Alt Energy
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Tuesday rapid fire
I’m back from Kentucky, I’ll have a recap of that soon, in the meantime, here are some interesting links
- Harry Anderson and New Orleans
- An underappreciated man of all time
- Ranking Blogs as newspapers
- Radio Shack fires 400 people by email
- Offshore wind mills – seems pretty cool
- Man Lives to 112 Despite Junk-Food Diet
- This was the funniest SNL skit of all time, surprisingly it’s not on YouTube
- Another good skit is, specifically, Seinfeld meets Oz.
- A seemingly major oil discovery. Probably not as big a deal as everyone thinks it is, but then again, maybe not.
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Monday rapid fire
- The best use of graphic thumbnails I’ve seen
- Calculate your Body Mass Index. This seems a tad unrealistic, and if this is what people are using to measure America’s obesity “Epidemic” I’m much less impressed. It seems over broad and crappy. For instance, my ideal weight range is between 137 and 183, a difference of 46 pounds.
- Stirling Engines!
- Kurdistan, the other Iraq, it’s where all of the American troops will be should a full fledged civil war break out. Described my Michael Totten as “a Muslim Utah”. Shoul Iraq break up, this will be the country we subsidize most, besides Israel.
- $10 Panoramic Tripod Head – I need one of these.
- Apex Predators
- How much is inside….
- Cheap Handlebar mounts – something else I need.
- Milton Friedman TV!
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Interesting
A very good post on GeoThermal energy by Malcolm Gladwell. For a simple explanation as to what it is
Geothermal heating and cooling is based on one simple fact: that 6 feet down in the ground the temperature is the sameÂbetween 50˚F and 60˚F- the whole year round. This means that it is relatively cool in the summer, and relatively warm in the winter.
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For geothermal cooling, all one needs to do is to circulate water in a pipe through the ground to cool it, and use this cool water to cool the air pumped through the house in the heating ducts.Heating is done much the same way. The numbers seem quite plausible, I wonder why it’s not more popular.
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Yet more reasons to hate environmentalists
I just saw the creator of “Who Killed the Electric Car” on the Daily show. He did not address the problems raised by David Friedman (mainly cost), or any of the range argument. Instead it was the usual anti-corporate spiel.
That’s to be expected. What I found reprehensible was his not mentioning the new vehicle by Tesla Motors, or plug in hybrids from CalCars. Too many people in the alt-energy environmental front prefer a great excuse to a modest accomplishment and the director was no exception.
I suppose that’s why Solar Towers (CNN article here, WikiPedia here) don’t actually exist yet.
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Quick round up
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Tesla Motors seems way cool
The official unveiling of the Tesla Roadster is tomorrow, but Wired has photos and an article. It looks very cool.
Judging from the specs (I haven’t seen any independent reviews) it seems like a plausible model. 0-60 in four seconds, 250 mile range for an electric car, standard batteries (i.e. laptop batteries) fairly quick recharge time. It could work.
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Science Tuesday
In further effort to drive the biking in darkness post farther down the page I bring you Popular Mechanics interesting article comparing alternative fuels, as well as their article on souping up the human body.
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I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while
But I haven’t had the time. Here is a very good article on alternative liquid fuels. Not wholly convincing, but interesting nonetheless.
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Saturday rapid fire
- Forests paying the price for biofuels – not that surprising really. Everything has a cost.
- Good and bad procrastination
That’s the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They’re type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.
What’s “small stuff?” Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary.
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Wednesday rapid fire
- Driving with Mr T.
- Poorly written and misleading article in Newsweek about poverty. To quote:
The picture is clearest when you look at the number and fate of the world’s middle- class countries (rather than middle-class individuals, although the story there is not so terrific, either).
and
The absolute income levels of the poorest may be creeping up. But with the notable exceptions of India and China and a few others
Why is there no critical thinking anymore?
- Michael Jackson uses ladies room in Dubai
- Woman to marry man who shot her
- More on modded hybrid cars
- Solar power and Sterling Engines make the best chance for meaningful solar power I’ve seen so far.