Welcome to Lightning Car Company – The UK’s Premier Electric Sports Car via Inhabitat
A fully electric right-hand drive convertible that does 0-60 in four seconds? I’m drooling right now.
So they’re asking for a deposit that comes out to over $100,000 based on the horrific weakness of the dollar against the pound. It looks like an old Jaguar, from back when they knew how to make a pretty car.
They do plan to send them over to the US. Can someone loan me some cash?
We finally made it down to the U St. farmers market on Saturday. It happens every Saturday, 9am-1pm, at 14th and U St NW. I was quite pleased with the visit. We got some really nice vegetables that the wife turned into brunch shortly thereafter, and I got some great apples. I don’t remember what type they are – nothing I’d ever heard of. But they’re very good. I just ate one this morning.
I’d like to do more shopping at markets like that. I don’t know how local the actual farmers are, but certainly more local than almost all the produce you find in the grocery store. There’s a big debate among hippies as to whether to buy organic or local. Obviously both is best, but if you have to choose one, it’s not clear which is the better choice. I tend to think that local produce is better, since it uses fewer resources in transit. But I’m open to other arguments.
EERE Consumer’s Guide: Do-It-Yourself Home Energy Audits
You can easily conduct a home energy audit yourself. With a simple but diligent walk-through, you can spot many problems in any type of house. When auditing your home, keep a checklist of areas you have inspected and problems you found. This list will help you prioritize your energy efficiency upgrades.
Via Lifehacker, the Department of Energy is offering tips on increasing your energy efficiency at home. This is especially pertinent to me after getting a $174 electric bill from Pepco. Our house was profiled in the local DC paper not long after the condo conversion, and the writer gushed about the environmentally friendly principles of the condos. Aside from meaningless EnergyStar certifications (Nearly everything meets the requirements these days – there is talk of making them stricter) and pretty good natural lighting, there is very little about our place that is environmentally friendly. Sometimes I wish we had thought more about that when we were buying, but we really fell in love with the place, and it wasn’t until after we moved in that I really thought about it.
Anyway, I think our electric bill is high because Pepco is not actually reading our meter. They are doing estimated meter readings, and I think they are way off. I think they are doing a real reading at the end of this month, so I don’t really expect to pay anything for electricity for a month or two. I went and looked at the six meters – one for each condo, one for common areas – and ours was turning much, much more slowly than any but the common areas. We don’t run the air as much as we might, and we set it higher than many people would, so I think we use a relatively small amount.
I do actually have a point here, and that is that you should check your house for wasted energy. You could probably save money on your electric bill, and you could probably help lower greenhouse gas emissions and all sorts of things that are generally good for the planet. And you can probably do all this without any lifestyle changes or great expense.
Boing Boing: Al Gore’s impressively messy office
It won’t be the first time, nor the last, that I’ll complain about Al Gore. I’m still angry that he and his advisors weren’t able to win a very, very winnable election against an opponent who has done very, very terrible things to our country.
I am not impressed with Al Gore’s messy office. Yes, I know that they say really smart people are often messy. I don’t care. I’m not here to debate his IQ. I am here to debate his dedication to his cause. Does the man who is becoming synonymous with saving the environment really need three monitors and a television running? Does he really need hard copies of all those books and papers? And why not a reusable dry-erase board?
This is why you lost, Al. On the rare occasions when you have a message, you can’t stick with it.
I’m not really sure why Al Gore pisses me off so much. Maybe I just need a nap.
Energy Roundup – WSJ.com : Look for the Carbon Label
The label will show how many grams of carbon dioxide were emitted in the process of making the product and delivering it to store shelves. Companies joining the scheme will vow to cut that footprint in two years or risk getting booted from the project
Hopefully this idea will cross the pond soon. I really like the idea. Inform consumers about the real environmental cost of what they’re consuming, and let them make their own decisions. Don’t force people to change, but give them an explicit picture and let them choose for themselves.
