Mohammed Bah Abba, an engineer and consultant for the UN, has developed a very interesting refrigerator for people without electricity. His invention, the pot-in-pot, is simple to the point of being revolutionary. I’d love to put one of these together just to see what kind of temperature gradient it can produce in hot weather. It wouldn’t work so well in San Diego (not hot enough and too humid), but I bet Las Vegas or another Mojave city would be a good testing ground…
All posts by Chris
It’s good to have allies
Since many folks seem surprised when I tell them about the Bush adminstration’s latest problems with Medicare, jobs, WMD, mercury, and a host of other issues, I figured a link to the House Committee on Government Reform Minority Office was in order.
That’s a mouthful, but basically it’s an inside-the-beltway watchdog group investigating, among other things, the Administration’s duplicitous statements about public policy. (i.e. the aforementioned Lies and Lying Liars.)
Bush Evades Own Trade Ban
From today’s Daily Mislead:
According to a new report, President Bush’s official campaign is selling clothing made in Burma – a country whose goods Bush banned for sale in the U.S. because of their awful human rights, narcotics and sex trafficking record. According to Newsday, “the merchandise sold on www.georgewbushstore.com includes a $49.95 fleece pullover, embroidered with the Bush-Cheney ’04 logo and bearing a label stating it was made in Burma, now Myanmar.
Read the rest and be sure to sign up for the e-mail newsletter. It’s good stuff.
The Bad Space News
It may sound odd, but I’m not too keen on the Bush administration’s new space initiative. On the surface it may seem like everything I’ve asked for from NASA (a coherent direction, emphasis on permanent Moon/Mars colonies). Unfortunately, at its core it suffers from the Bush syndrome: too much pork and not nearly enough direction or funding.
This Space Daily article sums it up much better than I could. I can only hope that once Kerry gets into office he’ll take the rhetoric and make it into a real space program.
The Good Space News
If you haven’t heard of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, take a few moments to peruse their newly-updated Web site. SDSS has been painstakingly mapping a big chunk of the known universe – every star, every galaxy, everything we can see with telescopes.
Best of all, they’re releasing all their data to the public – about 6 terabytes so far (or as Steve Jobs would put it, “two million songs”.) That translates to lots and lots and lots of really neat eye-candy, plus a bunch of fun science projects made possible by this much data.
[Feb 2006 UPDATE: Fixed the links to point to the main Sloan site; deep linking seems to break whenever a new version is launched.]