If you like numbers and supernatural drama, take a look at the new show on FOX, Touch. The stories center around a speechless autistic boy, the red thread and interconnectedness. And it's about choices and trust. It's extremely well-written and well acted, tapping into both that which is intellectual and deeply emotional. You can watch the pilot and the only two episodes here.
Donald Sadoway, a professor at MIT, has helped develop a new type of battery, and he proposes that such a device is critically needed for America to make use of sustainable energy technologies such as wind and solar:
If we're going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can't just conserve our way out. we can't just drill our way out. We can't bomb our way out. We're going to do it the old fashioned American way: we're going to invent our way out working together.He starts the talk discussing the history of the battery. The problem is that there is no battery yet available to meet today's main needs: "uncommonly high power, long service lifetime and super low cost." (min 4). He indicates that it needs to be made out of abundant elements--"dirt cheap." His proposed liquid-metal battery consists of magnesium, antimony and salt (min 10). He adds that prototypes have worked well, and they have "no moving parts . . . minimum regulation . . . no thermal runaway . . . designed to work at elevated temperature that come from current surges . . . reduced cost by producing fewer larger units . . . "
As a new user of an iPad2, I was wondering why I can't use Flash? I had read in several places that it was about money, not technology Here is Apple's explanation, which makes the claim that it is about technology.
A harassed driver named Terrance Huff was lied to and threatened by of a police officer named Michael Reichert outside of the city of Collinsville, Illinois. Huff is also a filmmaker, and he has offered us this vivid lesson in how the police sometimes lie.
Glenn Greenwald compares the danger of government secrecy with the dangers of excessive disclosure of government secrets:
The harms from excessive governmental secrecy vastly outweigh the harms from excessive disclosures; they’re not even in the same universe That’s why WikiLeaks is such a vital and important movement. It’s also why I have zero respect for those who so vehemently denounced WikiLeaks’ supposed disclosure recklessness without devoting even a fraction of the same rage to the obsessive, anti-democratic, dangerous government secrecy regime being not only maintained, but vigorously increased, even a full decade after the 9/11 attacks. Such critics have little interest in issues of transparency v. secrecy; their manifest agenda (like the often-overlapping American “terrorism expert” industry: more on them in the next couple days) is to serve the state, demonize its adversaries, and protect its interests. That’s what indiscriminate secrecy achieves, and it’s why such people are so rarely bothered by it.