http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obvZ3gaHk9E

Note that you don’t necessarily get hit by the air bag and lose your glasses, but the deployment is much quicker than on the blog video. Test airbags are not covered in chalk, so the cameras can see what is going on.

.

And per it not being possible: That depends entirely on the car and age. There was a Japanese car that, when it first came out, was sensitive. You could whack the bumper with a baseball bat and set it off. Gang bangers liked to do that for a while “for kicks”. Mazda? Nissan? I forget… but a specific model and years.

FWIW, the Japanese bags have a softer deployment than the US bags. They are sized for smaller people and so are safer with children. The German bags are also safer, largely due to more money spent on well designed systems (some are even two stage, depending in a weight sensor under the seat). The head breaker models tended to be the US makers. Sized for a 200 lb or so man and as cheap as they could make work acceptably.

“McIntyre’s recent revelations about the majority of the hockey stick being based on a few tree cores in Yamal”

And yet elsewhere we have …

“There are many issues pertaining to the Mann hockey stick, but the Yamal controversy is not one of them.”

Huh? Do McIntyre’s findings about Yamal damage Mann’s Hockey Stick or not? And is the Hockey Stick relevant to what we do about global warming or is it perhaps best characterised as a somewhat tangential issue? Simply, is the Yamal kerfuffle really evidence that AGW is a fraud?

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“Check out the personnel and be afraid, be very afraid at the number of fresh-faced, just-out-of college “scientists”. This is the new generation, just out of the Nu-Labour education system and fed the Al Gore story, trained at UEA, Oxford, etc by the warmers. They also have brought in youngsters from other countries as well. They are qualified not in climate science, but in global warming mitigation, sociology, engineering, economics, etc.

http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/people/staff-list-with-pictures?page=3

Amplified from a post by DennisA (11:51:36) : Oct 14th emph added

Hahaha! Yep, that’s about how them planet-savers are!

A while back, I was reading a greenie forum where the subject was IQ. Seems a number of them figured (all on their own, of course) that IQ of yesterday is inferior to IQ of today, thus an old person with an average IQ back in their time is basically retarded today (well, retarded enough to destroy the planet, according to one (presumably) young greenie). If I could remember (uh-oh. Am I OLD then?) the site I would post it, but unfortunately my memory fails.

Anyway, one must wonder what kind of smarty-pants would ride in a car, when Gore knew how to grow wings and fly :-)

He drives an E_Z Go electric golf cart?

We are seeking rubber band driven or wind driven vehicles. Wind energy is far from green.

A prime example: the internet is a powerful tool, and yet the press does not pick up on the power:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091015/sc_afp/britaincanadaarcticclimateenvironmentscience

Depending on your standpoint (opinion) and knowledge of the facts, this is incontravertably biassed. But, of note are the following:

This is an (AFP) associate Free Press (?) piece. The reporters name, Elodie Mazein, almost seems inconsequential.

Veteran polar explorer Hadow and two other Britons went out on the Arctic ice cap for 73 days during the northern spring, taking more than 6,000 measurements and observations of the sea ice.

Okay, a nice smattering of real numbers to legitimize the report. But who is Hadow, and these ‘others’? What are their qualifications? Are thy a group of frat boys out for jolly jaunt? Hah….the power of the internet. Perhaps the names are linked, so we can find out a bit of background on these ‘expeditionists’, to determine their fitness to the task in hand, without the reporter necessarily and tediously recounting their qualifications.

Well, no. No links to them in the article. But this isn’t a technical limitation, since the words ‘Polar Explorer’ are linked (“Great Deals at Yahoo! Low Prices On polar explorers.”) which is useless this context.

This all reinforces the fact that the news isn’t about the news any more. It’s about giving just enough information to get the reader to form an opinion on a matter, usually aligning with the written piece.

This is subtly different from an opinion column although quite similar, and is most insidious. The age old phrase “don’t believe everything you read” has fallen out of use but is, as yet, more and more important today as it ever was. How many young adults have been taught this? I recall as a youngster asking my parents about things in my naivete (“dad,….is this true?!”) and this was a most suitable answer to ensure a healthy dose of skepticism in everything.