Damn.

Well shit. Now I need a suit that flies. To be honest that movie kinda kicked my ass. I want to have Jon Favreau's babies.Although I coulda used less of the prototype/ kidnapping portion and more flying around kicking random people's asses. The best part about Spiderman, Superman, Batman, (And now Iron Man. What? Too good for a one-word name?) isn't the epic battles with supervillians bent on world destruction/domination. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that mayhem too. But the ease with which these guys dispense with "normal" badguys is much more entertaining and serves to deliver a baseline of just how badass they are. I'm sure they'll put a nod to this concept in the sequel, but it won't be the same. Instead of "what the eff is that?" *wham* muggers will say "oh crap here comes Iron Man". (Though to be fair there was plenty of the military going "what the eff is that?") But that's about the only problem I can invent to have with this movie. Well, besides being pissed off that I can't have anything I just saw.

Education Starts At Home.

Awesome, teaching kids how to not be douche bags sounds like a great idea.

"What happened, Daddy?" AJ asked, "I burned the sausage," I said.
He looked at me, wheels turning, assessing the situation. Finally, he went for it and said in his finest Donald Trump, "You're fired!"
Cracked me up.
"You're fired! Hahaha," with that fake laugh of his. "You're fired, Daddy! Fired!"
"Aaron Julius," I said in that well-practiced Authority Voice that dims his eyelids. "What did Daddy tell you about 'funny?'"
Bottom lip out. Words an elusive monotone. "It's only funny the first time."
"Good boy."

This seems like an excellent rule, but I'm not really sure when its best imparted.  Cause babies definitely do not agree, a funny thing is funny each and every time it happens.  Maybe that's why they need to be told about adult humor, rather than just letting them make terrible jokes until they stumble upon the tenet after a long and painful stint in high school.

• If Only I'd Been Jeff Foxworthy's Dad : Don't Forget to Flush on Offsprung.com

Renting The Power Supply.

My biggest dissuasion against running out and buying an electric car right now (aside from lack of supply, lack of funding and lack of a place to plug it in) stems from a general uncertainty of battery packs.  How long will the pack last before it needs replacing?  How much is that gonna cost?  Do I have to do anything special to it?  And so on, like with any new (and probably better) technology.  Think of your feelings the first time you saw a CD player after a lifetime of cassette decks.  There was probably a little fear and resentment of new technology deep in your chest even though it probably manifested as condescension or apathy.  There's just so much to learn and you've already kinda got a system that works.  Oh, but it could be so much better if we'd just man up and do it.  However that fear is a legitimate concern when dealing with new technologies, just ask the minidisc deck under my bed.

But what if I didn't have to worry about the battery?  TreeHugger has a very interesting link about buying the car but leasing the batteries.  Sounds like a neat idea that might make people adopt technology they're not quite sure about yet. Course you'd need to incentivize proper use and maintenance to maximize the usefulness of each pack.  So don't get excited about gorging through 48 AA batteries like you did on Christmas day when you were twelve.

• TreeHugger: Buy The Car, Lease The Battery

Eye On The Prize.

Thin-film Solar cells.  That's the place to be... in about 5 years. Right now solar power is just cool, but its going to get better.  To compete with fossil fuels it needs to get past the $1 per watt point, but right now its about 4 times that much and not very arousing to a solely fiscal analysis.  That doesn't mean that other catalysts can't drive projects, as you can see with Google's and San Diego's solar projects.

Filsom, a Swiss Firm Solar Cell Firm, projects that in 5 years solar will be marginally cheaper than fossil fuels.  And after another 5 years it'll be half as costly.  Thin-film is a new process that prints solar collectors onto a flexible backing that can be placed on many more surfaces than traditional technology.  Imagine every rooftop you see providing the power for everything underneath it.  And with thin-film, the sides and windows of the buildings can contribute too.  So alternative power doesn't have to be about endless fields of mirrors and collectors.  We can just repurpose some of the impervious surfaces that just radiate solar collection.  Win-freaking-win.

• TreeHugger: Thin-Film Solar Tech

I Bet Crude Oil Tastes Great!

Ethanol gets me so riled up. I mean, sure its a great way to stop using foreign oil and prop up the sagging farm industry. You know, aside from its general inefficiency, its failure to address the Neanderthalic burning-stuff-for-power lack of innovation, and the destruction of a perfectly useful commodity. People have been taking it up lately because that's a great way to impress the middle of the country. You know that same, unimproved commodity you're been growing all your life? Well turns out that it just got 7 times more expensive! Bullshit.