Contrary to the hysterical first comment (And I mean “hysterical” both in the “I thought it was really funny” and the “the person who wrote it needs to relax” kind of ways), this is a very Republican/conservative/non-hippie way of trying to bring about change. Instead of adding regulations and forcing people to cut down on carbon emissions, they’re informing people of the facts, giving some incentive to change, and then walking away. The commenter obviously has a knee-jerk reaction to anything related to global warming and the environment and would rather spew a canned response than actually think about what’s really going on.
On a related note, a friend mentioned the Wall Street Journal blogs to me last week, and I just started reading them. I like them so far, and it’s nice to see the WSJ offering more free online content.
Treehugger: What Can Robots Learn From Rats?
The project seeks to create the “Inspiratâ€, a prototype climbing robot. Yes, in case you were wondering, the name does come from “inspiration†and “ratâ€.
Come on, tell me you can’t get excited about a project that combines robots, saving the world, and awesome moving rat x-rays. You have no choice. if you don’t think this is cool, then there’s just something wrong with you.
Apparently some scientists are more or less making movies of rats climbing things, except the movies are series of x-rays. They hope to use the rat climbing technique to make robots that can climb. Treehugger is interested because “a robot capable of performing inspection or maintenance activities in previously unreachable locations could extend the lifespan of buildings and structures, perhaps even enable new green construction materials to be developed.” That seems like an awfully optimistic outlook to me, but they’re the treehuggers, and I’m just a complainer.
It’s funny – you occasionally see these experiments where we take some natural organism that’s really good at something, and try and mimic the technique it uses with a machine. This seems like common sense to me. A few hundred thousand years of evolution probably got a few things right – we might try at least starting with all that prior knowledge.
Harvey Manning, 1925-2006: Author of hiking guides ‘was a force of nature’
Helen Cherullo, publisher of The Mountaineers Books, recalled getting an early e-mail from him. It started, in all caps, “WHY I AM PISSED OFF … .”
I’m not a hiker, although I do enjoy a bit of hiking on occasion. One of Harvey Manning’s daughters is one of my Nano mentees. From this article, he sounds like a cool guy. One of the early environmentalists, he did a lot to protect the woods he loved to walk in.
Most of Manning’s writings were done on a typewriter, and always on recycled paper — usually with something else printed on the back, Cherullo said.
That’s great, the idea of sending a manuscript to your publisher, typed up on the back of your grocery list or a note to your family. I imagine many publishers would flip out, but I guess his was a little more tolerant.
Still, with an estimated nine years of landfill space left, councils throughout the UK are faced with a tough decision about what to do with the UK’s waste
Okay, I know England has much less space than we do. But I’ll bet that fifty years ago they didn’t think they’d be running out of landfill space. It’ll happen here, eventually. I know I’ve been making a conscious effort to throw less away. I’ve been trying to recycle more, and half the food I eat is fresh vegetables, so anything that I don’t eat goes down the disposal. But we Americans throw tons and tons of stuff away all the time, and it’s going to come back to haunt us eventually. You know you saw the Simpsons episode where they had to move Springfield because there was too much trash. Sure, it was funny. But it won’t be nearly as funny when it happens somewhere near you.
How to Make Paper – a photoset on Flickr Link via Lifehacker
Paper making is a science in the same way cooking is. You learn the rules, which are hardly ever solid, then you improvise and improve and make it your own.
This seems like the perfect thing to do with old bank and credit card statements.
So, some really smart people at Cornell have created organic LEDs that can both emit light, and create energy from light. This makes a lot of sense – one doesn’t need nearly as many light-producing devices when it’s bright and sunny outside, but those lazy regular light bulbs just sit there during the day, mocking the environment. Even the fancy CFLs don’t do anything useful when they’re not turned on.
I’ve always thought we should do more of this – collect energy that’s already there when we don’t need it so we don’t have to buy as much from the power company when we do. Efficient appliances are great, but appliances that gather some or all of the energy they need to run are even better.