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Goddess on the mountain top
Burning like a silver flame
The summit of beauty and love
And Venus was her name
–Shocking Blue/Bananarama

Is Venus dead? Maybe not.

First, a way cool picture:

[Click to hugely embiggen.]

That’s Idunn Mons, a mountain on Venus as radar mapped a few years back by the Magellan space probe. The color overlay is a brand spanking new thermal (temperature) map using an infrared detector on the European Venus Express probe, currently orbiting our sister planet. Red is warmer, and as you can see, Idunn appears to be trying to tell us something.

But what’s it saying? OK, here’s the back story:

If you needed to write a compare-and-contrast essay about Earth and another planet, you could hardly pick a better one than Venus. It’s a lot like the Earth: it has almost the same diameter (12,100 km versus Earth’s 12,740), it possesses about the same mass (5 versus 6 x 10²⁴ kilos), it orbits the Sun a bit closer in than we do (109 million km versus 147). The total carbon content of the planet is similar to ours, too.

But it’s also a lot different. While ours is locked up in the oceans and rocks, Venus has all of its CO₂ in its atmosphere, which has caused a runaway greenhouse effect. The pressure at the surface is 90 times ours, and the surface temperature is 460° C (almost 900° F). It’s an alien planet, in every sense of the word.

We also thought it was dead, geologically speaking. Despite showing mountains and other interesting features, maps of Venus indicate that the surface hasn’t appeared to change much over geologic times. We have a pretty good grasp of how its atmosphere works, and the weathering processes it subjects the surface to — which is not be to be trifled with, since the air there is laced with sulfuric acid and a hint of fluorine and chlorine compounds, too. According to all that, the surface looks to have been pretty stable for quite some time.

But that idea might be changing. New studies indicate Venus may have been volcanically active in the recent past, and may indeed still be active!

The atmosphere of Venus is opaque to our eyes (and highly reflective, which is why Venus looks so bright to us from Earth), but the VIRTIS instrument — which stands for the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer — on Venus Express was specifically designed to peer through the muck and look at the planet’s surface. It can see temperature differences on the ground there, and when scientists studied the maps, they found several spots where the surface appears to be slightly warmer than you’d expect.

And very interestingly, at least some of these spots on Venus are also associated with raised features (0.5 to 2.5 km (.3 to 1.8 miles)) above the average surface height — mountains, or, perhaps, volcanoes.

The image at the top of this post shows one such area, which is clearly a mountain of some kind in the Imdr Regio area of Venus. The surface on the top of the mountain is a few degrees warmer than the area around it, suggesting the existence of a hot spot under the surface. It’s very hard to look at that and not think it’s a volcano with a magma chamber under it. The data also indicate flow features that are much less weathered than expected, and therefore most likely very young.

How young is young? According to the team of scientists who took this data, this indicates that Venus was geologically active no more than 2.5 million years ago, and these features may have formed as little as 250,000 years ago! That’s very young indeed when talking about the geologic clock of a planet — that’s more recent than the last Yellowstone eruption in the American northwest, for example. And the fact that the hot spots are still around is a strong indicator that activity is still present on Venus.

Of all the planets in the solar system, Venus gets closest to Earth — it can be as little as about 40 million km (24 million miles) away, compared to Mars which can only get as close as 55 million km (33 million miles). Yet we know less about Venus than Mars. There are many reasons: Venus never strays far from the Sun in the sky, making it more difficult to observe than Mars, and as mentioned above its atmosphere is opaque.

But it’s very much worthy of our study. Why did Venus suffer such a catastrophic runaway greenhouse effect? Why is its surface apparently pretty much all one age (except for this new result)? Why are there hot spots, and are they like ours here on Earth?

Studying the Earth is obviously an incredibly and critically important job for science. And as much as we learn studying it, we need other examples of planets to help us test our ideas. When I was a kid in middle school, I hated having to write those compare-and-contrast essays. But as a scientist — and as a human living in a thin habitable bubble on a planet we have barely begun to understand — I know we need them desperately.

Coal mining has become safer in recent years, but miners still have a fatality rate six times higher than the average for all private industry.

