In ye olden times, nobles (usually men) used peasants (usually nubile young girls) to warm the sheets before going to bed. The idea has returned to at least one hotel in London, although the connotations aren’t quite as risqué:

Florence Eavis, Holiday Inn spokeswoman told Reuters that the "innovative" bed-warming method was a response to Britain’s recent cold weather and marked the launch of 3,200 new Holiday Inns worldwide.

She could not explain why the beds were not being warmed by hot water bottles or electric-blankets, but admitted the human method was quirky.

The freezing temperatures that have evidently resulted from man-made global warming now leads to “quirky” behavior. Yeah, I get that.

We’ve been waiting forty one years for the future. Back in November of 1968, Popular Science predicted that we would be happily flying personal vehicles by 2008:

IT’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated.

In the decades since then, we’ve been kept on tenterhooks with regular reports from Moller International, which claims to have “developed the first and only feasible, personally affordable, personal vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicle the world has ever seen.”

Indeed, many a boyhood hour were spent dreaming of the freedom I would one day enjoy with the ability to go wherever I wished at hundreds of miles per hour. No longer would family reunions happen so rarely, no more would I have to put off that trip to Yosemite, no more excuses for not getting out of the house on the weekend because there’s no place to go.

But like so many boyhood dream, this one is finally, irrevocably being put to death.

According to the latest quarterly report for Moller International, the company has an accumulated deficit of over $45 million and a working capital deficit of over $11 million. Furthermore:

There is no assurance that MI will continue to receive funding from shareholders in the future or that funds from other sources will be sufficient to provide MI with the capital needed to continue as a going concern.

The Register also reports, “It also appears that Dr Moller himself has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.”

Now that is depressing. What’s next? Someone going to tell me that the nanomachines that are supposed to rotor-rooter my arteries is a fantasy as well? Damnit, I’m going to have to start eating healthy, aren’t I?

HT to non-blogging Advised by Wolves.

Technorati Tags: Moller International Inc., Flying Cars

Japanese news source Akihabara News reports that Pioneer is no longer making Laser Disk players, putting the final nail in the coffin of that particular media.

Yep, my Laser Disk as well as my DVD players are obsolete – and I don’t even own a Blu-ray yet. Man, I used to be so on top of things . . .

In November of 1968, Mechanix Illustrated asked, "What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?" It was only forty years ago, but they had some pretty lofty ideas:

IT’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper, which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated.

Can you imagine trusting your life at 250 mph to a public computer network? I hope it isn’t Windows based!

The article is pretty funny, but my favorite bit is at the end:

No need to worry about failing memory or intelligence either. The intelligence pill is another 21st century commodity. Slow learners or people struck with forgetful-ness are given pills which increase the production of enzymes controlling production of the chemicals known to control learning and memory. Everyone is able to use his full mental potential.

Anyone who has experienced a "senior moment" would appreciate memory pills. On the other hand, an intelligence pill should would make politics awfully dull. Just imagine a world without socialists!

It’s hard to get coverage when your World Cup is taking place at the same time as the Olympics, but AlphaWife and I just finished watching four hours of muscle rending excitement of the 2008 Professional Bull Riding World Cup. Team USA came from behind in round three to upset the Canadians (yes, Canadians) and win it all.

Standings after all four rounds:

USA	878 points
Canada	773.25 points
Brazil	773 points
Mexico	497.25 points
Australia	262.5 points

USA favorite Justin McBride (reigning PBR World Champion) and Brazilian Adriano Moraes (3 time PBR World Champion) were just incredible to watch.

The annual contest to write the worst opening sentence for an imaginary novel is over and the results are in. The winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest wrote a nauseating comparison of a couple’s love to the streets of New York City to secure the $250 grand prize.

You can read the top entries in each category here. A few of my favorites:

Grand Prize Runner-Up

"Hmm . . ." thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the veranda past the bright white patio to the cerulean sea beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang, where splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a thousand tiny bells, where great gray whales bellowed and the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of sequins on the flyfish’s bow ties, "time to get my meds checked."

Andrew Bowers

Spy Fiction Runner-Up

The KGB agent known only as the Spider, milk solids oozing from his mouth and nose, surveyed the spreading wound in his abdomen caused by the crushing blow of the low but deadly hassock and begged of his attacker to explain why she gone to the trouble of feeding him tainted milk products before effecting his assassination with such an inferior object as this ottoman, only to hear in his dying moments an escaping Miss Muffet of the MI-5 whisper, "it is my whey."

