Chicagoboyz Know Jack
Month: August 2008
Blog Outage (Resolved)
Apparently, this site was not accessible last night via IE or Mac Safari. I have fixed the problem as far as I can tell. Apologies for the inconvenience. Please let me know if you are still having difficulty accessing this blog.
UPDATE: If someone who reads this post has access to Mac Safari and can tell me whether this blog displays properly on it, I would be grateful.
Skagway and Project Management
THE WHITE PASS AND YUKON RAILROAD
Recently I was in Alaska for a vacation. The trip was great. In the town of Skagway, which is a big destination for cruise ships, is a narrow gauge railway called “The White Pass and Yukon Railroad”. This railway was built in 1898 for the Klondike gold rush.
The railway carried freight for many years and was a significant component of the effort to fortify Alaska in the 1940s when it was under threat from the Japanese in WW2. After the war it was used for civilian purposes.
The rail way shut down in 1982 and was re-opened in 1989 as a tourist railway, taking passengers from Skagway (at sea level) up over the mountains and into Canada. We took the railway up and over into Canada and had a great time. The railway has restored cars that were purchased from other (now defunct) railway lines, some almost 100 years ago. They even have an original steam engine that they keep running and take out on Saturdays (I was told, didn’t see it) so the true “train buffs” can actually ride behind a narrow gauge steam engine (it is number 69 and they sell T shirts for it, probably a big seller due to the double entendre).
A Big Breakthrough
[See update at end]
Instapundit links to an EEtimes story that claims that MIT researchers have created a catalyst that can electrolyze water at 100% efficiency, meaning that 100% of the electricity that goes across the electrodes goes into breaking the bonds between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the water.
If this pans out, this is big, I am talking discovery of nuclear fission big. For one thing, it means the end to concerns about anthropogenic global warming.
The MIT breakthrough is the equivalent of someone finding the means to improve a car’s miles-per-gallon rating from 30 to 150.
It’s big!
Are Credit Cards the New Universal Currency?
In the past, paying for things while traveling overseas was complicated. You had to convert some of your native currency into the local currency or get travel checks demarcated in local currency. Today, you can just hop on a plane with whatever major credit cards you have on hand and fly anywhere in the world and pay for anything with a swipe of the card.
Has this widespread adoption of credit card effectively made them a universal currency?