In light of the mining disaster this week in West Virginia, the Labor Department pulled together its fatality, injury and illness statistics on coal mining.

“Coal mining is a relatively dangerous industry,” the Labor Department’s report states. “Employees in coal mining are more likely to be killed or to incur a non-fatal injury or illness, and their injuries are more likely to be severe than workers in private industry as a whole.”

The rate of fatal work injuries for the coal mining industry was 24.8 per 100,000 fulltime equivalent workers in 2007, according to the Labor Department. Meanwhile, for all private industry, the rate of occupational fatalities was 4.3 cases per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers.

Even so, the rate of coal mining fatalities in 2007 was 57% lower than the 58.1 fatalities per 100,000 fulltime workers that occurred the prior year.

A total of 28 people died coal mining in 2007, down from roughly 31 miners who died per year from 2003 to 2006.

Coal miners are also more likely to be injured or fall ill on the job. The rate for nonfatal injuries and illnesses was 4.4 cases per 100 full-time workers in 2008 — 13% higher than for all private industry.

Those injuries were more often considered serious and required time away from work to recover when compared to private industry as a whole. Serious injuries among coal miners — 19% of which were fractures, which take longer to heal — resulted in a median of 31 days away from work compared to a median of 8 days for all private industry.

Nathan Keyfitz, professor of demography and sociology at Harvard from 1972 to 1983, recently died at the age of 96. Keyfitz was a leader in the field of mathematical demography and a pioneer in the application of mathematical tools to the study of population characteristics.

Born in Montreal on June 29, 1913, Keyfitz graduated from McGill University in 1934 with a degree in mathematics. He began working for the Dominion Bureau of Statistics in Ottawa, Canada, as a research statistician in 1936, where he would remain for 23 years.

He rose to the rank of assistant dominion statistician in the Canadian Civil Service, before beginning a distinguished academic career in 1961. His academic career took him to the University of Toronto, the University of Montreal, the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and Ohio State University before he arrived at Harvard as the Andelot Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and of Demography in the Harvard School of Public Health. He also served as chairman of the Department of Sociology.

His pioneering work produced hundreds of books and articles in leading journals, and is credited for developing the field of mathematical demography.

Keyfitz, who was married to Beatrice (Orkin) Keyfitz from 1939 until her death in October 2009, had two children, Barbara and Robert.

A memorial service honoring the life of Keyfitz will be held at 1 p.m. on April 13 at the Bigelow Chapel in Mount Auburn Cemetery (580 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge, MA 02138).

Well, it looks like the the foreclosure virus is becoming more egalitarian every day; its even moving into tonier neighborhoods:

RealtyTrac is forecasting that Houses with $5 million+ mortgages will likely be the next class of loans to go belly up.

While the overall numbers are small, they expect to see a sharp rise in foreclosures this year. In all of 2009, there were 1,312 houses with $5M+ mortgages scheduled for foreclosure auction. The spike is apparent this year — in the month of February alone, there were 352 homes nationwide in this category.

Here’s the Journal:

“Mortgage defaults began to surge in late 2006, mostly among borrowers with subprime mortgages, those for people with weak credit records or high ratios of debt to income.

Over the next few years defaults spread rapidly to better-heeled borrowers, especially those who got loans without documenting their income. At the end of 2009, nearly eight million households, or 15% of those with mortgages, were behind on mortgage payments or in the foreclosure process. . .

Big borrowers are more likely to default than ordinary people, according to data from First American CoreLogic. Its loan database, reflecting more than 80% of the overall home-loan market, includes 1,700 loans with balances of $4 million or more. About 14.8% of those loans were 90 days or more overdue at the end of January, compared with 8.7% for all home loans tracked by First American.”

It turns out that the wealthy are not any better at forecasting their own future economic circumstances than the unwashed masses were . . .

