A vimeo about the badass code weapon for Hungry Beast on Australia's ABC1. 

Another interesting vimeo by Patrick Clair is How Green is Your Internet?

In architecture school in the 1970s we learned a fair amount about passive solar design. We learned about orienting a building to take advantage of solar angles, about trombe walls, overhangs and brise-soleils. Although, back then, a lot of passive solar designs tended to look alike, it certainly seemed to us that in the midst of an energy crisis, we'd be doing energy-efficient buildings in our careers.  [Read more]

New Society has published three new books telling us that we're doomed. Or are they? When you see that humanity is running up against a problem, and you write a book about it, are you actually a doomer?

Take Thomas Malthus, whose name has become synonymous with population overshoot. His contemporary, the Marquis de Condorcet, had written Outlines of an historical view of the progress of the human mind, which described a world getting better, for example:

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Love that wood veneer paneling ...

Last night, a Bloomberg headline read, Nissan Aggravates Customers Trying to Turn Over a New Leaf. Today it reads, Nissan Customers Angry Trying to Turn New Leaf, but Nissan is only off the hook in the headline:

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The Mazda 2 now for sale in the US is already one of the two most affordable green cars on the ACEEE list, but Green Car Congress talks about an advanced evolution of the Mazda Demio with, "hybrid-like fuel consumption at a lower price."  [Read more]

Prius goes roomy

Toyota previews Prius v; first expansion of planned Prius “family”

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I like to promote cycling, but The Infrastructurist notes that in many cities it isn't even safe to walk next to the roads much less to bike in traffic:  [Read more]

Here are the animated walkthroughs prepared by college teams for the 2011 Solar Decathlon, to be held in Washington DC from Sept 23rd through Oct 2nd. I put the animations that kept my interest first, and the ones that were less interesting farther down.

Team New Jersey I like the assembly presentation of this one, the design, and the integration of music into the video.

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Several automotive blogs -  Autoblog Green, Green Car Congress and GreenPowerTrain, below - have recently cited an announcement from battery maker PowerGenix:

PowerGenix unveils NiZn batteries for global micro-hybrid market [Read more]

The charging and recharging of batteries has been the big challenge for electric vehicles (EVs). Batteries are fundamentally different than gas tanks. You can empty and refill your gas tank over and over with no loss of function for decades, but the way you discharge and recharge your EV battery determines its useful life. With hybrids, the gas engine usually kicks in before the batteries discharge too deep, but by definition EVs only have power from batteries.  [Read more]

Last week, lots of experts were predicting that lower oil prices would lead to lower fuel prices at the pumps this summer. I wondered about that because Tom Whipple had noted that gasoline stocks were very low. The Kansas City Star takes the fuel stocks story a bit further:  [Read more]

It might be better to keep the one you have. The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) a non-profit research group, has rated their top thirteen "green" cars. These are the least environmentally offensive models from mainstream automobile manufacturers. Non-traditional vehicles like the Twike and the NmG (the old Sparrow) are not included.
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A Peak Oil special from Catalyst on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). 

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Honda Insight & Civic

I bought Consumer Reports (CR) Annual Auto Issue last week. Given Verified Atheist's endorsement of his Civic Hybrid, I checked those out first. Honda is coming out with a new Civic line right about now, so there wasn't much data in the new vehicle reports. The reliability history for the Civbrid was generally excellent, mostly red circles. But for the electrical systems of the 2005, 2006, 2007 & 2009 models CR shows the dreaded black circles instead.  [Read more]

With new gizmos, drugs and financial instruments appearing all the time, it certainly seems like technical and scientific innovation continues fast and furious from the 20th century. [Read more]

Dr Tainter fielded several questions after the keynote lecture I just posted. Some of his responses are a lot more direct than his presentation, particularly his answer to the very last question:

Part One

Part Two [Read more]

In 2005, I read the books, Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (who was all over public TV with Guns, Germs and Steel) and A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. I found them fairly similar in theme, both dealing with Easter Island and other collapsed societies. Both books were discussed on The Oil Drum, but other commenters kept bringing up The Collapse of Complex Societies, a textbook by Dr Joseph Tainter, as a more thorough treatment. [Read more]

I attended an AIA panel discussion tonight:

Infrastructural Systems: Cities Designed for a Changing World
Hillary Brown, FAIA, Paul Lukez, FAIA, and Mason White; moderated by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson [Read more]

In What Does Free Really Cost, I discussed the problems of free parking. A few weeks ago, in Should Transit Be Free?,  Mark Brown, who has been documenting his car-free lifestyle at Car-Free Baltimore, discusses the many advocates of free transit, and summarizes their arguments:

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