Those zany Swedes! Wow, knitting is times-consuming! It must be nice to have that kind of time to screw around, huh?

I guess stuff like this is what people do in a socialized society where they are taxed like mad for earning money and the government takes care of all their "needs". The good side is that the "grafitti" is easy to remove and pitch when it gets nasty. Wacky stuff (and neat!)

The Drew Barrymore image is funny. It looks like one artist did the left side of her face whilst another did the right. The eye size, placement, cheeks, and hair are quite different.

Hah! Let's hope that this Belgian force doesn't surrender to these invaders as quickly as Leopold III did to the Nazis. His quickness to throw in the towel without consulting his Allies really put the British Expeditionary Force in a bind.

Bloody stupid. While it's there, the USB volatge output is supposed to be a LOW power source -- it's intended to run varied computer accessories. A soda can chiller is not in any way connected to computer function. This would much more sensibly be plugged into a wall (or cigarette lighter). It's just asking for trouble by loading up the USB power load. How much is that new motherboard going to cost?

Total BS. WHen you read something like that, you really have to question everything else that comes from the same writer/source.

Homework is fine. I'm 40 and had *lots* of homework (book reports, math, sentence diagraming, science projects, etc.) all through gradeschool and highschool. Granted, I attended Catholic schools the whole time -- it's quite possible that the kids in the government schools at that time did not have to much work. That gave them more time to watch Match Game and play Atari I guess.

Well, I'd like to think that the government schools woke up and started pushing the kids a little harder. I doubt this is the case though as they seem to have mostly eliminated the system of trackinig kids according to their abilities and now lump everyone together and teach to the lowest common denominator. So, it wouldn't surprise me if the current homework is valueless time-eating drivel.

I guess I would need to see the specific assignments to decide if they were worthless busywork or something valuable. The curricula today are rife with a lot of krap and pretty low on the 3 Rs. My kudos to the prior commenters who have taken the huge sacrifices to homeschool their kids. The government schools are (largely... yes, there are excepts) a disaster.

Gerry raises a good point about the potential energy involved in carrying around a lot of compressed air in a high speed vehicle. The storage systems (tanks, lines, etc.) need to be VERY robust (which add mass and suck up useful range).

Others raised issues with the energy required to compress air. This is frequently neglected, but is NOT trivial for air as it is not trivial for systems which compress natural gas to 3000 - 5000 psig for natural gas vehicles. Adding the electricity cost is essential! It seems the article is saying that $2.00 will get you 125 miles range. That implies a public (not home) high pressure dispensing and thus *should* have electricity cost already included... but be wary. The numbers sound fairly attractive, but I'd need more details to do the energy analysis.

One thing people have missed is that there is a big thermodynamic problem with compressing a gas into a tank and then running off the accumulated pressure. The compressed gas gets (Boyle's Law) quite a lot hotter as it is compressed. Unless the tank is very well insulated, as it loses this heat and drops back to room temperature, you lose pressure (and range) -- a big loss of energy. These systems need to take great pains to conserve the enthalpy of the compressed air. That's a major reason why to date, there have been no practical public highway compressed air vehicles. They are more feasible for short term / short range use on scooters, fork trucks, etc. inside large factories (no emissions inside the building). In that application they are easily "charged up" and the slower travel speeds mitigates the need for serious crash protection. The fairly short time (hours, not many days) between recharges reduces the need for exotic tank insulation schemes.

I think it's real. Apparently, he is pretty well known within the genre, and he created this with a lot of people around during the process AND the finished product can be examined.

If you read the guy's writeup, he says that the whole point of the thing was to test the limits of his abilities (after he used its beginning as a tool for training his students in a seminar). It's apparently *not* his normal deal to repaint photographs of models. Rather, it is to realistically paint things that cannot be easily photographed (like the jet fighter at near ground-level).

That one bat has nads so large, it's amazing it can fly.

This is sweet. I wound up buying some wheels for my Saab from some guy on a Saab forum (hours away) and we had to guess at a shopping plaza to meet at partway. This would have been a nice help.

How long do you think Brancusi devoted to this "masterpiece" of his:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Brancusi-Torso.jpg
Compare that to anything Bernini created.

I'll give the excuse makers a little latitude when they say "art can't be compared" and "it is all subjective". That's true to a point, but eventually krap is krap. There are krappy books, krappy movies, krappy TV shows, krappy car designs, krappy architecture, and YES, krappy art. Don't be afraid to call a spade a spade.

Here's another winner: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/art/20th/painting/malevich1.jpg
To be fair, much of Malevich's stuff isn't quite so awful. But it is a good example of "you just don't understand it" trash that litters the MoMA and another such museums, gifts of the wealthy and gullible. Lots of people are afraid to say the emperor is naked, but I am not.

Sorry, but there is krap and this is krap.

It's a cool chart, but yeah, there are a lot of countries missing, including some REALLY big population ones like Red China, India, and Russia.

We want more!

You don't think the shift from realism to abstraction could have just a little to do with abstraction being available to much broader numbers of artists?

Realism took a high level of technical skill. Any community college sculpting class could provide me with a dozen "sculptors" capable of reproducing "The Kiss". Granted, they might not have the artistic inspiration that Brancusi had to make it in the first place, but the level of technical skill in the piece is very low.

Great art should require BOTH artistic inspiration and a high level of technical skill. Donatello had both. At most, Brancusi had the former alone. It's as laughable as comparing Warhol & Banksy to Vermeer & Botticelli.

Yeah, the chicks turned out pretty hot. It's obvious that they've been used to attention their whole lives though -- it explains them all (except 1) returning home to mooch off their poor parents. You're grown up! Leave! Give your parents some peace! If you can't take care of yourselves, go find husbands!

What is most amusing about this account is that Sacagawea is presented as Lewis really considered her: "one of the wives of Charbono (Toussaint Charbonneau)". She is not identified by name, nor described as the great guide & leader that she is mythologized into today in politically correct gradeschool textbooks. No doubt that her actions did contibute to the success of the expedition - Clark himself later expresses his gratitude for her presence, but the PC movement has transformed her from a minor player in a large expedition into one of the major players, and even its saviour.

Merriweather Lewis considers her one of Charbonneau's wives. Wikipedia identifies him as *Sacagawea's husband*. Considering Lewis was a little closer to the action, I think we know where the real truth lies.