 Source:
Foreclosures Hit Rich and Famous
CRAIG KARMIN And JAMES R. HAGERTY
WSJ, APRIL 9, 2010
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304198004575172303998670976.html

---

This post is reprinted from Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• WEALTH FLAUNT OF THE DAY: Take A Luxury Jet Tour Over Other People’s Misery
• HOUSE OF THE DAY: Nicolas Cage Loses His Over-The-Top Bel Air Mansion
• The Coming Nantucket Real Estate Crash

Some more wise thoughts on the US funding challenge, this time from Richard Benson of boutique bank Specialty Finance Group:

There’s no doubt where the Treasury will turn for finance. We are about to see the greatest stuffing of banks with government securities the world has ever seen. American banks will be forced to gorge on Treasury securities, and disgorge bank reserves. Where else can the government get the next trillion to spend on things like wars, unemployment benefits, and food stamps?

There are a few obvious things to think about here. At the rate of $120 billion a month, it will only take about nine months to blow through over a trillion dollars in free bank reserves. Each Treasury auction will find it more difficult to sell all of the treasury securities, and it will take rising interest rates to coax out even more reserves from the banks. (When you need to borrow over $4 billion a day, even a trillion dollars doesn’t last long.)

By the end of the year, when the bank reserves are used up buying Treasuries, interest rates will soar and bond auctions will start to fail. No one will have any cash left to buy Treasuries unless, of course, central banks crank up the printing presses again. Look for a QE II, QE III, and QE IV before the dust settles. Without central banks, there really isn’t any source of debt buying large enough to fund America’s deficits.

Looking in the crystal ball that reflects the truth of what our government is up to, our choices appear to be:

    * inflate, or watch interest rates soar;
    * watch interest rate soar, and inflate; or
    * inflate the money supply and ultimately drive interest rates relentlessly higher.

Either way, interest rates, particularly longer term, will constantly be pushed up, while future rounds of money printing will surely promise great inflation in the years to come. Endless deficits of this magnitude do have serious consequences.

Join the conversation about this story »

A perfect credit score of 850 is technically possible, according to FICO spokesperson, Craig Watts but may not be possible for anyone.

Marketplace took a look at this issue last year and got the definitive answer from FICO.

Craig Watts: In rare circumstances it is possible to get a FICO score of 850.

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad:

Watts: For a broad section of the population, it probably isn’t possible, even if they do everything right.

That’s because there’s not one formula for calculating your FICO score. There are ten. Each is a “scorecard,” that gives different items in your credit history slightly different weight. Your scorecard depends on where you are in your economic life.

Watts: For example, if you are college student, you’re brand new to credit. The FICO formula is only comparing you to other people who also have very short credit histories.

There’s a scorecard for people who’ve been through, say, bankruptcy — they may be printing extras of those these days. But here’s the point: every scorecard has its own score range. If your scorecard’s top range isn’t 850? You can’t get an 850, period. Now, what scorecard applies to you, or when you’ll move out of one and into another? That’s a secret. All Watts would tell me is how to get the best score possible.

Watts: Pay everybody on time, keep your account balances low on credit cards, take on new credit obligations sparingly, and then continue managing credit for a long time. Typically people who score in the mid-800s have been managing credit for at least a couple of decades.

Gagliano: So, be a financial rock star, and become old.

Watts: Yeah, be the Mick Jagger of the credit world!

But does a perfect score even matter? Looks like… not really. If you’re over 800, you’re probably getting the best possible deals.

Mint.com has an exhaustive article about perfecting your credit to achieve the highest possible “elite” score: anything over 800.

According to the article, once you achieve the 800s, a world of low interest rate mortgages and whatnot opens up before you. The good news? Even if you didn’t always have perfect credit, if you change your behavior your score will change too. So why not start now?

Can You Increase Your Credit Score to 850? [Mint]
In search of the perfect score [Marketplace]

Found under: Android, Twitter, Client,

Touiteur pronounced as Twitter but with a french accent is a new Twitter client for the Android platform. Developed by LevelUp Studio which are also well know with their applications Beautiful Widgets and the Android Developer Challenge 2 winner FoxyRing Touiteur promises to enhance your Twitter experience.Download Touiteur

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Read more in mobile format

In case you hadn’t noticed yet, Google Earth is once again available on the Motorola Droid with Android 2.1. (It was missing for some people after the update, and there for others. Why? We dunno.) Anyhoo, we decided to have a little fun with it and put it side by side against the Google Nexus One (also running Android 2.1, natch) to see which phone better ran the hefty app — it still weighs in at a rather massive 22 megabytes installed. Check it out after the break.

