This water bridge/canal now crosses over the River Elbe in a small city near Berlin called Magdeburg. The project was completed to aid in the transport of passengers and freight between East and West Germany, as part of the reuinification effort between the two regions. One question though: Did the bridge’s design consider the additional weight of ship and barge traffic, or just the weight of the water?
Google is appealing to the ever-growing trend in eco-tourism and environmental consciousness in the United States by joining the Earth Day Network to create entirely "green" trip itineraries for anyone who inquires. With growing concern over the United States' contribution to Global Warming and Climate Change, an entire low-carbon tourism industry is developing. Google is known for starting trends. We'll see how long this one lasts.
June 15, 2006: Today President Bush designates the Western Hawaiian Islands, a marine area near the size of California, as a national monument. This is the president’s second use of the National Antiquities Act; the first being the designation of the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan. The area west of Hawaii now protected will be completely off-limits to any commercial activity. It is about 140,000 square-miles in area and contains over 7,000 species of marine wildlife. This is the largest use of the National Antiquities Act in United States history, since it was created nearly 100 years ago.
READ THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK: Uncle Sam is peering over your shoulder! You’ve been warned:
I asked my dad about World Trade 7 and its collapse. He was working on search and recovery at the base of the building (the North Tower’s debris pile was at 7’s lobby). World Trade 7 held a civilian evacuation before any collapses at WTC occured (as did the Millenium Hotel, the World Financial Center, the Deutsch Bank Building, and the other auxillary buildings of the World Trade Center Complex). Smoke was heavy, he said, as fires from the north tower ignited fuel tanks near 7’s basement. The basement was inaccessible from the outside, so the fires continually burned until the structure’s collapse (and then continued on for days, under the rubble). About a 1/2 hour before the building came down, a structural engineering team advised search and rescue to evacuate; the building was deemed structurally unsound and under risk of collapse. Sure enough, the structure collapsed 1/2 an hour later. A team of engineers was on site within an hour of the first plane hitting the WTC. This is why Mayor Rudy Guiliani’s command headquarters was moved from Vessey Street prior to collapse, and how he survived. The engineers predicted a collapse and advised the mayor’s team to evacuate. They also advised search and rescue for months during the cleanup as debris shifted and as other collapses occured. During the 12-hour shift that my father was at ground zero, he said he witnessed near 6 collapses of auxillary structures and of remnants of other buildings at the site.
While in Washington, D.C. three weeks ago, an interesting opportunity approached me. General Motors was giving test drives of their HydroGen prototype vehicle, which runs on compressed hydrogen gas. The fuel cell powered auto is a bit smaller than the average sedan, comparable in size to a Prius, but higher off the ground with more headroom and larger windows. There are no mechanical components of the vehicle besides the front and rear axles. There is no drive shaft. There is no shifting assembly. The stearing wheel is not physically connected to the front wheels, lacking tie-rods and a pitman arm. Everything in the vehicle is controlled electronically. There are "forward," "reverse," and "park" buttons located on the center console between the two front bucket seats. The "gas" and "brake" are still in the form of pedals on the floor, however.
The debate for nuclear power in the United States has been an ever-inflamed issue since the Three Mile Island incident in 1979 at the plant's Unit 2 reactor. Since then, no new nuclear power generating stations have been built in the U.S. leaving us behind countries like France, who produce close to 90% of their power from nuclear energy. The American public has been pumped with anti-nuclear stigma for thirty years and is extremely reluctant in accepting nuclear technology of any type. The public idea of nuclear power associates a mushroom cloud to the technology. The idea can't be farther from the truth. The only "explosion" (if you even can call it that) that can occur is a steam flash event, or the effect of a steam-pipe leak within the reactor containment dome. The superheated steam rapidly expands once hitting ambient air temperatures within the reactor dome. The dome is specifically designed to contain this swift air expansion. The dome has near five-foot-thick, concrete walls reinforced with steel rods that form a woven steel grid. These steel woven "baskets" build on top of one another within the poured concrete. The result is a containment dome that can withstand never-before-seen tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, nuclear blasts, and specifically, direct impacts of military aircraft or missiles. Read the rest of this entry ?
“3,186
Number of prostitution arrests in the city [New York] last fiscal year. In the same period, however, only 1,922 arrests were logged for patronizing prostitutes, which seems to indicate that the market is a tad oversaturated with hookers.”
The above was happily borrowed from The Village Voice’s website…
Media outcry has recently revealed a darker side of Hillary Clinton. During her husband’s run as governor of Arkansas, Senator Clinton worked on the WalMart Board of Directors. During President Clinton’s run for the White House in 1992, a chief donator to the campaign was Mr. Sam Walton. With the White House is her eyes, Hillary Clinton is stearing clear of mentioning her ties to WalMart due to a recent Democratic campaign against WalMart’s employee benefits programs (they are non-existent). The liberal news media is currently up in arms over the ordeal. The question is: Why didn’t everyone already know this? She worked on the board between 1986 and 1992, up until her hubby won the White House seat. Is Hillary going to take John Kerry’s place as a severely disgruntled flip-flop? The Village Voice recently deconstructed “Wal-Mart’s First Lady.” It’s funny though, that WalMart is currently selling a book on their website interestingly called “Can She Be Stopped?: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless…” I see a fair amount of backstabbing in the near future…
Walmart has begun its systematic takeover of the blogosphere. In retaliation for current government and public attacks against the company, Walmart is beginning to hire current employees and embedded bloggers to do their dirty-work; they are feeding Walmart propaganda into the blog world. Recently, a state-legislated bill was announced that would force Walmart to increase spending on employee health insurance. Walmart currently encourages employees to seek public health benefits and welfare programs, instead of using the company’s programs. Brian Pickrell, a paid Walmart crony and frequent blogger, was posting in spades pro-Walmart messages attacking the bill: “All across the country, newspaper editorial boards — no great friends of business — are ripping the bills…” The New York Times ran the article this morning, giving an inside look into the invasion of the blog world:
Several sentences in Mr. Pickrell’s Jan. 20 posting — and others from different days — are identical to those written by an employee at one of Wal-Mart’s public relations firms and distributed by e-mail to bloggers.
Under assault as never before, Wal-Mart is increasingly looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers, feeding them exclusive nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters.
The artist, Jenny Holzer, has installed an intriguing piece of artwork in the lobby of the recently completed 7 World Trade Center building (destroyed on 9/11). The piece stands 14 feet tall and 65 feet long, scrolling everything from Langston Hughes to prose by Walt Whitman. It takes around 8 hours for the entire text segment to complete its journey across the wall of words. The wall of words is visible in the lobby from blocks away, as the white lettering is five feet high. Ms. Holzer, working with Larry Silverstein (the chief developer of the World Trade Center complex) and his wife, Klara Silverstein, spent more than a year debated the content of the text, agreeing to remove any 9/11-related content. Silverstein reiterated, “down here [in Lower Manhattan]… we need positive stuff.” This seems to be the trend of new designs and artworks appearing in the area; light, airy and joyous structures and artwork are rising from the ashes, making Lower Manhattan a forward looking and exciting place once again. The New York Times ran the article this morning.
