This week's episode of scienceNOW is probably the best yet. Hydrogen fuel cells. Supercomputing art projects. And proof of global warming!

NOVA scienceNOW

Julian Beever is an English artist who is famous for his art on the pavements of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium. It's peculiarity? Beever gives his drawings an anamorphosis view, his images are drawn in such a way which gives them three dimensionality when viewing from the correct angle.

COOL!

3D street drawings. Too cool!

Congressional leaders of both parties have signed off on a proposal, being considered in Washington this week, to start Daylight Saving Time on the first Sunday in March and end on the last Sunday of November. They say it would save energy.

dUh! Why not just extend it the whole year round?

Congress to add 2 months to Daylight Savings Time

What they're all seeing is nothing less than the future of the World Wide Web. Suddenly, hordes of volunteer programmers are taking it upon themselves to combine and remix the data and services of unrelated, even competing sites. The result: entirely new offerings they call "mash-ups." They're the Web versions of Reese's ("Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate!") Peanut Butter Cups.

This is one of the driving forces behind my strategies surrounding Physician Integration (backing P4P) and RPM. In the next few years, you'll see combinations of services that amount to new value chains and new businesses. The prerequisite for this is building interfaces (APIs) that allow people to build on what databases and services you already have. Not only is this good for you, since it expedites your own internal application and product development lifecycles (and maintenance as well), but enables others to unlock value from your assets, which you will surely benefit from.

When thinking about how best to position AMHC's technology resources for the near term, I'm struggling mightily with demonstrating this value to current business owners.

Also, I'm tired of getting my puns ripped off, since I've been referencing the Reese's line for about 6 months now when I describe the potential partnerships we've been trying to spin up.

Mix, Match, And Mutate

The greens, hawks, and farmers helped convince the Senate to add an ethanol provision to the energy bill—now awaiting action by a House-Senate conference committee—that would require refiners to more than double their use of ethanol to 8 billion gallons per year by 2012. The provision is the latest installment of the ethanol subsidy, a handout that has cost American taxpayers billions of dollars during the last three decades, with little to show for it. It also shovels yet more federal cash on the single most subsidized crop in America, corn.

I'm pretty certain that the anti-ethanol article that I meme'd here is being generated as a salvo targeting these groups and probably aiming squarely at ADM, the nation's largest corn producer. I'm all for battling it out from a market perspective, but with so much at stake, is it really worthwhile to battle ideologies?

Of course, it really gets thick when you see this:

The two scientists calculated all the fuel inputs for ethanol production—from the diesel fuel for the tractor planting the corn, to the fertilizer put in the field, to the energy needed at the processing plant—and found that ethanol is a net energy-loser. According to their calculations, ethanol contains about 76,000 BTUs per gallon, but producing that ethanol from corn takes about 98,000 BTUs. For comparison, a gallon of gasoline contains about 116,000 BTUs per gallon. But making that gallon of gas—from drilling the well, to transportation, through refining—requires around 22,000 BTUs.

Now don't make me whip out my economist hat and tear that to pieces. There's no fucking way that gasoline is nearly 1/5 the energy cost to produce than ethanol. Not unless you are not factoring in things like economies of scale, depreciation, and existing plant.

The ethanol subsidy is worse than you can imagine.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

The parellels between Steve and I are sometimes uncanny. I hope to do him one better though, since I learned a lot of these lessons before I turned 30.

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

Farmers, businesses and state officials are investing millions of dollars in ethanol and biofuel plants as renewable energy sources, but a new study says the alternative fuels burn more energy than they produce.

Idiots. ALL energy processing will yield less than what it takes to produce. That's called physics. The points are:

1) Is the source sustainable, renewable, or non-destructive to the environment?
2) Is the yield sufficiently high enough to make it worthwhile, GIVEN #1 above is true.

Petroleum has been proven time and time again to be massively inefficient as a source of energy. It takes trillions invested to get it out of the ground, transport it, process it, distribute it, and then consume it. All the while, it is unsustainable, contributes mightily to the destruction of our environment, and is the second leading source of instability in the world (only to fundamentalist religion). Even if it was 2x more 'efficient' than other techniques, it would still SUCK ASS because of these attributes.

I predict the transition to renewable sources of energy will be mired in spin, FUD, and political stonewalling the likes of which we haven't seen even in the movie/music industry. Meanwhile, people, plants, and animals will suffer and die all in the name of circumventing progress.

Study Says Ethanol Not Worth the Energy

I'm having a lot of fun with this.

Church Sign Generator

For 301 days, hockey fans have waited for this day — the day when sanity finally prevailed and the sport and its players were able to agree on a common ground and announce that a new collective bargaining agreement had been struck.

Ten burning questions about the NHL's CBA

he NHL and the players' association reached an agreement in principle on a new labor deal, ending a lockout that wiped out last season, the sides announced in statements Wednesday.

...
Commissioner Gary Bettman warned in February when he canceled the season that the offers the union passed up were better than any it would see once a year of hockey was lost.

It's official. And yes, the line starts here to punch Bob Goodenow in the face.

GAME [almost] ON!

NHL, players' union reaches agreement in principle