Hydrogen Cars: The Hover Car of the New Millenium?
I happened to watch this Nova Science Now episode, and it seemed like a really cool show. One of the topics they had was powering cars with hydrogen, and how impractical that is because it requires pure hydrogen which is rare and difficult to acquire. Also, hydrogen tanks in cars are highly impractical because of the difficulty of compressing enough of the gas to fuel a vehicle without having to refuel every fifty miles. So I was thinking that the promise of practical hydrogen cars in our lifetime is like the promise of hover cars fifty years ago.
Also, I was reading an article in Smithsonian magazine that was sort of about "the First Thanksgiving," but really more explaining the whole situation of coastal Native Americans around that time, and the fact that there was more luck than planning on the Pilgrims' side and the conscious decisions of the natives to allow them to stay strategically, not just ignorant, kind-hearted acceptance. But something I found personally amusing about the article was the parallels I saw between the Americans of the time and the Japanese. The Americans would trade with the Europeans, but they would not allow them to stay long or explore the area. Also, because this was around the Massachusetts Bay area and Cape Cod, right on the eastern edge of the continent, they called themselves the People of the Dawn, or something like that--they believed themselves to have some kind of mystical connection with the rising sun or something. (There might also have been some sort of "the gods creating them first of all people" myth--that seems pretty common, though.) And, lastly, they were meticulously hygenic people, and some guy back in the seventeenth century recorded how the Americans were apalled by the fact that Europeans had hankerchiefs--pretty pieces of white linen where they cherished and carried around their snot instead of throwing it away. All these things are pretty much analogous to random little facts I know about the Japanese.
Also, I was reading an article in Smithsonian magazine that was sort of about "the First Thanksgiving," but really more explaining the whole situation of coastal Native Americans around that time, and the fact that there was more luck than planning on the Pilgrims' side and the conscious decisions of the natives to allow them to stay strategically, not just ignorant, kind-hearted acceptance. But something I found personally amusing about the article was the parallels I saw between the Americans of the time and the Japanese. The Americans would trade with the Europeans, but they would not allow them to stay long or explore the area. Also, because this was around the Massachusetts Bay area and Cape Cod, right on the eastern edge of the continent, they called themselves the People of the Dawn, or something like that--they believed themselves to have some kind of mystical connection with the rising sun or something. (There might also have been some sort of "the gods creating them first of all people" myth--that seems pretty common, though.) And, lastly, they were meticulously hygenic people, and some guy back in the seventeenth century recorded how the Americans were apalled by the fact that Europeans had hankerchiefs--pretty pieces of white linen where they cherished and carried around their snot instead of throwing it away. All these things are pretty much analogous to random little facts I know about the Japanese.