You know you want one. It's closer to being a reality than ever before. But how close exactly is that? Maybe closer than we think.
posted on May 6, 2008 - View this thread

Pond scum saves the planet? In the beginning, there were algae, but there was no oil. Then, from algae came oil. Now, the algae are still there, but oil is fast depleting. In future, there will be no oil, but there will still be algae. ^ Power your ride with pond scum. In some iterations you don't even need light. (we have talked about this before and the fact that CO2 powers the algae production is not insignificant) More details here.
posted on Apr 17, 2008 - View this thread

Is offshore wind power the renewable energy of the future?
posted on Apr 13, 2008 - View this thread

Slum (youtube: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Dwellers (mp3): how the other billion lives.
posted on Feb 28, 2008 - View this thread

MeFi's celebration of the Ivy League continues with "The Facebook of Wall Street's Future," a New York Times map of social and professional connections in the tradition of They Rule (previously on Metafilter here, here , here and here).
posted on Jan 14, 2008 - View this thread

The trap-jaw ant, best known for its powerful jaws which hold the land speed record for movement at 145 miles per hour, is brilliantly captured in a short film shot at 100,000 frames per second.
posted on Dec 28, 2007 - View this thread

Candidates on executive power: a full spectrum. Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on presidential signing statements, surveyed the major 2008 presidential candidates about their views on the limits of executive power. [BugMeNot, via Huffington Post.]
posted on Dec 26, 2007 - View this thread

Could giant magnetically levitated windmills be the solution to the worlds energy problems? Chinese scientist have reported 20 percent increase in capacity over traditional wind turbines using maglev turbines, and now Arizona-based based Maglev Wind Turbine Technologies claims their turbines will have 1000 times the capacity of a traditional turbine. Not everybody is convinced.
posted on Nov 26, 2007 - View this thread

"To never stop fighting means not knowing victory / So give me blank books to fill up with history" sing Adam Kline and Joanna Newsom in The Honey, The Power, The Light [youtube]
posted on Oct 28, 2007 - View this thread

The Solar Decathlon is a just-completed competition in which 20 teams of college and university students competed to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house. View a photo gallery or take video tours of the homes. Inhabitat has been blogging the event - here's their view of Germany's winning entry.
posted on Oct 21, 2007 - View this thread

Earth, 2100 AD. Atmospheric CO₂ has doubled to 1000 ppm. From shore to the horizon, there is but an unending purple color -- a vast, flat, oily purple. No fish break its surface, no birds. We are under a pale green sky, and it has the smell of death and poison. Paleontologist Peter Ward's new book links past mass extinctions to global warming and shows, absent major changes, "Our world is hurtling toward carbon dioxide levels not seen since 60 million years ago, right after a greenhouse extinction." Maybe it's time for a heresy: nuclear energy's green, and renewables aren't.
posted on Oct 9, 2007 - View this thread

But Is It War? A vigorous debate among three conservatives about the limits of post-9/11 executive power.
posted on Sep 7, 2007 - View this thread

Following this 2005 post, this documentary on Osaka "Host Clubs", "The Great Happiness Space" [Google vid 1:15; misleading preview here] is like nothing I've ever seen. Dark and light and wrenching and weird and funny. And dark. Kafka comes to mind for a lot of viewers, but this would fail as fiction. A midpoint shift forces you to confront a reality that is staggeringly complex. It's a kaleidescope of self-awareness and -delusion; compassion and manipulation; candor and deception. Layered, nuanced, and self-referential. The chief host's blog translated somewhat idiosyncratically by google, gives you another perspective [note: not included in the spirit of "LOL Engrish"]. This insider's account of a hostess club, written by a Duke University sociologist, is a lot more predictable and straightforward.
posted on Jul 28, 2007 - View this thread

BYT: A lot of our readers at Brightest Young Things are young women. Is there a main thrust of Vagina Power that you want to communicate directly to them? It was just this morning, on the prompting of a friend, that I found myself examining Alexyss Tylor's Vagina Power again, including our home grown transcript of her vagina power philosophy. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but when I tuned into my favorite website about the D.C. social scene this morning, I fell off my chair. [nsfw]
posted on Jun 25, 2007 - View this thread

'A Different Understanding With the President' The first of four chapters in this week's Washington Post on how Dick Cheney became the most influential and powerful man ever to hold the office of vice president. This series examines Cheney's largely hidden and little-understood role in crafting policies for the War on Terror, the economy and the environment. By Barton Gellman and Jo Becker.
posted on Jun 24, 2007 - View this thread

Solar Tower (text and video). "The rays of sunlight reflected by a field of 600 huge mirrors are so intense they illuminate the water vapour and dust hanging in the air."
posted on May 3, 2007 - View this thread

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

[T]o strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free” social science, or a “free” economy. A “laissez faire” group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can so easily be established because the idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. . . . Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women’s movement it is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not).

