One of my favorite bumper stickers is “hummers are for dicks”. Too racy? Then the humor in The Tech Generation might be better.
The hybrid Hummer isn’t expected to appear on the streets until 2011, but apparently 17,000 have already been ordered – probably all by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I understand that people have a really, really hard time accepting change, but making the Hummer H3 electric seems like such a concession to marketing/fashion instead of engineering, that it again begs the question of foresight. Is GM also going to offer a free pair of bell bottom jeans with every purchase? The Hummer might still be in fashion today, but I suspect as new and more efficient (e.g. less boxy) designs are found not only wiser for efficiency but also sexy, then no one will want to be seen pushing air in a big, dare I say dumb, box.
MIT has some cool new energy experiments running in Portugal. Apparently they harness ocean wave energy by getting the water to push a lever that compresses air.
Changing the volume of the airspace within the OWC chamber allows for different wave frequencies and intensities to be optimized. When extended to a larger chamber, a wider range of wavelengths produce the best effect. Researchers are currently working on identifying the most efficient chamber sizes for the various wave types.
Placing these devices, called the oscillating water column (OWC), in lighthouses and breakwaters makes perfect sense.
The drive is missing from the Archives facility in College Park, Md., a Washington suburb. The drive was lost between October 2008 and March 2009 and contained 1 terabyte of data — enough material to fill millions of books.
A Republican committee aide who was at the inspector general’s briefing said the Archives had been converting the Clinton administration information to a digital records system when the hard drive went missing.
The aide, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, said the hard drive was left on a shelf and unused for an uncertain period of time. When the employee tried to resume work, the hard drive was missing.
Did it go something like this? “Oh, I’ll just set this 1TB drive with the personal identity information of top officials and sensitive logs over here on this open shelf for a while and go work on other things…”. Not exactly the sort of risk calculation you would expect in the National Archives. Maybe they do not have a high rate of technology theft, but even so the person using the drive knew the value of the contents. I bet they still keep valuable papers under strict lock and environmental controls.
I often wonder why the lights are left on all night in office buildings in America. It seems like a colossal waste of energy. The cost should be offset by more intelligent detection and control systems, which have many uses beyond simple energy savings, as demonstrated here by Wroclaw University of Technology students in Poland:
Instead of fireworks displays, which are so 17th century, the cities could come alive with annual building light shows. Buildings could also give emergency messages, or be used to indicate temperature and weather change. The energy being burned every hour of every night could be put to so many more uses. The technology is ready: