Don't Back Down

For those of you who don't like to hear me bash the government, listen up. Another monster is on the block today - the National Football League. For those of you who don't know, the Carolina Panthers are in the playoffs this year, and they have a game against the St. Louis Rams, to be played in St. Louis this afternoon.

Some folks here in Charlotte put together a nice fund-raising idea for the Make-a-Wish foundation to try and wind up collections on $1 million. Local folk hero Hope Stout, featured on the NFL telecast of the Panthers victory over Dallas last week, cast her wish to have the wishes of all other Make-a-Wish participants granted. The cost? A cool $1 million.

Read "No Football Here Today" »

Recently, I wrote about how Mecklenburg County has implemented an ordinance requiring every family dwelling in the county to have a carbon monoxide detector. If you've read that piece, you know that it may not be a bad idea for every home to have a detector, I simply object to the government deciding that it is their decision to make.

Read "Regulation Never Ends" »

Recently some transportation geeks in Spain and Morocco have decided that they will build a tunnel, which will run beneath the Straits of Gibraltar, in order to linke the two countries. Coupled with the development of the Chunnel a few years ago, linking England and Paris under the English Channel, this raises the possibility that you will one day be able to take a train from Northern Scotland to the South of Africa.

It's probably more likely that flying is a more geek-like pursuit, but it seems that even those who had a blueprint and more than a million dollars at their disposal could not get a replica of the Wright Flyer to actually, well, fly.

Meanwhile, SpaceShipOne recently demonstrated its capabilities in the first manned supersonic flight by a private (non-government) effort. Lest you think this is not geeky enough for inclusion here, the craft is the entry of Scaled Composites into the XPrize contest, which is $10 million US to the first team who can launch a manned ship into space (100 kilometers) and then repeat the feat with the same ship within two weeks. Building technology in pursuit of money sounds like the most noble of geeky pursuits to me. But if that's not enough, the bulk of the prize is financed by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame. With all the hubbub about Mars lately, I'd say this is definitely geek material.

Until next week...