Mike Strizki lives in the nation's first solar-hydrogen house. "The technology this civil engineer has been able to string together – solar panels, a hydrogen fuel cell, storage tanks, and a piece of equipment called an electrolyzer – provides electricity to his home year-round, even on the cloudiest of winter days. Mr. Strizki's monthly utility bill is zero – he's off the power grid – and his system creates no carbon-dioxide emissions. Neither does the fuel-cell car parked in his garage, which runs off the hydrogen his system creates."
posted on Mar 16, 2007 - View this thread

Cheap solar power poised to undercut oil and gas. The "tipping point" will arrive when the capital cost of solar power falls below $1 per watt, roughly the cost of carbon power.
posted on Feb 19, 2007 - View this thread

The Authoritarians - Robert Altemeyer's book on authoritarianism is freely available online [via]
posted on Feb 17, 2007 - View this thread

The dirty underbelly -- I'm sick and tired of these hypocritical Hoosier legislators who think that my sex life or relationship status is any of their business. Do I intrude on who they're sleeping with? I didn't, but I'm going to start now. ...Consider this a call to arms gossip. ... -- Bilerico, a GLBT blog in Indiana, fighting their proposed state Constitutional Amendment to ban marriage and all other rights for gay and lesbian couples and families.
posted on Jan 25, 2007 - View this thread

CitizenRe is a solar power rental company for the home. Free to install (!), a monthly rental fee is equal to what would normally be paid to the power company. Video.
posted on Jan 11, 2007 - View this thread

The Edison of our age? Stanford Ovshinsky may not be a household name, but his inventions have the power to change the world.
posted on Jan 1, 2007 - View this thread

Make that bribe a tax deduction The Australian Wheat Board (AWB) [previously] has been found by to have breached UN sanctions on Iraq by paying the former regime almost three hundred million Australian dollars (300,000,000.00 AUD = 235,733,088.15 USD) in illegal “kickbacks” (read bribes). While the Australian Navy was instrumental in enforcing sanctions, at a huge cost to the Australian people (and indeed a far greater cost to Iraq people) this company was doing all it could to prop up Sadam’s regime. Now in the Australian Taxation Office have ruled that the bribes aren’t bribes, and have allowed the AWB to claim them as a tax deduction. Happily for some AWB’s share price surged with the news, so that’s some good news at least. It looks as if US might be taking action.
posted on Dec 20, 2006 - View this thread

A Mall Divided (youtube) - a musical tale of commerce, employment and electrical distribution for our times.
posted on Dec 18, 2006 - View this thread

The KTrak Snowcycle Conversion Kit takes your mountain bike and turns it into a tracked, human-powered snow (or sand) machine, complete with a front ski. Other snow bikes are great at going downhill, like the Hanson Ski-MX Kit or the Winter X Bike Kit, but the KTrak goes up, down and all around.
posted on Dec 13, 2006 - View this thread

The 100 Most Powerful Women in the world has been an education in showing me the beauty inherent in strength, particularly when a woman has embraced her own sense of power. Look at these red lips, these kohl lined eyes, this frank face full of mischief. These are Queens, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Heads of State, powerful government officials, CEO's and more. Just reading their bios tells you so much about who they are and what they believe in. Would a similar collection of 100 men offer as much to ponder over and respect?
posted on Nov 23, 2006 - View this thread

[NSFW] Much of contemporary liberal thought rests on the idea of the Social Contract. In this scheme, we agree to give up a certain amount of freedom in exchange for the protection and opportunity that society provides. Our individual lives mirror this. We defer to others when politeness requires it. We assert ourselves and our needs with pleases and thank yous. Most of daily life has some power dynamic to it, expressed with the subtlety that civilization demands. And what is implicit in daily life is made explicit in the role-playing of BDSM, based on the idea of a Power Exchange, where one party explicitly agrees to give up a certain amount of power to another. For most people who are into this, the “scenes” are circumscribed by rules, usually discussed beforehand, such as appropriate safewords, time limits, etc. For a small subset of this group, the typical safeguards are cast aside and the slave surrenders all aspects of his or her life to the master. The female submissive Polly Peachum has written about this lifestyle in her essay “Violence in the Garden” about her life as a 24-7 slave and the sexual dimensions of that relationship.
posted on Oct 1, 2006 - View this thread

