Every geek loves sci-fi flavored pseudodirigibles, from Blade Runner to their occasional appearance in Batman comics:

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Â… an Aeroscraft?

A Tarzana, Calif., company has been working on a new kind of aircraft that looks more like a flying cruise liner than anything inhabiting the skies today.

"It's not a blimp, it's not an airship, it's a totally new vehicle," said Edward Pevzner, business development manager for Worldwide Aeros Corp.

"Today we have three types of vehicles — air vehicles, which are airplanes, helicopters and airships [blimps]. So this Aeroscraft, as we're going to call it, is going to be the fourth type. And it is going to combine technologies of all three other vehicles."

Roughly the size of two football fields, the Aeroscraft can be used as a military transport for troops, artillery and equipment; as a cargo transport service in the spirit of Federal Express or UPS; as a commuter transport service; and as a luxury travel option.

Okay, here comes the bad news that will doom this fat bastard:

Because the vehicle is heavier than a normal aircraft, it moves much slower — a coast-to-coast trip would take about 18 hours.

But for the luxury traveler or businessman on the go who might be willing to pay the high price of a first-class airline ticket, it's not about getting there fast; it's about enjoying the trip, Pevzner said.

This just in: Pevzner is an idiot. No one is going to want to triple his travel time. Surely they won't pay a premium price for it, restaurant or no restaurant.

"The Aeroscraft is not going to take you to New York in six hours — it'll take you to New York in 18 hours — but you'll have your own room to sleep and rest in during the flight, you'll have a meal in a restaurant — it'll be a restaurant meal instead of airplane food," he said.

Sure, sure. Or, you can just take a normal plane, get to LA in six hours, have a meal in (get this) LA, on the ground, and then sleep at a hotel room.

Pevzner said that when configured as a cruise ship, the craft would able to hold about 250 people as well as offer a wealth of amenities.

Restaurants, nightclubs, spas, casinos and sleep cabins are among the facilities the craft could come outfitted with — just like a luxury ocean liner.

Wow! Casinos, spas, nightclubs, and beds! The thing is... they have those on the ground, too.

It may have some value as a military transport, though. Supposedly it can transport 500 tons of cargo 12,000 nautical miles in seven days. So, perhaps a few of these would be good for medium-sized fast deployments.

Except, of course... all of our troops would be stuck inside a lumbering, ginormously obese target.

Still, it's fun to play "let's pretend" sometimes.

Thanks to Allah again.

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (39)
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Hey, your Y chromosome is passed from father to son, just like your last name. People with common last names tend to be related, if tenuously. So why not build a database of DNA commonalities among people with the same surname?

Forensic scientists could use DNA retrieved from a crime scene to predict the surname of the suspect, according to a new British study.

It is not perfect, but could be an important investigative tool when combined with other intelligence.

...

"The evidence would not be hanging on the Y chromosome, all it would give you is an investigative tool to prioritise a sub-set of your suspects," said co-author Dr Mark Jobling from the University of Leicester.

Mining the information would require building a database of at least 40,000 surnames and the Y chromosome profiles associated with them.

Dr Jobling emphasises the limitations of the method; it could have some predictive power in just under half the population, after the most common surnames like Smith, Taylor and Williams have been excluded.

But he says it has the potential to cut down on the police workload.

"If you had a big enough database, it would give you from your crime scene sample a list of names," Dr Jobling, from the University of Leicester, told the BBC News website.

That's just too cool.

Unfortunately, in the future, episodes of CSI will be one and a half minutes long.

On the plus side, so will episodes of CSI: Miami.

Thanks to Link Mecca.

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (11)
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No new show for today; but they'll be running a repeat.

Sorry... I had a great guest for today-- David Horowitz! -- but I don't have a landline in my apartment yet. I've been using a friends', but I can't use that one today. So, it's just impossible to plug in and do the show.

Hopefully Mr. Horowitz won't feel too annoyed at being blown off by such a minor webcast talk show host and I can have him back later.

Posted by: Ace at 11:27 AM | Comments (5)
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Got that? It's forbidden to call traitors and sympathizers with the enemy "un-American." It is, however, quite good form to call veterans returning from honorable service in Iraq, supporting our nation's policy "un-American."

You will not, of course, hear any media outrage about the Democrats attempting to chill the free speech of returning Iraqi veterans by branding them "un-American."

Posted by: Ace at 11:24 AM | Comments (11)
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The soft self-censorship of cowardice continues.

Submitted: if enough media/information institutions bow to the fundamentalist Muslims' demands for special, elevated treatment, it matters not a whit if our government makes it official and actually names Islam as the state religion.

Little by little, we are submitting to Islamist violence and giving up the rights and incidents of a free people.

Note: As Cal writes, she can still find "Allah" profiles on Yahoo. But a newspaper article reports that people are having trouble creating logins with those letters ("Callahan," for example, isn't permitted).

More information is needed, she thinks. I think it's just likely that this is a new-ish restriction, and that previously "Allah" was allowed. Old monickers/logins etc. are just grandfathered.

Posted by: Ace at 11:17 AM | Comments (19)
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Worker shortages looms.

NYT sub-hed: Major Corporations, Social Workers Hardest Hit

A new survey finds shortages of qualified workers are problems in the U.S. and around the world.

