This should really be the Tourist Ad for the USA!

Peter and Blake, two young filmmakers, and founders of Conscious Minds Productions, recently launched grassroots work Project Beaker with their director friend Sam.

Armed with just a camera, tripod, tape measure and a string with a blown-up paper protractor, the trio captured one guy's journey walking from the streets of New York to San Francisco. 2,750 still frames, 14 days, and 2 pairs of Levi's jeans later is their video love letter.

So now you need to watch the clip. The song is Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

Black Box Inventor Dies..

David Warren, the Australian inventor whose "black box" flight data recorder revolutionised the safety of air travel and aided countless crash investigations has died aged 85.

His own father died in a plane crash and he hit upon the "black box" idea while probing a 1953 disaster involving the world's first commercial jetliner.

"Without any explanation, without any witnesses, without any survivors ... it was a really baffling mystery," Warren said in a 2003 interview.

Warren, who died on Monday, was the first European child born on Groote Eylandt, a remote Aboriginal island in Australia's northeast, in 1925.

His father was among 12 people on board the "Miss Hobart" mail plane that vanished over the southern Bass Strait in 1934, one of Australia's earliest air disasters.

Then just nine years of age, Warren was left with his father's last gift to him, a crystal radio set, which he used to listen to broadcasts after lights-out in his boarding school dormitory.

Building radios soon became his schoolboy hobby, but a World War II ban on amateur radio led Warren to dump his nascent ambitions as a "radio ham" in favour of chemistry, his ultimate career path.

He first hatched the idea of cockpit voice and data recording while investigating a 1953 crash of the Comet, the world's first commercial jet, basing his design on a miniature pocket recorder he had seen at a trade fair.

"I put the two ideas together," he said.

"If a businessman had been using one of these in the plane and we could find it in the wreckage and we played it back, we'd say, 'We know what caused this.'

"Any sounds that were relevant to what was going on would be recorded and you could take them from the wreckage."

After an initial lack of interest from authorities, Warren built a prototype "black box" in 1956. It was able to store four hours of voice recordings and instrument readings.

The idea was slow to catch on, with Australia's Department of Civil Aviation advising Warren that his "instrument has little immediate direct use in civil aviation".

Military authorities went further still, with the Royal Australian Air Force dismissing it as unnecessary and likely to "yield more expletives than explanations".

It took a lunchtime demonstration of the device to a visiting British official in 1958 for the potential of his design to be recognised and christened the "black box" -- a reference to its technical mastery.

"One of the people in the discussion afterwards said, 'This is a wonderful black box'," Warren said. "A black box was a gadget box. You didn't have to understand it but it did wonderful things."

It was 10 years before black boxes -- in fact brightly painted to make them easy to spot at crash sites -- were made mandatory in Australian aircraft. "Our driving force was air safety so we felt that it's succeeded in that regard," he said in 2003. "It's a very satisfying feeling."

We're always on the look-out for great marketing ideas and here's a great one from Thai Airways whose revenues have suffered due to the recent political unrest.

Their great ruse to raise additional revenues is to sell their in-flight food to people who aren't flying!!!

Their target, it seems, is the typical business traveller who has had a 'good in-flight experience' but has no time to prepare the food at home..

An example we're sure will be closely followed by BA and many other airlines!

We see that the European Union unveiled plans on Wednesday to attract more visitors from the likes of China and Russia, hoping tourism can help the region bounce back from the economic crisis.

The European commissioner responsible for tourism said better use of technology would be critical in attracting more tourists, with plans for a Europe travel website in Chinese and other ideas in the works for Russia, Japan, India and Brazil.

Travel to and within Europe, which includes several of the world's top tourism destinations, has taken a big hit since the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, and was further dented this year by the volcanic ash cloud in April and May.

The number of tourists visiting Europe dropped by 5.6 percent in 2009 from 2008, according to the World Tourism Organisation, with the total value of tourism receipts falling by a more substantial 8 percent to 295.7 billion euros ($362 billion).

That's a trend the EU desperately wants to turn around.

"The European Commission wants to be the trailblazer working to breathe new life into this vital sector," EU commissioner Antonio Tajani told reporters. "It needs to recover from the economic and financial crisis it has been so hard-struck by in the last few months."

The aim is to stimulate more tourism within Europe, by encouraging more young and old people -- those who have more time on their hands -- to travel, while also drawing in more visitors from rapidly developing countries.

With the euro single currency, which is shared by 16 EU countries, having lost more than 10 percent of its value against the dollar this year, the likes of France, Spain and Italy are now relatively cheaper for foreigners to visit.

Quoting the Roman theologian Saint Augustine, Tajani said it was everyone's duty to see as much of the world as possible.

"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page," he said.

One idea being discussed to encourage more young people to travel is to make it possible to book train, plane and hotel tickets via mobile phones. The broader idea is to use technology better and more frequently to promote travel and tourism.

For Europeans aged 65 and over, who are expected to make up 20 percent of the region's 500 million people by 2020, the EU proposals recommend targeted marketing and measures to make tourist sites accessible to those with reduced mobility.

The initiative will not be limited to attracting more visitors to the favourite destinations such as France, Spain, Britain and Italy, Tajani promised, saying it should be targeted at all 27 EU member states.

Tourism accounts for 9.7 million jobs in the EU, employing 5.2 percent of the workforce, according to EU estimates.