As Labor Day 2006 winds to a close, America's long & twisted history with Organized Labor seems to never come to rest on any one side of the fence, opinion wise. While we hate the idea of the evil CEO crushing the employees underfoot, there's something profoundly un-American about bolshevikism. This excellent collection of political cartoons from Life Magazine from the early decades of the 20th Century explores both sides of the debate, reminding us at the end of the day that nobody loves a fat man.
posted on Sep 4, 2006 - View this thread

WSJ: Moguls of New Media Have nearly a million friends on MySpace and you get $5000 endorsements. Make a comedy podcast with cocktail recipes and you get endorsed by Steve Jobs and get interest from advertisers. Post seemingly impossible self-potraits on Flickr and you get hired by Toyota. The Wall Street Journal looks at these and many more "whos' who of new media". from BlogHer
posted on Aug 1, 2006 - View this thread

Lots of people are not happy with Bechtel Engineering, the giant-sized general contractor and designer of The Big Dig, who are also in trouble for problems with the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal plant. How many nuclear generating stations did Bechtel build?
posted on Jul 19, 2006 - View this thread

Laws for an Outlaw Culture. Robert Greene is an unlikely guru for the Hip Hip Nation - a geeky white freelance writer & filmmaker. But his 48 Laws of Power have been embraced by the movers & shakers in the Hip Hop scene as their path to personal power. He's also written another book you may have heard of, The Art of Seduction. And he's just started his own blog.
posted on Jul 12, 2006 - View this thread

James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper No. 47:

The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many...may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

That extraordinary powers have, under Bush, been accumulated in the "same hands" is now undeniable. For the first time in more than thirty years, and to a greater extent than even then, our constitutional form of government is in jeopardy.

Power is out for around half the people in New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. At around 8:30 this morning, high winds blew a grounding cable onto high-voltage cables in the Otahuhu substation, causing about 1/3 of the load to fail, including all buildings and traffic control in the central city. I guess no one has heard of redundancy, nor learnt from prior mistakes?
posted on Jun 11, 2006 - View this thread

...Bush has been aggressive about declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws -- many of which he says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him alone ... President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. ... Long, eyeopening article laying out what laws have been ignored and why. ...Bush has cast a cloud over 'the whole idea that there is a rule of law," because no one can be certain of which laws Bush thinks are valid and which he thinks he can ignore. 'Where you have a president who is willing to declare vast quantities of the legislation that is passed during his term unconstitutional, it implies that he also thinks a very significant amount of the other laws that were already on the books before he became president are also unconstitutional," ...
posted on Apr 30, 2006 - View this thread

A Feminist Gaming Manifesto. (And part 2 is here.) "So wait, you’re wondering, maybe, why don’t these crazy men-folk just do that? I think the answer is actually pretty straightforward. People who themselves feel marginalized can’t bear the thought that they could be in a position of power wherein they could hurt someone in the same way that they feel hurt. Who out there hasn’t felt terribly marginalized? What happens, then, is there’s this conflation of “you’re doing something that makes me feel excluded or hurt” with “you’re a bad, bad man like those people with the bitch shirts.” You can’t handle that thought, so you try desperately to prove that it’s not the case. Guilt, or fear that you might be guilty, never did anybody any good."
posted on Apr 16, 2006 - View this thread

Will algae defeat global warming? "Fed a generous helping of CO2-laden emissions, courtesy of the power plant's exhaust stack, the algae grow quickly... The cleansed exhaust bubbles skyward, but with 40 percent less CO2... The algae is harvested daily and a combustible vegetable oil is squeezed out: biodiesel".
posted on Apr 14, 2006 - View this thread

Evidence of a slippery slope continued: Newsweek reports that White House counsel Steve Bradbury believes President Bush can order killings on US soil as part of the Terrorist-Surveillance Program^TM. Meanwhile, while Attorney General Gonzales "lashes out" at the media and insists that the TSP^TM is "not a dragnet that sucks in all conversation and uses computer searches to pick out calls of interest," the Washington Post reports it's precisely that -- "computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears" -- and has led to very few leads. (See also discussion of Arlen Specter and the legality of the TSP^TM here.)
posted on Feb 6, 2006 - View this thread

Anti-Defamation League speaks up against the Christianizing of America-- They're calling for a communal strategy for confronting the political and cultural initiatives of religious conservative groups, and naming the Arlington Group, Focus on the Family, The American Family Association and the Family Research Council as some of those responsible for the infrastructures throughout the country designed not just to promote traditional “Christian values,” but to actively pursue that restoration of a Christian nation. Opinions differ, of course. Foxman anticipates them in his speech, Religion in America’s Public Square: Are We Crossing the Line?: ... On one hand, there is an extreme element in the community that believes it is unsafe to confront Christianity. ... There are also those who say that because evangelicals are friends of Israel, “don’t fight them;” “don’t make them angry;” “don’t upset them.” . ...
posted on Nov 17, 2005 - View this thread