You want to grow power? Plant a field full of photo voltaic cells that do a much better job of harnessing sunlight and turning it into usable fuel. And I won't need to subsidize you cause it won't be ridiculously expensive to turn a mild profit.

Sorry I finally got around to watching "Who Killed the Electric Car" so I'm very angry about inferior alternatives being pushed out because they may benefit a small subset of people for a short time. These hydrogen and ethanol technologies that are the "salvation of the energy dependence" completely fail to address the issue of environmental efficacy. Electric cars have been around since the beginning of cars, but we've been distracted all this time by a better advertised, but less effective, alternative. Don't get suckered in again. Don't buy an "efficient" 42mpg hybrid, don't wait around 5 years for a "where the hell will the fuel come from, oh its expensive and inefficient to create" hydrogen drive vehicle. There are gigawatts of electricity out there in wind, sunlight, and waves just waiting to be harvested. And electric cars the possess durability and performance to make use of that free power NOW, without the need to throw billions into "future research".

So next time you feel pressured to use one of these "new innovations" in fuel, reply that you're more temped to crack open a can of 10W-30 instead of Gatorade at the gym.

• Ethanol in America: "Our Crop. Our Fuel. Our Country." (TreeHugger)
• Checkbiotech.org: Ethanol's corn-fed boom holds hidden costs: higher food prices

It Wasn't A Warning Shot, It Was A Camera.

I love plans for the future, especially when they were devised in the past. Take for example this plan for an interstellar mission from 1973. The members collaborated on a method to send instruments to a near star system within the span of a human life while only using near-future technology. It was called the Daedalus Project; with a name like that how could it not work?

The plan (keeping in mind that this is a grievous summary) was to use a nuclear pulse rocket to accelerate the probe to 135,000,000 km/h. (the current fastest space-bound projectile is Pioneer 10 at 51,810 km/h) This rocket would trigger 250 tiny nuclear bombs per second for two straight years before moving on to stage two. In all the propulsion would consume 46,000 tons of deuterium and helium-3, and the craft would have to pit-stop at Jupiter to collect this fuel. Ac few years before the fifty year mission's conclusion several pods would split off the mother ship and record whatever they pass. The instruments will try to gather as much data as possible as they hurtle through the system at 3,750,000 m/s because they'll have no means of deceleration.

Goodness, lets hope there isn't someone we might piss off by shooting at them.

• Damn Interesting » The Daedalus Starship

Oh, That's The Charger For A 9454b, Not A 9455b.

Freaking phone companies, they squeeze every last drop out of you. But now China could be paving the way for us all. They're trying to mandate a standard charging interface for cell phones. That'd be super guys, and if the plan to have use USB as the standard maybe we'll finally get some phones that sync with computers and don't waste all kinds of power. But that's probably just crazytalk.

• Techdirt: China To Mandate Standardized Phone Chargers

Oh, and I did some research on USB. Its kinda interesting stuff, coming up with data transfer standards and seeing the various incarnations. No, wait. Maybe its only interesting to me.

• Universal Serial Bus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Keeping Up With The Jetsons.

Now we're getting there. Everyone knows that things float in the future. And we can't use magnets because nothing's made of metal. So some Japanese scientists are working on a way to make fish float. Well, technically they can make tadpoles, insects and fish eggs float too, but I imagine its pretty much any small object. The technology uses sound waves to keep an object suspended for a sustained period. I imagine it'll be a while before we're floating people with it, but that's not why it was designed anyway. The researchers are looking for a way to house compounds that normally corrode their containers. So imagine any video game you've played where the magical floating orb of mystery junx is floating in a temple. We can do that. All we have to do is figure out how to extract essence of water.

• Chinese mad scientists levitate fish with sound - Engadget

In The Future We'll Fly Naked.

Its rough being on the bleeding edge. Especially when you enjoy buying and using electronic devices because they are unknown only to have people searching your person for unknown electronic devices. Imagine the hubub that arose when someone tried to board a plane with the new (and stupid) Nike+iPod implant in their shoe. Remember that some dude had shoes made of bomb, and now you have to run footwear thought the x-ray scanner. I find it funny only cause I don't ever think I'll be persuaded to get this thing. But it got me thinking. We're only going to have more and more wearable or implanted technology in the future. And if things keep progressing, we'll have more and more invasive searches in once public areas. How in the world are these two going to reconcile? Will TSA employees actually be versed in technology or weaponry? Or will they just keep raising alarms when they run across something they've never seen before? Honestly, my outlook is so bleak that I prefer not to even think about it.

• PSA: The TSA is not down with Nike+iPod - Engadget