3-country Tour

Am off on a 3-country swing through Hurricane Alley - from Jamaica to the Caymans and Mexico. I checked the weather -- all are balmy compared to our rain, snow and COLD.

If all goes as planned the Cayman stop will include a submarine tour, something I have never done. It's been a extraordinarily busy year and this is a much needed break as well.

I'll try to post updates along the way. This is also a test of my relatively new Blackberry Storm, which is supposed to be an international phone.

Film of Wright's First Flight - Snow in Houston

A friend sent me this link to discovered video of the Wright Brothers first flight. I've attached her comments and the link - before I head out today for a project that must go on even in a rare Houston snow...

WRIGHT BROS. 1909 Film clip from the Austrian archives about the Wright Brothers demonstrating their plane in Italy in 1909. What is even more fantastic is there was an on-board camera on the Wright plane and the last part of this film shows it. Wilbur Wright is at the controls on both of the flights. It's a GREAT video considering it is 100 years old and the quality/weight of the equipment of that day. This film clip is fascinating and in very good condition for its age being as it shows the Wright Bros demonstrating the Flyer to a group of European officers and officials in 1909. Only runs for 4 minutes. The shots of the plane in flight are the best I have ever seen of this machine showing a degree of speed and smoothness I did not think would have been possible. Excellent starting sequence with the linen covered props and easy start but the outstanding sequence being the take-off along the rail. You can't see the actual weight drop to pull it along the rail but in some shots you see the tower. The small piece of string on the forward elevon was put there by the Wrights to ascertain degree of side slip as you are aware the plane basically turned flat, and although they eventually put in a form of wing warping it was always a difficult plane to handle in turns, so they kept it as flat as possible because any side slip over a certain angle was unrecoverable. This was the two seat version as you can see and designed for a hopeful military use. It could only fly in very calm conditions. The in-flight shots were something else again and possibly the earliest aerial movie shots ever taken. When you think he had to fly the plane and also hand crank the camera, I think it must have been fixed in position as the camera stays motionless and in any case cameras were heavy in those times and the plane had little spare capacity but I could be wrong. Note the take off ramp. Loved the ancient Italian Roman ruins in the final shots the approach speed was very slow in deed. When you get to the site, just double click on the picture of the flying machine, it loads automatically. The other vintage videos are entertaining, too.

http://www.europafilmtreasures.eu/PY/322/see-the-film-wilbur_wright_and_his_flying_machine'

Sunday Seabrook Sunrise

Beautiful sunrise this morning over Clear Lake - these colors lasted only a few minutes.

Enjoy.

Thanksgiving Sunrise on Clear Lake

Today's Thanksgiving sunrise was nice to see, after a few days of cold and rain! It looks like a beautiful day for people to get together with family.

The past week I have felt like a fighter pilot, shooting down the enemy left and right. Only in this case, my weapon was a Windex sprayer and the enemy was a gang of fruit flies that somehow came in uninvited in some bananas. Did you know that one female fruit fly can lay 500 eggs? Insecticide doesn't seem to bother them, but Windex knocks em down and you end up accidentally (or incidentally) doing a lot of cleaning in the process!

The Internet was a source of knowledge on how to get rid of them. You get some plastic containers, put a small hole in the center of the lid, fill it with cider vinegar - and they will crawl in to get the cider and not figure out how to get out! At one point, the containers seemed to have thousands of tiny bodies floating around. Now they are mostly empty but a few hangers-on keep buzzing me. That's when I started carrying a Windex sprayer to shoot them down.

Yikes, these little guys are harder to get rid off than politicians and talk show know-it- alls buzzing around and being irritating!

But it's Thanksgiving and I'm grateful that we will be spared more TV political ads soon, and that the year was pretty good for us in Houston -- compared to many other places -- with or without fruit flies!

Afghan Solution: Build a Trans-Asia Highway with a McDonalds at Every Exit

Any President trying to “fix” Afghanistan is doomed -- by geography and culture -- unless a novel new approach is taken. Iraq is civilized compared to wild Afghanistan, where people live in hundreds of remote isolated valleys with no way to go anywhere without facing broken axles.

Kabul might as well be on the moon for these isolated people. This isolation is perfect for the bands of Taliban who can set up shop without concern that the Afghan police will ever be able to reach them. Imagine foreign troops trying to capture or kill our own rebels in America’s mountainous west and how difficult that would be.

Put a million troops on the ground if you want, but if the people don’t have jobs -- and an easy way to get from A to B -- the whole exercise is doomed to failure along with the billions spent. Farmers can’t sell to markets if they don’t have roads.

Nothing has worked since 2001 because we have had a military focus instead of a civilian development focus supported by the military. But there is a solution that could worked. It worked well in America the last century.

Solution? The only solution is to find a way for remote peoples in Afghanistan to travel and create jobs. The best way to do that is to take a page from America’s past – and create a Trans-Asia highway that cuts through Afghanistan and connects the country’s transport system together. The jobs would include everything from construction to long term jobs working in all the gas stations and McDonald’s built along the highway selling kabobs and tourist maps of Tora Bora. Farmers could then get crops other than poppies to the market.

Just see if the Taliban can possibly compete with 7-11 convenience stores and color HD TV’s! And if the Trans-Asia highway also connects to the remote badlands of Pakistan -- where Al Qaida is hiding out -- it will lose its nuclear sanctuary to Jack in the Box and WalMart with their shopper specials. Nothing could be more hideous to Osama bin Laden than men and women shopping together at the Swat Valley Macy’s.

Think about it Mr. President..

Biggest Economic Loser? Not the U.S.

What recession?

The recession that started in 2007 ended in July or August 2009, according to Anirban Basu, the national economist for the Associated Builders and Contractors organization. He gave a speech last week with some dry humor and interesting facts that Americans should know to make them feel better about the situation.

In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, unemployment stood at 25%. We are at 10% and Mr. Basu thinks it should peak at 11% – less than half of what happened seventy years ago. (Historic fact: The only way the U.S. got out of the 25% unemployment hole was FDR’s spending on things like roads and dams (and WWII, which spurred production). Without the stimulus spending going on now, after the entire economy locked up last year, we could have had come much closer to the unemployment pain that was felt in the Great Depression.

Who is today’s biggest loser? Not the U.S. is the short answer. The U.S. economy is down only 2.7%. Russia’s and Mexico’s economies are down over 7%! Japan’s is DOWN 5%, over twice our decline.
On the other hand, China’s economy is UP 8% and India’s is UP over 5% despite the global meltdown. Even Africa is UP 2%.

The two best job sectors in the U.S. right now are education and health care – both are adding jobs.

But that doesn’t mean we are “out of the woods.” According to Mr. Basu, we need to expand in the three “E’s” to stay ahead – energy, education and exports. That means we need to develop more efficient green technologies, sell more products overseas and produce more scientists and engineers-- instead of letting 50% of our high school kids drop out.

We are an example of the green tech revolution. My company’s sales increased over 500% from last year. I attribute that to it being a “green” energy saving/security technology (and a lot of marketing too). The trend looks good for next year, 2010, because saving energy is the key to our future and pays for itself over time. So is adding security to minimize damages from future storms or from break-ins.

Mr. Basu says that residential construction is accelerating in much of the U.S. (including here in Houston where home prices actually rose slightly in 2009, as it did in a few select markets). The first-time buyer tax credit is helping keep the housing market from falling, and a lot of jobs with it.

So, don’t feel bad – the economy is much worse if you are living in Russia, Mexico or Japan.

But China is still on a roll, producing those engineers and building a solar array that covers 25 square miles of Mongolia! It is building wind turbines. It is going to kick out butt if we just stay glued to the TV watching sports. We are producing “reality” shows that have nothing to do with reality and won’t give us the skills and technology needed to keep us in the lead in the 21st Century.

Water on the Moon...Will Obama Be a JFK With a Space Vision, or not?

NASA has discovered that the MOON has water - that makes a BIG difference since the cost of transporting water into space is prohibitive. Now we can have crews that use existing water on the moon for everything from drinking to hydrogen and oxygen.

Now the question is whether President Obama has the JFK vision or not. For a measly $3 billion/year (when we are spending over $700 billion on one stimulus package that blacktops roads but little else), NASA could get American back on the moon by 2020. JFK got us from test tubes to micro-circuits with his vision. Without it, we'd still be using computers the size of rooms.

We'll see if Obama has the JFK touch or not. If he has real vision, then this is a no-brainer decision. We have spent $10 billion a MONTH on places like Iraq that generate ZERO technology advances for our future. It is the Chinese and even the Europeans who are pushing ahead in space --without us.

Our future relies on pushing the space age technology frontier. We won't do that with GM cars that guzzle gas and are poorly made. We won't do it without a manned mission to the moon and beyond.

Now it is up to President Obama to do a real JFK "vision thing" and get us to a leadership position on the next high ground - in space. If you agree, let your voice be heard - or the era of American technical leadership is OVER.