Autopsis

RTW 1938 Nimbus with sidecar

I visited our local BMW/Triumph dealer, Lone Star, today to test ride the Triumphs on the Factory Tour.

I’m slowly trying to adapt and adjust back into American culture. I’m using riding as one of the tools to accomplish that task. I rode the Bonneville SE. It was fun, but I think I’d go for the T100 to gain a little peg to seat room.

Anyway, I was chatting with a rider in the dealership when I was tracked down by a guy asking if I was the owner of the GS with all the flags on the pannier boxes. He related that he was accompanying some friends during the U.S. portion of their Round the World (RTW) trip. He thought I’d be interested in their trip and might be able to give them some advice on places we’d been and they were headed.

I wandered out to the parking lot and met Klaus Ulvestad and his 1938 Nimbus, its sidecar, and all 22 of its horsepower.

A man after my own true heart.

Klaus and his riding partner started in Norway one year ago (April 2009) and crossed Europe, Russia, Siberia, Mongolia, South Korea and the northern tier of the U.S. They crossed that northern tier, from Seattle to New York, in December, January and February. My take was that they don’t teach the details of U.S. weather in Norway. Klaus said, “We were very lucky on the weather.” Just more of that classic Norwegian humor for you.

So, here you have two guys, each on their very own 70 year old motorcycle and sidecar, traveling around the world on next to no money.

The good news is, this is really, really cool.

The bad news is, you now have officially zero excuses for not following your dreams and doing this yourselves.

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Doug’s Tip Makes Engadget – the D620 Story

Steph was on TV on Wednesday and I get a mention on Engadget on Friday. Quite a week for us.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/02/dell-latitude-e6410-e6510-finally-make-it-to-us/

(click on any photo for larger size)

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Tags: D620, Dell, E6410, E6510, engadget, i7, laptop, Latitude, photos, rendering, Travel, video

Posted in Gear, Photography, Sci / Tech, Travel | 1 Comment »

Science in Four Panels

Tags: research, science

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Steph’s Dr. Oz Video

Video clips of Steph’s segment on the Dr. Oz show:

Steph’s portion only: http://www.hackneys.com/video/droz-steph.wmv

Entire segment: http://www.hackneys.com/video/droz-full-segment.wmv

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Steph’s Big Leap

Due to formatting requirements I needed to produce this post in PDF format.

Please click here for the post: http://www.hackneys.com/docs/stephs-big-leap.pdf

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Circles in Circles

Much of the story of humans and groups of humans, as well as the challenges that face America, can be told with circles.

The core of the story is an individual.

The first unit of human organization is the family.

The next unit of human organization is tribe.

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Tags: colonialism, family, partisanship, polarization, tribe

Posted in Cultures, Outside the Fishbowl, US Politics | 2 Comments »

What We Can Afford

During America’s brief tenure atop the world’s pecking order between the end of WWII and the beginning of the current era, the country enjoyed an unprecedented run of prosperity and abundance. The country was so successful while producing copious wealth and endless opportunity, it could afford to take on costs and burdens that would have crippled any other country in the world.

As Europe slowly rebuilt from the ashes of war, the Islamic empires continued their long slumber, India scuffled through its often chaotic early democracy, Latin America swung wildly from far-right to far-left despots and China suffered unspeakable suffering under Maoist extremes, the United States bobbed cheerily along the sunny seas of prosperity.

During this time, the U.S. took on cost after cost, burden after burden, both domestically and internationally. From supporting the world’s largest, most expensive military, to feeding internal parasites that sucked economic vitality like a lamprey eel, America endured all the costs and burdens, yet kept on growing.

Once the Soviet Union fell, the United States stood well and truly alone atop the world, the sole superpower, capable, so the story went, of doing whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted, whenever it wanted.

During the decades from the end of WWII to the end of the century, the American population came to expect endless growth, ever-increasing prosperity, an always better life for their children and unchallenged global precedence.

