Deana sent this article about a power-generating backpack that turns the up-and-down motion of walking into electricity. According to the article, “The energy you exert could be offset by carrying an extra snack, which is nothing compared to weight of extra batteries.” Nice.
All posts by Chris
gettin’ hitched, California style
Ah, finally my state does something to be proud of. At least the Senate and Assembly have, by approving the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act. Now we’ll see if our Guv’nor is a better man that I think he is, because he has to sign or veto it in the next 30 days or it will become law despite him.
As an aside, I’m really glad that Marriage Protection is finally being used in the true sense, rather than the ironic way it’s been used by the religious right. (i.e. this actually does protect the right to marry, not protect the status quo.)
UPDATE: OK, maybe not. Our governor is a wingnut.
fafblog vs. feds
Once again, Fafblog sums up my thoughts better than I could do myself.
bq. If only there existed some sort of federal agency for emergency management, perhaps under the supervision of a cabinet-level department for securing the homeland! In the absence of such powers and resources, what is a chief executive to do but bolster morale as best he can through boisterous jokes and heartily-staged photo ops?
What indeed?
enablers
I can’t believe it took me this long. I just realized that videophones, which I normally consider to be a nice-to-have addition to voice conversation (or chat), are an amazing leap forward for deaf person. In fact, it would probably make sense to offer a video-only version of such things, to save the bandwidth of a useless audio channel.
How many other “nice-to-have” features are we ignoring, instead of enabling uses we didn’t expect?
hurricanes and climate change
The question of hurricanes and their relationship to climate change (“global warming”) has come up a few times recently, so I’m making a few notes here:
“Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years”:http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature03906.html,
(abstract) from Nature.
“The links between hurricanes and climate change”:http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/global_warming/page.cfm?pageID=1529,
from the Union of Concerned Scientists.
It certainly looks like the models of cyclone strength as related to sea surface temperature are well developed and useful in predicting future trends. I personally think they provide enough support for a causal link meme, namely “these storms are getting worse because of global warming”, even if that meme gets oversimplified in transmission.