The Quintessential Blog of Adam Kuhn

I like to think that I live a relatively happy life. But some things just get to me, so here are my top three pet peeves of the week:

1. Tailgaters & Traffic Jams

My commute to work (yes, I get to drive the beltline every day…) should take me an average of around 20 minutes. Yet, for the last few weeks, I’ve seen this time grow to over an hour and a half. Why? Tailgaters. They are the number one cause of traffic jams and accidents. When they creep up to less than a car length behind the next driver in front of them at over 70 mph, they risk their life and the driver’s life in front of them.

But there isn’t always wreck. We’ve all experienced it, the mysterious traffic jam that has no cause in sight. How the heck did it happen? The tailgater that had to slam on his brakes because the driver in front of him braked gently. This sudden slow down grows at an exponential rate through the line of traffic, much to the same effect that a wave travels through a shaken jump rope.

If any one safety feature is needed on cars these days, it should be an anti-tailgating feature. It’d be pretty easy to incorporate into a modern automobile.

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Synopsis: Between 1968 and 1972, nine American spacecraft voyaged to the Moon, and 12 men walked upon its surface. They remain the only human beings to have stood on another world. ‘In the Shadow of the Moon’ brings together for the first, and possibly the last, time surviving crew members from every single Apollo mission that flew to the Moon, and allows them to tell their story in their own words.

This riveting first-hand testimony is interwoven with visually stunning archival material which has been re-mastered from the original NASA film footage – much of it never used before. The result is an intimate epic that vividly communicates the daring, the danger, the pride, and the promise of this extraordinary era in history when the whole world literally looked up at America.

The participating astronauts include Jim Lovell (Apollo 8 and 13), Dave Scott (Apollo 9 and 15), John Young (Apollo 10 and 16), Gene Cernan (Apollo 10 and 17), Mike Collins (Apollo 11), Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11), Alan Bean (Apollo 12), Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14), Charlie Duke (Apollo 16) and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17). Beautifully shot by Clive North in High Definition video, the astronauts talk directly to camera. They emerge as surprisingly eloquent, witty, emotional and very human.

The producers Duncan Copp and Chris Riley spent many weeks in the NASA film library examining cans of film some of which had not been opened for over 30 years. This search uncovered many gems, astonishing space shots which have been re-mastered from the original film rolls to reveal the Apollo program with a visual clarity and impact it has never had before. The mute 16mm rolls shot in Mission Control have been laboriously lip-synced with the 16-track audio recordings of the mission controllers’ voice loop to re-unite the pictures and sound of many historic moments for the first time, lending a striking immediacy to many dramatic scenes.

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Come 2009, Polaroid Corporation will cease production of their instant film, first developed in the 1930s. Polaroid will be closing factories in Massachusetts, Mexico, and the Netherlands, eliminating 450 jobs. The Polaroid Corporation plans to shift focus to new ventures such as portable printers for cell phones and digital cameras, televisions, and DVD players.

Polaroid’s newest venture, a sleek portable photo printer, is the size of a deck cards and boasts the ability to print full color images on business card size print while using no ink. This is possible using thermal printing technology developed and licensed from Zink Imaging, which was founded by private investors who bought technologies from Polaroid as it was coming out of it’s 2001 bankruptcy.

Down from a peak employee count of 21,000, Polaroid will continue to exist with a skeleton crew of 150 employees in the Boston suburb of Waltham.

Synopsis: Into the Wild tells the adventures of Christopher McCandless, a top student at Emory University and an athlete. After graduating, McCandless decides to give $24,000 of his savings account to OXFAM and later burn all the money in his wallet. He hitchhikes to Alaska to live in the wild. During his adventure, he encounters several unique people that change his life before he faces the dangers of wilderness.

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I came across this video today on YouTube. The song has a good groove, but I thought the animation was really cool and originial:

Enjoy.

Synopsis: No End in Sight is a documentary film that focuses on alleged serious mistakes made by the Bush administration in the two-to-three-month period following the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The film portrays these errors as the cause of ensuing problems in Iraq, such as the rise of the insurgency, a lack of security and basic utilities for many Iraqis, sectarian violence and, at one point, the risk of complete civil war.

To a large extent the film consists of interviews with the people who were involved in the initial Iraqi occupation authority and the ORHA (the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, later replaced by the CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority). 35 people are interviewed, many of them former Bush loyalists who have since become disillusioned by what they experienced at the time. In particular, many of those interviewed claim that the inexperience of the core members of the Bush administration—and their refusal to seek, acknowledge or accept input from more experienced outsiders—was at the root of the disastrous occupation effort.

Among those interviewed are:

According to No End in Sight, there were three especially grave mistakes made by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA. The film cites these three mistakes, as well as many others, as the cause of the rapid deterioration of occupied Iraq into chaos.

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The picture says it all.

Police training with a taser: