Archive for 2010
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »The Glass Just Might Be Greener On The Other Side
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 13, 2010 by admin in Clean & Green
Saturday, November 13th, 2010Thanks to recent work at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory, someday soon even your windows may be solar collectors.
We recently touched on a brilliant idea involving turning the world’s highways into solar collectors, but what if you could turn virtually anything into a solar collector, just by covering it with a thin transparent film? That’s just one crazy idea that may soon be possible because of recent research at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Working with a semiconducting polymer spiked with Fullerenes, the scientists were able to create a thin film that is effectively transparent, could efficiently generate charge and charge separation, and is scalable to industrial production levels. Existing transparent photovoltaic materials are either slightly tinted like PVGlaze architectural glass, or only partially transparent like Taiyo See-through Solar. In the latter case because the material is created with laser etching that alternates the photovoltaic material with a truly transparent material. The real innovation with the Los Alamos project lies in the fact that the material is fabricated by creating a micron-sized flow of water droplets across a thin layer of the polymer-fullerene solution, which then evaporates, leaving a nano-scale honeycomb pattern that could efficiently absorb light and facilitate electrical conductivity. A material like this could greatly enhance ideas like this Italian greenhouse project that both grows food and collects solar power. Or imagine if the material evolved to a point where it could be applied to existing buildings without significantly changing their appearance. Although there are already a lot of strategies out there for building-integrated photovoltaics , including the possibility of photovoltaic “paint”, this new technology may make even more crazy ideas possible. Imagine if you could solarize your house just buy spraying it with a transparent film…
Will Facebook E-Mail Be A G-Mail Killer? Who Cares?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on November 12, 2010 by admin in Technology
Friday, November 12th, 2010Why anyone would use either as their primary e-mail service escapes me. And using a Microsoft Office product through a web browser, via a Facebook account is sort of like pouring gasoline down your horse’s throat, poking his eye with a cattle prod, and yelling at it to get on the freeway
You’ve probably heard by now that Facebook will be announcing a full-fledged web e-mail service with POP access and Microsoft Office Web Apps integration on Monday. Unless – ironically – you’ve been on Facebook all day, because they themselves are saying nothing about it on the site as of this writing. So, with the tech press being as predictable as it is (apologies to Mr. Arrington, at least he breaks the stories), everyone is of course debating whether the new Facebook service is a “Google Killer”. Which is an absurdly framed question, in my opinion. Yes, Facebook and Google are in a battle to dominate the internet in various ways, but I will eat poop on the day that Facebook gets search right or Google gets social networking right. Of course everyone with a Facebook account will activate an available username@facebook.com option. And of course this will siphon in millions in ad revenue and put a big ding in Hotmail, Yahoo, and Google e-mail ad placement dollars. But will that mean that Facebook e-mail will “kill” G-Mail? I personally doubt it, for several reasons. First of all, because I know an astounding number of otherwise intelligent people who still use Hotmail or Yahoo as their primary e-mail accounts. And secondly, of the larger group of people that I know who use G-Mail – especially if they use Google Docs – the last thing in the world they’re going to do is give up the reliable functionality of Google’s cloud services to use a Microsoft Office product through a web browser, via a Facebook account. Forgive me, but in my opinion that’s like pouring gasoline down your horse’s throat, poking his eye with a cattle prod, and yelling at it to get on the freeway. But ultimately, I remain befuddled as to why people would use G-Mail or Facebook as a primary e-mail provider in the first place. Facebook is the company that helps you build a trusted network of friends and then tells you the reason you can’t export their contact info is to protect them from you. Unless THEY are giving them to another service, which then lets you export them. And Google? Aside from the fact that from day one they’ve indexed your e-mails so they can place ads next to them, they are in many ways Facebook’s strongest competitor not so much in terms of services offered, as in the realm of corporate deceipt. In their founding documents they said “we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers“. Two years later they introduced advertising to their results, and now derive the vast majority of their revenue from ad services. In terms of how to access e-mail, I still use a mail client and my own mail-server accounts. I guess I have the advantage of owning domains and offering reseller hosting, but this is remarkably easy to set up if you need web-based communication, and your hosting company doesn’t scour your files as a prerequisite to storing them for you. Ah well. To each their own I guess. One thing I must admit I am looking forward to though, is the first friends that get lost in FB’s interface and post an excruciatingly private e-mail on someone’s wall. You know it will be happening in the first week.
Why Can’t This Headline Contain The Word [Expletive Deleted]?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on November 11, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Thursday, November 11th, 2010I thought about doing something special for the one-thousandth article on Dissociated Press, then I said f*ck it.
You Look Hot With A Fag In Your Mouth
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 10, 2010 by admin in Health & Wellness
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010Would making teens associate having a cigarette in their mouth with having a penis in their mouth be more effective than the new FDA anti-smoking campaign?
We took a look recently at how the government gets it all wrong with anti-smoking campaigns by creating legislation that actually drives innovation in tobacco packaging. So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised – since our government is pretty much owned by all the industries that it’s supposed to regulate – that the FDA’s latest anti-smoking campaign looks like it was assembled by interns at RJ Reynolds’ ad agency. Although presumably inspired by the dramatic and offensive images used in the UK and Canada, the images in this campaign are almost kitschy, horribly retouched, and more likely to inspire Photoshop contests than deter smoking. As a smoker who occasionally ponders quitting, I can tell you with confidence that these images will have absolutely no impact on my cigarette consumption, nor any smokers I know. In fact, when other countries mandated that cigarette makers place these images on their packages, a friend of mine would ask friends traveling abroad to try to get him complete “sets” of all the disgusting images for his collection. Telling a smoker to quit smoking because it’s going to kill them is much like telling a skate punk to quit skateboarding because he’ll end up with broken bones poking out of his skin. The danger is part of the seductive nihilistic appeal. If the government really wanted adults to quit smoking, they’d issue free Chantix. It would probably be cheaper than all of these PR campaigns, and might actually help a few people quit. And when it comes to preventing youngsters from starting, I think The Onion was onto something with their It’s Gay To Smoke parody (video below). If you could actually get teens to associate sticking a cigarette in their mouth with sticking a penis in their mouth, peer pressure would take on a whole new dynamic, and maybe the youngsters that really do want a penis in their mouth could get down to business, and the rest could be “scared straight”, so to speak. But seriously, the fact is that a typical teen these days looks for images more graphic than these on purpose, so they’re certainly not going to be deterred from smoking by looking at them. I’d even argue that it’s sort of like the giggling, gross-out teen equivalent of the way Mad Men glamorizes smoking. So below are a few stabs at some alternatives. We challenge you to Photoshop and submit something better, which shouldn’t be hard; these took me about ten minutes. The FDA site has the images in a PDF file (13MB) or zipped JPEGs (6MB) if you’re interested. Read the rest of this entry »
More Alternative Thanksgiving Turkey Recipe Ideas
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 9, 2010 by admin in Holidays
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010People gobbled up our last feature on weird ideas for Thanksgiving recipes, so we’re back to let you know that you can have your cake and meat it too.
  As a health precaution, a turkey chef should always wear the appropriate head gear as well. |
Thanksgiving, as we all know, is a day of family, feasting, joy, celebration and thanks. Unless you’re a turkey, of course. I don’t know why we have it in so bad for flightless birds. Years ago, when KFC’s slogan was “We Do Chicken Right”, they opened a new location in San Francisco, and while the sidewalk cement was still wet, a friend of mine engraved it with “You done them chickens wrong“. Which kind of sums it up. Our national guilt about the annual turkey slaughter runs so deep that the president is obligated to pardon one each year. But that doesn’t stop us from turning them into lowfat cat food