David Potter
Nagoya, Japan

Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mentions

Creeping slowly over the hill, the sun seemed to catch the small village nestled in the valley by surprise, which is a bit unusual really, as you’d think that something with a diameter of 865,000 miles and a surface temperature of 5780 degrees Kelvin, and which is more normally seen from 93,000,000 miles away, wouldn’t be able to creep anywhere, let alone catch anything by surprise.

Malcolm Booth
Brinsworth, Rotherham, U.K.

Watching Felicia walk into the bar was like watching two fat Rottweilers in yellow spandex and spike heels that had treed a scrawny bleach blond cat at the top of a skinny flagpole that for some reason had decided to sprout casaba melons.

Melissa Alliston
Coraopolis, PA

Now that’s bad writing, I don’t care who y’are.

A Romanian court has ordered a surgeon to pay a man $795,000 in compensation to a patient whose penis he accidentally severed during an operation.

I wonder how anyone "accidentally" hacks off a penis. AlphaWife says the compensation wasn’t enough.

You would think that swimming with sharks would rate as highly dangerous, and it probably does. But in terms of sheer number of injuries caused each year, what are the summertime activities that cause Americans to head for the emergency room?

Forbes has the answer, and it may surprise you:

Top 9 Most Hazardous Summer Activities

1. Hedge trimmers and other small garden power tools (that’s because they let women operate power tools in the flower garden. Just kidding honey!)
2. BBQ! Grills, stoves and equipment (hey, those big sticking forks are sharp!)
3. Trying to use those complicated tents, picnic equipment and beach umbrellas (seriously)
4. Air guns (you could put an eye out with that! Isn’t that a Christmas movie?)
5. Carnivals and amusement parks (evidently kids get hurt getting out of those big bouncy blow-ups because the forget how to walk on solid ground)
6. Lawn mowers (trying to start them causes back injuries? Dude, you’re old enough to afford an electric start!)
7. Trampolines! (Need I say more?)
8. Skateboards. (The heck with them falling, its when they run into innocent pedestrians that I get mad.)
9. Your friendly neighborhood Playground (But isn’t falling off of the monkey bars just a part of growing up?)

Magicians/showmen Penn & Teller took on the $30 billion a year weight loss industry in one episode of their Emmy-winning show, Bullshit! You can watch about ten minutes of this episode on YouTube, but my favorite part starts eight minutes in with an bit by Glenn A. Gaesser, Director of Kinesiology at the University of Virginia and author of Big Fat Lies:

Fat people who exercise regularly are better off health wise, and have lower mortality rates, than thin people who don’t.

Now there’s a truth that you won’t hear too often. That’s because weight loss has been so politicized that it is hard to ferret out the what is known from what is conjecture from what is outright lies designed to get you to buy more books, diet pills, exercise equipment, sports bras, and so on.

Salted throughout the show are examples of just how little we really know about health and how to improve it. Penn addresses this in a somewhat unique way:

500 years ago, the plague was blamed on the wrath of God. It wasn’t until 1847 that some Hungarian nut-doctor in Vienna suggested doctors wash their hands before delivering a baby. As late as the 19th century, cutting someone open and sucking out half of their blood was a standard medical practice. 25 years ago a couple of Australian doctors demonstrated that almost all peptic ulcers were not caused by stress, but by a bacteria. Some recent studies suggest – suggest – that obesity might also be caused by a bacteria. We don’t know for sure yet, though.

And our pal, Marvin Minsky, who pioneered artificial intelligence at MIT, says, "I don’t work out because we don’t know yet enough about the long-term effects. It appears that each hour of exercise may add two hours to one’s life – but I don’t know of any evidence that this leads to getting better ideas."

Better ideas, fuck! Yeah, and you can bet your fat ass what we’re doing today will look incredibly stupid in 30 years.

Exactly.

The bottom line is that activity level is more important than weight. If you have a "weight problem", my advice is to throw away the scale and join a baseball team. Or maybe just buy a Wii.

British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in his adopted home of Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

A Fall of Moondust was one of the first books I ever read, and it instilled a passion for Science Fiction that has yet to be extinguished.

Clarke was a prolific writer whose voice will be missed.