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have you seen the CieAura Holographic chips? Check them out. It’s insane. I put one on my back, because I have chronic back pain on the right hip, and it seriously just went away. In 30 seconds. I am such a nerd. I bought a pack of 30 of them. They aren’t that cheap, but way cheaper and better than pain killers.

This is from the CieAura website, to give you an idea of what it’s all about.

“CieAura Pure Relief Holographic Chips provide a safe and effective alternative or supplement to current discomfort. Numerous people suffer from discomfort in problem areas such as knees, backs and shoulders. It has been estimated that almost 80% of the world’s population will suffer from back discomfort at some point in their lives. We believe that CieAura PureRelief Chips can be used to manage back discomfort caused by sprains, muscle strains, headaches & athletic soreness.

When the body is in discomfort, energy naturally refocuses on the affected area. CieAura PureRelief Chips, like the needles in acupuncture, are able to refocus the energy when they are placed on the points of discomfort. ”

I went and set up a website and got some 800 Numbers and i’m on my way. Now I can capture leads online or through the phone and track them to the source from which they originate. The cool thing about Touchfon is that they have inexpensive toll free numbers that I can put my own custom greeting on, and it will email me an mp3 of the voicemails as soon as they come in. And the best part? It shows me the number that called. I even put the numbers in my PPC search ads, and people can call them before they click.

Loveliest of Trees by John Duke

SaiHate Farewell

SaiHate-Vocaloid Farewell

SaiHate-Vocaloid Farewell

Jackson has a lot of restaurants for a town of 10k people. The restaurants scene is full of mid to high end restaurant/bars with great menus and fine cocktails and wine. Steakhouses are everywhere, and they range from crap, to super fine dining. Ten years ago there was only one Sushi restaurant in the whole valley, now you find 5. I recently visited Blu Kitchen, a small chic little spot with very delicious food.

The more I get around in the world, the more I appreciate the food in Jackson Hole. To learn more about Jackson Hole Restaurants go to www.surfthetetons.com

How could a person who has never heard of redbull seriously think they are aware enough to run the country? I just can’t believe it to be true. I heard about redbull 15 years ago and stopped drinking it over 5 years ago because I believe it to be pretty hard on the system. How can this be true?

^{eSolar employees put the final touches on the mirrors used to focus sunlight.}

eSolar is a startup company which is in the process of building solar thermal power plants. It was one of the first startups to earn financial support from Google. This morning it received $130 millions dollars in funding from Google.Org, Bill Gross’ Idealab, Oak Investment Partners, and other smaller investors. The company says it will have a power plant up and running later this year in southern California.

Designed to address the complex issues surrounding large or utility-scale power projects, eSolar’s distributed solar thermal plants achieve economies of scale at 33 MW, and are modularly scaled to fit the needs of large and small utilities.

In order to deliver on the promise of Big Solar, the typical utility-scale installation faces huge construction costs and requires large tracts of real estate, combined with expensive transmission line improvements to bring the power out of the deserts and into the cities. eSolar’s modular approach stands in direct contrast to this ‘bigger is better’ strategy. eSolar has replaced expensive steel, concrete, and brute force with inexpensive computing power and elegant algorithms. This new method of installing a solar power plant minimizes costly civil construction and the use of heavy equipment, dramatically reducing project cost and deployment time.

Centering on eSolar’s 33 MW pre-fab form-factor, the company’s modular design translates to minimal land requirements. The company’s solar power plant solutions are tailored to fit local resources and produce a low environmental footprint, favoring a straightforward siting and permitting process. Myriad locations combined with a multitude of interconnection options mean that eSolar can deliver more clean, carbon free power where it is needed: near the cities and towns where it is consumed.

Via: Press Release

Straight out of the heart of Copenhagen, comes the Triobike, an innovative cargo bike, that can transform itself into a regular bike and a stroller. It’s no surprise that this bike comes form Copenhagen — the city is filled with urban bikers. With the Triobike, you can transport your kids to school in the cargo bike, then, instead of riding the cargo bike around all day you merely pull out a front wheel from under the cargo bay, put it on the front forks. You can then ride a regular bike or use the cargo section as a stroller.

There’s a short video showing how the bike transforms here.

In Denmark the bike costs about 19,000 kroner for the basic setup, which is about $4000 U.S.

Via: Copenhagenize

In an ambitious move, a California utility plans to create a massive, distributed “powerplant” by installing a total of 2 square miles of solar cells on the roofs of businesses. Southern California Edison plans to install 250 megawatts’ worth of solar power, generating enough electricity to power 162,000 homes.

Green Wombat reports:

It’s a potentially game-changing move, one that could lower the cost of solar cells as manufacturers ramp up production to meet the utility’s schedule of installing a megawatt-a-week of arrays until it reaches the 250-megawatt target. That alone is more than United States’ entire production of solar cells in 2006 and will generate as much electricity as a small coal-fired power plant, albeit with no greenhouse gas emissions.

The $875 million initiative also marks the first big foray into so-called distributed energy by a major utility. Instead of building a centralized power station and the expensive transmission system needed to transmit electricity to the power grid, Edison will connect clusters of solar arrays into existing neighborhood circuits. A significant hurdle for the massive megawatt solar power plants planned for California’s Mojave Desert is the need in some cases to build multi billion-dollar transmission systems through environmentally sensitive lands to bring the electricity to coastal metropolises.

The initiative will work like this: Edison will lease the warehouse rooftop space from building owners in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The utility will outsource the installation, and retain ownership of the solar cells.

This plan will be exciting if it is achieved, and it will become a model for other utilities to follow.

Via: Green Wombat

Wind power is breaking new records in Spain, accounting for just over 40 percent of all electricity consumed during a brief period last weekend. As heavy winds lashed Spain on Saturday evening wind parks generated 9,862 megawatts of power which translated to 40.8 percent of total consumption. Between Friday and Sunday wind power accounted for an average of 28 percent of all electricity demand in Spain. Spain’s wind power generation equaled that of hydropower for the first time in 2007.

In July the government approved legislation that will allow offshore wind parks to be set up along the nation’s vast coastline in an effort to boost the use of renewable energy sources. While more expensive than land-based wind farms, offshore wind parks can take advantage of stronger, steadier coastal breezes.

Spain, which along with Germany and Denmark, is among the three biggest producers of wind power in the 27-nation European Union, is aiming to triple the amount of energy it derives from renewable sources by 2020.

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Snooping at the passport records of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain by the government a private company contracted by the government is a big deal, but it’s the kind of thing that some politicians are pushing to make easier and more widespread. How? With “Real ID” — the national ID card program that, once upon a time, was the kind of thing that Republicans and Democrats opposed, but now is the greatest new Big Brother kool-ade flavor favored by Republican politicians and neoconservative “thinkers.”

From Ars Technica, we get the quote of the week:

As I’ve reported previously, the major problem with Real ID is that local DMV and law enforcement officials will have access to an unprecedented amount of sensitive information on anyone with a Real ID—scanned copies of any documents used to establish identity, like birth certificates, bank statements, pay stubs, property tax bills, and so on, not to mention driving histories from other states. Now imagine all of that data in the hands of a crooked sheriff who’s fighting off a reformist challenger in a hotly contested election. Do you really want to live in that world?

No.

And maybe we should add to the scenario Jon Stokes paints: private companies contracted by governments. After all, the passport breaches were not done by government employees, they were perpetrated by private individuals working for a private corporation.

In this day and age where our government “outsources” (read: privatizes) so much of its own business, from school lunches to prisons to heavily armed mercenaries in Iraq, where is the line drawn on privacy in a Real ID world?

Time was that this was a country of people free to live their own lives. Now we have a government that seems bent on controlling and tracking us in all we do, as though we were guilty until proven innocent.

The tipping point for this political agenda was 9/11, when foreign nationals already on CIA watch lists managed to sneak in and skyjack their way into murderous infamy. The Bush Administration, with general Republican enthusiasm, reacted by pushing for radical new powers to spy not on foreign threats, but on Americans — none of whom had anything to do with 9/11.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

-1984, by George Orwell (Chapter 1)

Greg Mitchell tries to claim in Editor & Publisher that many major papers five years ago were in fact against the war on Iraq.

You may be surprised to learn that, precisely five years ago, at least one-third of the top newspapers in this country came out against President Bush taking us to war at that time. Many of the papers may have fumbled the WMD coverage, and only timidly raised questions about the need for war, but when push came to shove five years ago they wanted to wait longer to move against Saddam, or not move at all….

…Once equivocal editorial pages got straight to the point. “This war crowns a period of terrible diplomatic failure,” The New York Times argued, “Washington’s worst in at least a generation. The Bush administration now presides over unprecedented American might. What it risks squandering is not Americans’ power, but an essential part of our glory.”

Other papers were even more blunt. The Sun of Baltimore, consistently one of the most passionate dissenters on the war, began their editorial with the sentence, “This war is wrong. It is wrong as a matter of principle, but, more importantly, it is wrong as a matter of practical policy.”

USA Today asked Bush to finally disclose risks, costs, and democratic government estimates for Iraq while the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wondered “what ‘the peaceful entry’ of 280,000 troops would look like.” The Arizona Republic in Phoenix said that Bush and his “coalition of the willing,” with prodding by the French, “have left the United Nations in tatters.”

Well editorial pages are certainly where people turn to first, right? Never mind the war-fostering headlines on the front pages. Never mind the lazy absence of any meaningful fact-checking on Administration claims.

