The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network.
[…]
“We always knew Hawaii would be the perfect model,” [Shai Agassi] said in a telephone interview. “The typical driving plan is low and leisurely, and people are smiling.”
Cute. San Francisco and other Bay Area cities already have endorsed the same electric car network, perhaps with even more smiles.
I spoke with a representative from an electric company recently, as I was working on NERC Cyber Security, and he bemoaned the fact that electric cars are starting to burnout the electric grid. A Tesla roadster, for example, pulls at 240V and a few in a neighborhood could be a major problem for the infrastructure. This reminded me of a house I owned in 1996 where we tried to install a T1 and were told by the phone company that they would have to pull a new line from four states away to provide the bandwidth.
The BBC says a man in France has documented how a drug can suppress the urge to drink:
Dr Olivier Ameisen, 55, one of France’s top heart specialists, says he overcame his own addiction to alcohol by self-administering doses of a muscle-relaxant called baclofen.
He has now written a book about his experience – Le Dernier Verre (The Last Glass) – in which he calls for clinical trials to test his theory that baclofen suppresses the craving for drink.
I can’t help but notice a phrase offered by Dr. Pascal Garche in Geneva, as quoted by the BBC: “the book is going to set the cat among the pigeons”. Nice marketing.
Cat! who hast pass’d thy grand climacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroy’d? How many tit bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears – but pr’ythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me – and upraise
Thy gentle mew – and tell me all thy frays,
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists –
For all thy wheezy asthma – and for all
Thy tail’s tip is nick’d off – and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft, as when the lists
In youth thou enter’dest on glass bottled wall.
Nice when “edge” bands do fun stuff for kids, although perhaps a harder group also would have woven in a subtle statement on the Banana Wars. Maybe when/if I see them live (they’re playing in my neighborhood in a couple weeks) I’ll ask if they had to self-censor to get on Nick, or if actually they don’t care about the connection. Seems like a Marley, Rancid, Clash, or even Police treatment of the topic would go so much deeper.