Today, just 10 years into the new century, all of those expectations, and all of their accompanying assumptions, are being challenged. America is no longer the unchallenged global leader. America’s world standing and reputation have been severely dented. America’s prosperity has stopped, and in fact reversed, in the most severe downturn since the great depression. For the first time ever in its long history of endless optimism, a majority of Americans think their children will have a worse life than they did. And if that wasn’t enough, America can no longer afford many of the costs and burdens it currently bears financially, socially and politically.

There are many ways to decide what can be done to restore American prosperity and ensure a better life for our children and grandchildren. As a nation and as individuals, we can make those choices by any number of criteria. I believe the way forward consists of a very simple test: we can only keep what we can afford.

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Ranking America

The United States of America enjoys many riches, inherent capabilities and positive attributes, as well as shortcomings, unresolved issues and a converging set of existential threats.

The challenge is to be aware of the upsides of the United States without becoming defiantly hostile to any discussion of specific shortcomings or ways the U.S. could improve, or, conversely, becoming so immersed and versed in America’s downsides as to become blind to the unique positive capabilities, characteristics and opportunities the U.S. offers.

When you live in the United States, it often seems as if the U.S. is either all bad or all good depending on which political party is in power and which talk radio station, screaming cable channel or hyper-partisan web site or publication you are feeding into your head at the moment.

In addition, the United States has a long cultural history of and peculiar cultural affection for jeremiads, mournful and often bitter lamentations about the state of society and government. If you spend any time exposing yourself to discussion or media concerning public or foreign policy, it won’t be long before you come across one form of jeremiad or another predicting the imminent doom of the country, accompanied by a long list of complaints and depressing statistics. However, as they say about paranoia, just because a jeremiad shouts that the sky is falling doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The challenge is to sort out the real threats from the partisan fueled hyperbole and opponent bashing.

Faced with so much hyper-partisan ideology and agenda-advancing content, it can be difficult to establish and maintain an assessment of where the country actually is relative to the rest of the world, much less where it needs to go.

Here are some objective facts to help achieve that goal.

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Tags: airports, cell phone, exports, fixed investment, GDP, GDP per capita, Gini, gross domestic product, household income, imports, infant mortality, innovation, international aid, internet hosts, life expectancy, metric, military spending, mobile phone, movies, oil consumption, oil production, public debt, railways, roadways, telephone lines, top 100 software companies, top 500 businesses, universities, weights and measures

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A Perfect Storm

“…our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  Now we are … testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” – Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

*******

The United States of America faces an unprecedented combination of challenges in the coming decade. Bankrupt finances, political extremist and ideologues, government gridlock, a decaying infrastructure, dependence on foreign oil, declining education standards and results, loss of credible information sources, public health and geopolitical decline relative to rising powers all promise to change the very nature of life as we know it. 

Consider the following list of facts, and also consider the implications of these facts, which will all combine in the next ten years.

(click for larger image)

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Tags: Congress, education, federal budget, Geopolitics, government, health care, information, leadership

Posted in Cultures, Econ / Finance, Geopolitics, Outside the Fishbowl, US Politics, health care reform | 1 Comment »

The Nature of Change

More than 9 out of 10 patients do not change their lifestyles in response to their doctor’s recommendations.

More than 70 percent of corporate change efforts fail.

Humans hate change.

It’s a simple fact of life. There isn’t any easy way around it. In general, humans hate change.

That rule extends beyond individuals into groups of humans: families, tribes, organizations, companies, communities and nations. Humans hate change.

As individuals and groups, we tend to get locked into a way of doing things, a set of perceptions and a set of expectations. Anything that forces us to change anything about what we consider normal is usually resisted.

Even in the face of overwhelming evidence for the need for change, we will resist change. For example, the majority of people who suffer heart attacks do not make long term changes in their lifestyles to eliminate or limit factors that contribute to heart disease. In other words, even when it’s a matter of life and death, humans hate change so much they won’t change even to save their own lives.

There are university degree programs in change management; multiple national and global professional associations of practicing change management consultants; countless thousands of trained, certified and degreed change management practitioners and a cornucopia of books, videos, workshops and tutorials on implementing change. In spite of all this learning and all these resources, there has been relatively little improvement in change rates in humans or groups of humans.

Why is this so?

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Tags: change, change cycle, change management, human change, the curse of success

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