Update: D’oh! Didn’t have WiFi turned on with both devices in the first video. So, there’s new video after the break. (Also, no, the Droid’s not overclocked. It’s the stock 550Mhz.)

read more

RNC communications director Doug Heye says 31 state party republican chairman have signed on to a letter of support for chairman Michael Steele.

The letter will be released shortly.

In the wake of calls from at least 2 RNC members for Steele’s resignation, Heye says Steele is continuing an aggressive phone campaign with RNC members to shore up support for the RNC and his leadership.

Steele speaks to the 2010 Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans Saturday afternoon.

UPDATE (1:23pm EDT): The RNC has just released the list of republican state chairman who have signed the statement in support of chairman Michael Steele.  See the letter and list of supporters below:

As Republican Party state chairmen, we believe Chairman Michael Steele can lead the RNC to be a full partner with us this fall in our efforts to fire Nancy Pelosi and win Republican majorities in Congress and among governors. His record at winning elections has been stellar, his fundraising ability has been solid, and he has honed our Victory programs’ ability to identify and deliver voters for Republican candidates.

The charge of any national Chairman is to raise money and win elections. With over $100 million raised, victories in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, and victories in 29 of 37 special elections, Michael Steele has demonstrated that under his Chairmanship the RNC has the ability, focus, and drive to lead Republicans to a sweeping victory in November.

The RNC under Chairman Michael Steele is a full partner with state committees, responsive to our needs, and intensely interested in providing the support necessary for victory. That process is not an easy process. Technology has had a great impact on the art of politics. That impact has required the RNC to adapt and change to work effectively in this modern environment. Change can sometimes be difficult. But the changes Michael Steele has brought to the RNC were essential for our party to adapt, and win, when we do not, for the moment, hold the White House or Congress.

We stand behind Chairman Steele as he continues to lead us on the path victory in November.

Randy Ruedrich, Alaska

Ron Nehring, California

Dick Wadhams, Colorado

Chris Healy, Connecticut

Tom Ross, Delaware

Robert Kabel, District of Columbia

Sue Everhart, Georgia

Jesus Torres, Guam

Jonah Ka’auwai, Hawaii

Norman Semanko, Idaho

Pat Brady, Illinois

Steve Robertson, Kentucky

Charlie Webster, Maine

Audrey Scott, Maryland

Jennifer Nassour, Massachusetts

Ron Weiser, Michigan

Tony Sutton, Minnesota

Will Deschamps, Montana

Mark Fahleson, Nebraska

John Sununu, New Hampshire

Jay Webber, New Jersey

Harvey Yates, New Mexico

Robert Tiernan, Oregon

Rob Gleason, Pennsylvania

Gio Cicione, Rhode Island

Chris Devaney, Tennessee

Dave Hansen, Utah

Steven Larrabee, Vermont

Pat Mullins, Virginia

Luke Esser, Washington

Reince Priebus, Wisconsin

From Green Right Now Reports

The last decade in Glacier National Park saw a doubling of the temperature increase for the planet as a whole. The effects of this warming threaten Glacier National Park’s resources, from glaciers and snow-capped mountains to wildlife and forests, as well as the Montana jobs and tourism revenue the park generates, according to a new report from the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Drawn by the park’s scenery, wildlife, and other resources, two million people a year visit Glacier, making it the 11th most visited national park in the U.S. Nearly three-quarters of the visitors are from out of state. Almost one-third of all summer visitors to Montana are drawn primarily by the park, and 56 percent of the park’s visitors are returnees. Spending by Glacier visitors may approach $1 billion annually and supports more than 4,000 Montana jobs.

“Human disruption of the climate is the greatest threat ever to our national parks. If we don’t reduce heat-trapping pollutants and protect the resources of Glacier National Park, it will suffer from human-caused climate change,” lead report author Stephen Saunders, president of the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, said in a statement. “If we let climate change and its impacts get to an unacceptable point, the economy of Montana will suffer, too.”

