Charging Ahead

New EV From Tata

The Tata Indica Vista EV

Looking at Gizmag this morning, I found an article about a new addition to the Tata motors line up. You may recall that Tata is the company in India that produces the car that runs on air, as well as a gas powered car that sells for about $2,500 new. Here is a link to past Phil's Place posts where I mention Tata; Tata Posts

The new Tata EV has a range of about 150 miles, and is expected to cost $9,000.

Tata is India’s largest automotive company with revenues of US$20 billion in 2009-10. Apart from its recent acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover, Tata is also the world's fourth largest truck manufacturer and the world’s second largest bus manufacturer.

Media Meteorological Misinformation Mayhem

David Icke even had this fake official scientific chart on his website.

Gullible people took this story at face value, all over the world, except the Chinese state run press. They took the time to fact check and didn't publish this fake story.

I Googled 'Europes worst winter in 1,000 years' and got 34,900 results. That's cable and broadcast news reports, newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs, and radio programs that perpetuated this fabrication.

Realclimate.org tracked down the source of this example of erroneous sensationalism;

Europe Faces Coldest Winter In 1,000 Years
This claim circulates in the internet and in many mainstream media as well: Scientists have allegedly predicted the coldest winter in 1,000 years for Europe. What is behind it? Nothing – no scientist has predicted anything like it. A Polish tabloid made up the story. An interesting lesson about today´s media.
Read the Chilling Story

Civil War Photos

Edwin Chamberlain of Company G, 11th New Hampshire Infantry Regiment in sergeant's uniform with guitar.

The Library Of Congress has posted hundreds of recently acquired images from the civil war, on Flicker. I was interested to see that this soldier was posing with a guitar. Whether it was his or a studio prop is hard to tell. He is not holding a chord with his left hand, unless it's a beginners G, but his right hand is in position for finger picking. I wonder if the guitar survived?

Speaking of the Library of Congress, I went there yesterday to read more of the Wikileaks documents, and access was blocked to all things Wikileaks. This is the first time that I know of, where the LOC has denied access to previously published material. I sent them this comment;

"It is kind of sad. Wikileaks showed that the emperor had no clothes, and to appear patriotic, we must pretend that we didn’t see the naked truth.
Not only that, but there are some people who want to punish the kid for pointing out the emperors indecent exposure."

Here In Redding

Using iPhoto and Picasa to edit images taken with my Sanyo T1060. 12/4/10

I left the Lumix TZ1 at John's violin shop Friday afternoon. He took it home with him so I would be able to drop by his house and pick it up this weekend. I had planned to do that sometime Saturday afternoon, but when I was in town taking care of some business, and going to the library, I watched several near misses in the holiday traffic. I guess some of the drivers had sugar plums dancing in their heads because they sure weren't thinking about the other cars on the roads as they wandered willy nilly, without noticing lane markings or adjacent vehicles. Getting back home unscathed seemed the appropriate course to follow, so I decided that the Lumix could wait until Monday when John will be at his shop. It's less than a block from here.

Besides, I said to myself, I have 3 other cameras that I rarely use. So, I took a few pictures with the 10 megapixel Sanyo. I was reminded why the Lumix thrills me so. The Lumix TZ1 produces images that don't require a lot of fiddling and editing to look the way I like them to. The Sanyo is a good camera, but it's not magical like the Lumix. I tried editing the Sanyo images in both iPhoto and Picasa without much satisfaction. The pumpkin pie and ice cream was much better than it looks in the Sanyo images.

Today's Relatively Appropriate Song;




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