Stuffis
Still "Brent's pile o' stuff" but at least now there are sections.
Society
Homelessness
Alternative Energy and Transportation
- Belgian train tunnel with solar panels
- Plane + Train
- Bike lane buffers — a nice design for accommodating bike traffic and parking, which is apparently working well in Europe
- New thin-film solar cells can be rolled up for easier transport, and integrated into cloth like a tarp
- Self-driving cars can navigate the road, but can they navigate the law?: even if you require a present, alert driver who can be held responsible, there are going to be lots of tricky legal edge cases
- Europeans now testing road trains (Volvo releases photos): your car joins a "train" of others going the same way, and begins autonomous driving; compared to individual self-driving cars, this is safer and requires a lot less hardware/software to accomplish
- What a cool concept: Solar Highways (Wired article, another Wired article on GE funding, CNN article on snow melting)
- ...or you could put the solar panels above the roadway...
- A Chinese company has come up with a straddling bus concept
- Philips LED light bulb: $60 each (yikes) and they get hot (heatsink built in)
- SunHydro is trying to build a "hydrogen highway" from Maine to Miami
- The QinetiQ Zephyr solar-powered UAV (a.k.a. the "eternal plane")
- Nissan Land Glider concept car — very narrow (2-passenger) all-electric vehicle that leans into turns like a motorcycle
- Micro wind generation with vibrating tense bands or maybe piezoelectric "leaf farms"
- New study at UIUC shows growing for food vs. growing for fuel doesn't have to be either-or: there's lots of land considered "marginal" for food growth that could be used for biofuel stock like switchgrass, irrigated only by rain
- Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does: "This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies."
- Google.org's RE<C (Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal) and RechargeIT (plug-in vehicles) initiatives
Fiscal Responsibility
Demographics
Small Housing
Politics
History
My contact information,
brief autobiography (such as it is), and
family tree.