Hamster driven micro Power Plants ... the Hamster powered Night Light from the Otherpower.com guys .... also the school project of a London teen ... "Every two minutes Elvis spends on his wheel gives me about 30 minutes talk time on my phone." The teenage inventor was given a C for his project and has been awarded a D overall for the course" Please no Richard Gere jokes OK?
posted on Nov 7, 2005 - View this thread

The Psychology of Tyranny - A 1971 Stanford University experiment seemed to prove that power corrupts, and absolute power corrects absolutely - and perhaps recent world and national events would bear that out. But is it really power that's the problem? A recent study [more from researchers, here] from the Universities of St Andrews and Exeter suggests that it isn't power - but the failure of those who are anti-tyranny to themselves exercise appropriate power and to work together - that is more to blame for tyranny's results. If true, what needs to change to push back against tyranny in the world today? [first post, btw]
posted on Oct 19, 2005 - View this thread

Networking on the Network Started over 10 years ago, long before social web apps became ubiquitous, Phil Agre's Networking on the Network was an introduction to professional networking, using the internet, for graduate students.
The document has grown and evolved to encompass 90 pages of widely applicable advice on building professional relationships and helping others do the same. Much of what he writes is applicable to surviving in any institution.
Reading it feels like being taken aside by an expert practitioner who tells you, "Pssst....hey buddy, here's how things really work."
posted on Oct 7, 2005 - View this thread

Some cool little tube amps. The world's smallest production tube amp and world's Smallest Vacuum Tube hi-fi stereo amplifier. These are too cool.
posted on Aug 27, 2005 - View this thread

Power Cut Shuts Down Iraq Oil Exports ASRA, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq's oil exports were shut down Monday by a power cut that darkened parts of central and southern Iraq, including the country's only functioning oil export terminals, Iraqi and foreign oil officials said.
posted on Aug 22, 2005 - View this thread

45,000 pounds + four 130 foot rotors + up to 200 mph Jet Stream winds = Energy Problem Solved
Like the monster mother of all kites, a company called Sky Windpower (which sports an excellent website about high altitude wind power) has been founded by an Australian engineer with three others to attempt to harness the near limitless windpower of the jet stream with a machine they call an FEG (Flying Electric Generator).
They're currently seeking $4 million to build a 200 kilowatt prototype but still need to get FAA clearance to fly it. The production models would generate 20 megawatts each and would be flown in farms of up to 600 turbines to generate enough power to light up two cities the size of Chicago. Power and control of the huge machines would be handled by a three inch thick tether connected to a winch on a ground station.
Man, I love Popular Science!
posted on Aug 19, 2005 - View this thread

Have you ever thought your boss might be a sociopath? According to some, you just might be right. A recent film called The Corporation actually goes so far as to argue that American-style free markets select for sociopathic tendencies. While some on the left seem all too eager to chime in with their self-righteous “I told you sos,” others on the right dismiss all such notions to defend free markets with open contempt… Which is strange when you consider that free market theory owes its existence to Darwin’s theories of natural selection, which many on the right don't accept. Seriously--help me sort this out, or else I'm going to have to conclude we've all gone crazy.
posted on Aug 3, 2005 - View this thread

Electric power transmission and distribution explosions and fireworks for your Fourth of July weekend.
posted on Jul 2, 2005 - View this thread

LossofPrivacyFilter: 1) Patriot Act Expansion Bill Approved in Secret , which now provides a new ‘administrative subpoena’ authority (that) would let the FBI write and approve its own search orders for intelligence investigations, without prior judicial approval. ...Flying in the face of the Fourth Amendment, this power would let agents seize personal records from medical facilities, libraries, hotels, gun dealers, banks and any other businesses without any specific facts connecting those records to any criminal activity or a foreign agent. ..., and from the Justice Department: 2) Most health care employees can't be prosecuted for stealing personal data, and finally, 3) Citibank admits losing 4 million customer files.
These 3 examples all within the past few days--any others i missed?
posted on Jun 8, 2005 - View this thread

"They [the bipartisan elite] have imposed a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower down." While a lot of people (okay, maybe just me) have criticized David Brooks' column as an only-infrequently-successful attempt to channel Malcom Gladwell for the McCain-Specter set, I think he may have stumbled onto a provocative insight here.
posted on May 29, 2005 - View this thread

eXtreme Democracy : While at the Rocking Personal Democracy Forum last Monday ( what is Personal Democracy ? scroll down ), I ran into none other than Adam Greenfield, at a PDF breakout session on "Extreme Democracy". The conference was notable but the book is a really great read on - well - the future of democracy. Edited by Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe.
posted on May 21, 2005 - View this thread