Monday, June 30, 2008

CNN Money compares the platforms of McCain and Obama, and Obama hits all the right notes, especially on Point #2 (Gravest threat to the US economy: Islamic extremism vs. US energy policy). But the best part for me, and the most telling, is Point #7: Who do you admire:
McCain The ones I admire the most are those that have been on the leading edge of the information technology revolution. Bill Gates, obviously, springs to mind. Paul Allen.

Obama Steve Jobs is somebody who is an example of the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that we have to build on as part of what makes America such a great country.
So now it all comes together: Obama's a Mac, McCain's a PC.
It turns out Rambo gets exponentially tougher with every movie that comes out.

Now, to be fair, he wasn't in a good frame of mind in the first film -- all PTSD. But once they got him squared away for the second film, he's been almost parabolic. If they release a fifth film, we can expect about five people killed per minute.

Friday, June 27, 2008

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Wikipedia says this sentence is grammatically correct for all sentences consisting of at least one "buffalo" (using Chompskyan theories of grammar).

Bonus linguistics post: Yuen Ren Chao's poem "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den"

(Thanks lonelysandwich!)

Thursday, June 26, 2008

A cool new skyscraper in -- where else -- Dubai, will have 80 independent rotating floors. But check out this green hotness:
The slender building would be energy self-sufficient as the turbines would produce enough electricity to power the entire building and even feed extra power back into the grid, said the Italian architect at the unveiling of the project in New York. (Via BBC News)
The Huffington Post has a video and some more conceptual drawings, while the Wall Street Journal does its bit by covering the whole hard-on for skyscrapers Dubai seems to have these days.
EcoGeek raves about Nanosolar, a new startup developing the so-called "Third Wave" of solar technology. Founded by two Stanford Ph.D. candidates, Nanosolar offered to bring the cost of solar energy down cheaper than coal. And now, after raising $150 million in capital and building a factory in Germany, they're talking $2/Watt -- squeeking just below coal's $2.1/Watt.

This is big news. And important news. The real alternatives to fossil fuels rely on renewable energy sources. And the real answer to re-greening the planet comes from developing countries switching from coal-fired plants to something sustainable. If the cost of solar power drops below that of coal, we'll see countries like China and India moving away from fossil fuels, and this is where the huge environmental gains are going to be made.

You can read more about Nanosolar in this New York Times article, this National Post article, and on the company's website.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

An interesting article in Scientific American on the evolution of the English language, and a nice contrast to this one in Wired.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

I blogged about this before, over two years ago. But I recently read a frightening article in Maclean's called After Cheap Oil that brought this back to my attention. Some of the gems:
  • High oil prices are causing a downturn in the auto industry, forcing Ford to cut jobs
  • Rising prices will turn suburbs into ghost towns and drive Wal-Mart out of business
  • At $200/barrel, someone making $12/hour would work roughly a day and a half to fill their tank (my own car would cost about $100 to fill at this price)
  • Increasing fuel prices puts more emphasis on alternative fuels like ethanol, which in turn strains the global food supply
  • The airline industry will fall apart, resulting in a 90% reduction in the number of airports by 2025
Unfortunately, it's all doom and gloom. Life After the Oil Crash lists the facts point after meticulous point, including the research, economics, and alternatives. And he doesn't end with anything positive.
"What can I do to prepare?"

Attempting to prepare for a catastrophe of this magnitude is daunting to say the least. What you can or will do to prepare for this situation will depend on your age, health, marital status, geographic location, financial situation and other factors too numerous to mention. About the best I can do is point you to some articles and resources you might to be profitable reading in terms of generating your own options and plans. I maintain a continually updated repository of such articles at the LATOC Prepare page.

Best of luck,

Mattthew David Savinar, Esq.
But there may be a slim upside. Savinar writes that some combination of alternative fuel sources could be used to delay the inevitable, but it's not some kind of magic bullet. And Curtis Rist wrote in Discover that natural gas can be turned into fuel, and estimates suggest that could provide up to 60 years of fuel. There have also been a couple of recent discoveries I've blogged about which will have some impact.

But the most important thing is acting now. We have to lobby our governments to support energy reduction and research into alternative energy sources.

That is, if there's any window at all to be acting in.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Science fiction once again becomes science fact as LS9, a research company in Silicon Valley, genetically engineers a strain of E. coli to eat biomatter and excrete crude oil. Honest to God crude oil. And the reaction is carbon negative, so more carbon will be taken out of the atmosphere by creating the fuel than will be put in by burning it.

This is amazing news, and definitely an interesting development in meeting rising energy demands, even if its current spacial needs are a little taxing:
The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

Friday, June 20, 2008

This training program suggests that, with a little dedication, you can be doing 100 perfect push ups in six weeks -- even if you can't even do 10 right now. The best part? The training is only 30 minutes a week.
Push ups can be performed no matter where you are, and best of all, they are completely free - no expensive equipment or annual gym fees required! If you're looking to develop a great chest and shoulders, you could do much worse than follow along with the hundred push ups plan. Your core strength will also go through the roof too!
(Via BuzzFeed)

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Rod Hilton at the Editing Room has a script posted lampooning Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. As I hated the movie, I think this version is bang on -- and decidedly better.
Wired has a post today highlighting the many accomplishments of Eratosthenes, who estimated the circumference of the earth on July 19, 240BC (amongst other things).

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Researchers at Rensselaer and Rice University have created the darkest man-made material ever, absorbing over 99.9% of light. The secret: a thin coating of vertical carbon nanotubes.
All materials, from paper to water, air, or plastic, reflect some amount of light. Scientists have long envisioned an ideal black material that absorbs all the colors of light while reflecting no light. So far they have been unsuccessful in engineering a material with a total reflectance of zero.

The total reflectance of conventional black paint, for example, is between 5 and 10 percent. The darkest man-made material, prior to the discovery by Lin’s group, boasted a total reflectance of 0.16 percent to 0.18 percent.

Lin’s team created a coating of low-density, vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays that are engineered to have an extremely low index of refraction and the appropriate surface randomness, further reducing its reflectivity. The end result was a material with a total reflective index of 0.045 percent — more than three times darker than the previous record, which used a film deposition of nickel-phosphorous alloy.
A completely non-reflective surface would look like a two-dimensional, featureless, black shape.
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