The employment firm Manpower Inc. surveyed 33,000 employers in 23 countries and found that 44 percent of U.S. employers and 40 percent worldwide are having trouble filling positions because of a lack of suitable talent.

Well, they'll just have to train them, won't they?

Thanks to SWOOD.

And, even better:

Leading Economic Indicators Jump to Record High in January

A key forecasting gauge of the U.S. economy posted its biggest jump in seven months in January, rising to a record in a good sign for second-quarter growth, the Conference Board said on Tuesday.

The 1.1 percent gain in the index of leading economic indicators marked the fourth straight monthly rise, the private New York-based research firm said. It trounced financial market expectations of a 0.6 percent climb and followed an upwardly revised 0.3 percent increase in December.

The leading index, which measures a basket of economic indicators ranging from unemployment benefit claims to building permits, is intended to forecast economic trends up to six months ahead.

...

Many economists are expecting rebuilding efforts in the hurricane-hit U.S. Gulf region to give economic growth a fillip in the next few months.

...

The January surge in the index matched a 1.1 percent increase logged in June 2005, the private research group said.

The coincident index, a barometer of current economic activity, rose for a fifth straight month, climbing 0.2 percent after rising 0.2 percent in December. The lagging index gained 0.7 percent after a 0.1 percent December dip.

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (17)
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He's in fine, angry form. Why is he able to refrain from losing his shit when he's angry when Andrew Sullivan isn't?

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let's be sure we haven't hurt the vandals' feelings.

And it's happening here, too, but more subtly:

The silky ones may be more of a problem in the long term than the flagrantly vicious and crazy ones. Within a short while—this is a warning—the shady term "Islamophobia" is going to be smuggled through our customs. Anyone accused of it will be politely but firmly instructed to shut up, and to forfeit the constitutional right to criticize religion. By definition, anyone accused in this way will also be implicitly guilty. Thus the "soft" censorship will triumph, not from any merit in its argument, but from its association with the "hard" censorship that we have seen being imposed over the past weeks. A report ($$) in the New York Times of Feb. 13 was as carefully neutral as could be but nonetheless conveyed the sense of menace. "American Muslim leaders," we were told, are more canny. They have "managed to build effective organizations and achieve greater integration, acceptance and economic success than their brethren in Europe have. They portray the cartoons as a part of a wave of global Islamophobia and have encouraged Muslim groups in Europe to use the same term." In other words, they are leveraging worldwide Islamic violence to drop a discreet message into the American discourse.

If you bend to another's will out of fear of violence, are you still free?

Posted by: Ace at 10:35 AM | Comments (31)
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Maybe ABC's translation of the tapes was accurate after all:

That's where his friend's dream came in. "I got on the phone with a good friend I haven't talked to in 15 years. And I just told her what was going on, and she cut me off and said, 'You know, I had a dream about two years ago.' And then she described a location. She didn't know what it was, she just knew it was important to somebody. She drew a picture of this, and it was the exact angle of this location, as a power generation station on the Tigris River. It had two inlets and two outlets, exactly in her picture, and she said, 'There was water flowing into this house, and there was something going on downstairs, and I was standing there and no one knew I was there' — this is in her dream — 'and there was a lot of activity going on, but they didn't know I was there.' And she had no idea, I didn't tell her anything. And right as I was trying to decide what to do with this, she gives me this."

In the end, it all seemed to fit a Biblical pattern. "So the dream — look in the Bible," Tierney said. "There were dreams." Tierney gave the information to UNMOVIC, which, he said, did not adequately pursue it.

Faith-based intelligence analysis, with the occasional prophetic dream for good measure. It does not speak well for his credibility.

Posted by: Ace at 10:18 AM | Comments (19)
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As do Governors... and Hillary!

Critics have noted that some of the 9/11 hijackers used the UAE as an operational and financial base. In addition, they contend the UAE was an important transfer point for shipments of smuggled nuclear components sent to Iran, North Korea and Libya by a Pakistani scientist.

Still not convinced? Well how about the fact that Jimmy Carter supports the deal?

The Bush administration got support Monday from former President Carter, a Democrat and frequent critic of the administration.

"My presumption is, and my belief is, that the president and his secretary of state and the Defense Department and others have adequately cleared the Dubai government organization to manage these ports," Carter told CNN. "I don't think there's any particular threat to our security."

More...

Real Clear Politics:

It feels a bit like a rerun of the Harriet Miers nomination where the administration dug its heels despite knowing within hours it had made a grave mistake. The port sale is potentially even more damaging politically to the president because it strikes at one of his few remaining core political assets: the public's perception of Bush as an aggressive fighter of terrorism and staunch defender of America.

The other political problem? It's f'n' crazy.

How bad is it? It's this bad: Charles Shumer supports paying Halliburton -- HALLIBURTON! -- to run the ports over the UAE company.

That's kind of like Optimus Prime hiring the Decepticons to build him a backyard deck.

More at the Blogometer.

Posted by: Ace at 09:04 AM | Comments (118)
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Just memorize this sucker and you can go on all the cable talk shows and impress your friends.

Posted by: Ace at 08:52 AM | Comments (7)
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