| Wednesday, November 27, 2002 |  |
| Hydrogen Economy |
 Joi Ito talks about the Hydrogen Economy: "The picture above is ECD's vision of the Hydrogen Economy. Get Carbon out of the picture. Reduce the cycle to the basic elements of the universe. Photons creating energy to break H2O into Hydrogen and Oxygen. Oxygen goes back to the atmosphere and the Hydrogen is stored and transported in the Hydride material. The Hydrogen is later extracted to create energy through combustion or through the creation of electrical energy with a fuel cell. This electricity can be stored in a Hydride battery which is also based on Hydrogen. The electricity obviously can be used for propulsion or be converted into meta-energy, or information. Photons->Hydrogen->Electrons->Bits thatÂ’s all we need. No CO2, fossil fuels, Uranium or any of the non-big-bang stuff please. Oh and by the way, the basic material and the phenomenon used to store hydrogen in a solid, the convert hydrogen in to electricity and the store electricity in hydride batteries is the based on the same basic science."[ Energy | 2002-11-27 17:42 | 5 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Environmentally Friendly Sex |
| And now for the Greenpeace Guide to Environmentally-Friendly Sex. They're only half kidding. In brief, do it during the day to save electricity. Don't involve any genetically engineered fruit. If you're gonna do it in the yard, make sure there are no pesticides in the grass. Don't wear anything PVC or vinyl, but rubber or leather is good. And take a shower together to conserve water. [ Nature | 2002-11-27 17:51 | 4 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Build your own Hobbit Hole |
 This guy is working on building his own house in a hobbit hole constructed out of concrete pipes. Well, I've always had a fantasy about having an underground house, but maybe not quite like that.[ Stories | 2002-11-27 18:06 | 9 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| A nest of piracy - aka a LIBRARY |
| Jon Udell says: "I was shocked to discover a nest of pirates yesterday, operating brazenly right here in my hometown. They were gathered in a large nondescript building, reading and talking quietly and in some cases listening to music. Some kind of social club, perhaps? Yes, but with a profoundly subversive theme: "sharing" content. This establishment houses large collections of books, magazines, audiotapes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs. And it "shares" these with its patrons. I watched in amazement as people left the building carrying armloads of these content assets, which they "borrow" without paying a nickel to the copyright holders. It's frightening, really. Who knew?" [ Information | 2002-11-27 22:29 | 1 comment | PermaLink ] More > |
| Weblog exchange |
| Dave Winer announces that Radio Userland, a popular weblogging program, has a new feature of being able to export all posted entries into a standard format, RSS 2.0. RSS is traditionally the format used for syndicating streams of news postings, but 2.0 is flexible enough to store a whole weblog. I'm going to look into implementing that feature, and hopefully it is flexible enough to store weblogs created in my NewsLog program as well. I'm a bit worried about whether it can handle the pictures. Anyway, what this kind of thing can mean is an easy way of moving from one weblog software to another, an easy way of backing up the contents of your weblog, and it opens the door to programs that can browse freely through the content of many weblogs. [ Programming | 2002-11-27 22:29 | 0 comments | PermaLink ] |