Never mind ignoring the sometimes massive anti-war demonstrations in New York and elsewhere.

No, the editors clucked and tutted and therefore should get a pass on their crappy coverage.

Any wonder why newspapers are still in trouble and mistrusted by so many?

Send this around. Please.

OLEDs are thin, organic materials sandwiched between two electrodes, which illuminate when an electrical charge is applied. They’re so thin, that they could be applied to rooms as a type of wall paper to glow at the touch of a finger or when someone enters the room. Like LEDs they produce light very efficiently. But OLEDs also have to potential to be made at a very low cost, because they can be printed “roll-to-roll” like a newspaper. GE recently demonstrated the first OLEDs to be made in this manner — the researchers worked for four years on this project. See more at the GE Blog.

Via: Groovy Green

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Masanori Naruse jogs every day, collects miniature cars and feeds birds in his backyard, but he’s proudest of the way his home and 2200 others in Japan get electricity and heat water - with power generated by a hydrogen fuel cell. The technology - which draws energy from the chemical reaction when hydrogen combines with oxygen to form water.

Developers say fuel cells for homes produce one-third less of the pollution that causes global warming than conventional electricity generation does. Their plain grey fuel cell is about the size of a suitcase and sits just outside their door next to a tank that turns out to be a water heater. In the process of producing electricity, the fuel cell gives off enough warmth to heat water for the home.

The oxygen that the fuel cell uses comes from the air. The hydrogen is extracted from natural gas by a device called a reformer in the same box as the fuel cell. But a byproduct of that process is poisonous carbon monoxide. So another machine in the grey box adds oxygen to the carbon monoxide to create carbon dioxide, which - though it contributes to global warming - is not poisonous.

The entire process produces less greenhouse gas per watt than traditional generation. And no energy is wasted transporting the electricity where it’s actually going to be used.

Nearly every home in Japanese cities is supplied with natural gas for cooking or heating, which could make it relatively easy to spread fuel cell technology there. The potential for widespread use of fuel cells in bigger or more sparsely settled countries is less certain. Many American homes don’t have gas service, for example.

“There are not any real show-stoppers for this technology being used in the US,” said electrical engineering professor Roger Dougal at the University of South Carolina at Columbia.

Dougal said fuel cells are no more hazardous than any stove or water heater. Their major drawback is cost.

“Ultimately, I expect that some fraction of homes will use this technology, but it will be a very long time before a sizable fraction does,” he said in an email.

Naruse is paying $9 500 (about R74 000) for a 10-year lease on a test fuel cell for his home south-west of Tokyo from Matsushita, which sells Panasonic brand products, plans to offer fuel cells commercially in 2009.

Other Japanese companies working on fuel cells for homes include Toyota Motor, which is developing fuel-cell vehicles, and electronics maker Toshiba. Automaker Honda Motor is working with Plug Power, a fuel cell company in the US, to test a home fuel cell generator that also provides hydrogen as fuel for fuel cell vehicles.

Honda hopes domestic use of fuel cell generators will help make fuel cell vehicles become more widespread because owners can refuel at home. It plans to start marketing the FCX Clarity fuel cell vehicle this year in California; it will lease for about $600 a month.

Fuel cells are expensive in part because they don’t last very long. The latest model from Matsushita, for example, lasts about three years.

But the technology is improving. Matsushita says the savings from using fuel cell-generated power will vary by household and climate, but it promises a cost drop of about $50 a month.

Naruse’s family - with three TV sets, a dishwasher, clothes washer, dryer, personal computer and air conditioner - saves about $95 a month. At the same time, conventionally generated electricity remains available to them, should the power generated by their fuel cell run low.

The Japanese government is so bullish on the technology it has earmarked $309-million a year for fuel cell development and plans for 10 million homes - about one-fourth of Japanese households - to be powered by fuel cells by 2020.

Via: IOL Technology

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More at http://www.theuptake.org “Lobbying is the great evil of modern times” says Brandon Hodge, owner of two stores in Austin, Texas. His locally owned stores “Big Top Candy Shop” and “Monkey See Monkey Do” don’t get a tax break from the Austin City Council, yet the council hands out tax breaks to large corporations.

As Texas votes today, Hodge explains why he doesn’t pay attention to the commercials the candidates put out and why the candidates are not always at fault when there’s “dirty tricks”

Author: Veracifier
Keywords: clinton obama texas sanantonio san antonio primary caucus lobbying taxes
Added: March 4, 2008

More at http://www.theuptake.org The UpTake and Salimah Ebrahim interview a family of Korean-Canadians going out to eat with their Austin-residing daughter in Lockhart, Texas. They speak to how electing Obama or Clinton will change the view of the U.S. abroad and how the next President should deal with a possible change in leadership in North Korea.

Author: Veracifier
Keywords: obama hillary clinton texas austin primary caucus
Added: March 3, 2008