Yards are made with soil from the actual battlefields. As you enter each battle scene, an immersive sound system plays sounds of battle, bringing each scene to life. You can hear the shouts of the colonial soldiers,charging redoubt No. 10 at Yorktown, confederate rifle fire at Shiloh, the carnage of 225 Rangers landing at Point Du Hoc, the sounds of paratroopers and gliders hitting the ground at Luzon, the rotors of the 7th Air Cav UH-1 Huey helicopter, landing at LZ X-ray in the Ia Drang Valley, and the rumble of the Bradley Fighting vehicle, rolling through the outskirts of Baghdad.

After exiting the Last Hundred Yards, The sound of marching boots and shouts of drill instructors lure you into the Fort Benning gallery. Here videos teach about Drill Instructors, Basic Combat Training(BCT), and Army Ranger School. A laser range filled with m16a2 rifles outfitted with laser units and pneumatic recoil gives visitors a chance to qualify just like BCT recruits do.

Then down the stairs you go to take your pick of the rest of the galleries. Dad and I did them all in chronological order, starting with the Philippine insurrection and World War One gallery. This gallery ends in a simulated WW1 trench, where simulated bullets whiz overhead and artillery shells make the ground shake.

After leaving the trenches we moved on to the World War Two gallery. This exhibit contains sand tables of every key battle in every theater of the war as well as several artifacts, including a Jeep made in 1940 and numerous firearms.

The following gallery, the Korea and Vietnam gallery, ends in a Vietnamese jungle walk. Complete with simulated land mines, encased pungi sticks, and one Vietcong ambush, the jungle walk may be scary to some people, so there is an option to walk around.

The final gallery, titled "a sole superpower", deals with the fall of communism, Operations  Just Cause and Desert Storm, and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The National Infantry Museum also houses a gourmet restaurant, IMAX theater, and a gift shop full of actual military surplus like uniforms and inert grenades.

I have never seen a museum better than the National Infantry Museum. I like the way the museum takes you to the front lines of history, not tell about it on a plaque.

Only an hour or so south of Atlanta, I recommend this museum to anyone that is passing through Georgia, or anyone deeply interested in military history.

Learn more at http://www.nationalinfantrymuseum.com/

Norman Rockwell created thousands of photographic studies to prepare for his paintings:

I find it interesting to see what didn’t make it from photo to painting.

but this is pretty cool…

I’m a fan of nuclear power for the core electricity our culture uses. It can scale up and has less negative externalities than coal, gas, wind and rooftop solar.

That said, I really do want my cell phone, iPhone, laptop and other stuff I roam with to just charge itself. To just WORK.

From my Dad comes Konarka -  a maker of plastic that is a solar panel:

Put it in a bag and you can power the stuff inside it:

http://www.energysun-bags.de/

Yes!

Other vendors in the solar film game are Solexant and First Solar

Solar power, driven by MARKET demands, moves along rapidly.  Math and Physics say it won’t make enough juice to power our future lifestyle, but it can full niches in detached from the grid power quite well.