Stuffis

Still "Brent's pile o' stuff" but at least now there are sections.

Society

Alternative Energy and Transportation

• Belgian train tunnel with solar panels
• Plane + Train
• Bike lane buffers — a nice design for accommodating bike traffic and parking, which is apparently working well in Europe
• New thin-film solar cells can be rolled up for easier transport, and integrated into cloth like a tarp
• Europeans now testing road trains (Volvo releases photos): your car joins a "train" of others going the same way, and begins autonomous driving
• What a cool concept: Solar Highways (Wired article, another Wired article on GE funding, CNN article on snow melting)
• ...or you could put the solar panels above the roadway...
• A Chinese company has come up with a straddling bus concept
• Philips LED light bulb: $60 each (yikes) and they get hot (heatsink built in)
• SunHydro is trying to build a "hydrogen highway" from Maine to Miami
• The QinetiQ Zephyr solar-powered UAV (a.k.a. the "eternal plane")
• Nissan Land Glider concept car — very narrow (2-passenger) all-electric vehicle that leans into turns like a motorcycle
• Micro wind generation with vibrating tense bands or maybe piezoelectric "leaf farms"
• New study at UIUC shows growing for food vs. growing for fuel doesn't have to be either-or: there's lots of land considered "marginal" for food growth that could be used for biofuel stock like switchgrass, irrigated only by rain
• Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does: "This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies."
• Google.org's RE<C (Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal) and RechargeIT (plug-in vehicles) initiatives

Fiscal Responsibility

• Real Estate Prices as a roller-coaster ride: notice how high up you are at the end... right before the 2008 bubble collapse
• Visualizing Obama's budget cuts: our brains are not good at comparing "millions" with "trillions" of dollars; this video is a great antidote
• The Concord Coalition
• Taxpayers for Common Sense
• U. S. National Debt Clock
• U. S. Federal Funds Rate graph
• When income grows, who gains?

Demographics

• U. S. Topography of Faith (2008)

Small Housing

• Shipping container dormitory in Amsterdam

Politics

• Lawrence Lessig article on why transparency alone will not fix our distrust of the system

History

• The Ghosts of World War II's Past

My contact information, brief autobiography (such as it is), and family tree. back to Nordist.net