Highlights of the report include:

• A new analysis done by RMCO for the report shows that at the one weather station in the park with relatively long-term records, a West Glacier station at park headquarters, the average temperature for the decade just completed (2000-2009) was 2.0 F degrees hotter than the station’s 1950-1979 average. That is exactly double the average global temperature increase of 1.0 F degrees in the past decade compared to a 1950-1979 baseline. For both West Glacier and the planet as a whole, the last decade was the hottest in the history of instrumental measurements.
• Human-caused climate change could disrupt the unique mix of natural wildlife the park now supports, which offers Americans the best chance they have in the lower 48 states to see the full range of mammal predators present at the time of European settlement of the continent. The wildlife population includes grizzly and black bears, wolves, lynx, wolverines, mountain lions, and more, as well as other large mammals including mountain goats, bighorn sheep and elk. The park’s staff is concerned that climate change could lead to “wholesale changes in species composition.”
• A recent study for the report found that western Montana in 2000-2008 experienced eight more days a year of 90 F degrees or higher temperatures, and eight days a year of 0 F degrees or lower temperatures, than in 1900 through 1979.
• A just-completed update by the U.S. Geological Survey, not previously reported publicly, finds that of the 37 named glaciers in the park, only 25 remain large enough to still be considered glaciers. Of the 12 that have melted away, 11 have done so since 1966. Overall glacier acreage in the park in 2005 was 18 percent smaller than in 2005.
• Glacier is on track to lose all or nearly all of its glaciers, perhaps in the relatively near future. Seven years ago, scientists projected that even modestly hotter summers could eliminate by 2030 all glaciers in one basin in the park. Since that study was published, the glaciers in the basin have melted faster than projected. One author of that study, Daniel B. Fagre of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Mountain Science Center, says the basin’s glaciers now could be gone in just 10 years.
• A hotter climate is also expected to reduce snowfall and snowpack accumulation in the park. One recent study projects that near the end of this century, peak snowpack levels in the park may be reached 41 days earlier than in mid-20th century, and that snow could cover the ground for about 70 fewer days a winter. With mountains not snow-capped as much or as long into the summer, the scenery that draws most visitors to Glacier — including stunning waterfalls and lakes — would be affected.

“All the available research tells us that visitors come to Montana primarily for its spectacular unspoiled natural beauty,” Rhonda Fitzgerald, innkeeper at The Garden Wall Inn in Whitefish, Mont., said in a statement. “Tourism is Montana’s Number 2 industry, bringing over $3 billion into the state each year, and Glacier National Park is one of the top reasons people visit Montana. Ensuring that the pristine condition of the Crown of the Continent and its intact ecosystem will be maintained is essential to the economic health of Montana’s tourism industry.”

Apple announced this week that multitasking would be included as a part of the iPhone’s OS 4. For its users, this is huge news: one of the few frustrating aspects of the device has been its inability to run apps in the background. Apple revealed that the obstacle was mostly related to optimizing the power consumption of background apps to save battery life. After solving that problem, multitasking was quite easy. It will be rolled out to iPhones this summer and iPads in the fall.

While multitasking is a very welcome addition to iPhones, it will mostly serve to provide the smartphone with better entertainment value. After all, you can’t do any real work on an iPhone. But for the iPad, multitasking has the potential for the new gadget to take on an important new dimension. With this new capability, they begin to compare more to netbooks and could actually be used for work.

If using the iPad in a mobile setting, then you still probably won’t get much work done, since its on-screen keyboard will make productivity challenging. But if you’ve got it set up on your desk with a Bluetooth keyboard, suddenly it will feel a lot like a computer. You can switch back and forth between a spreadsheet, a presentation, an web browser, etc.

How the iPad’s multitasking will work hasn’t yet been revealed. On the iPhone version, you can have multiple applications going at once, but you can only display one at one at a time. However, what if the iPad’s multitasking includes an additional layer of functionality? Imagine if it allows users to display more than one window at a time on the screen. That would provide an additional dimension to its work productivity potential.

On the iPhone the mere physical constraint of its screen size could explain why this additional multitasking capability wasn’t an option. If you had two windows on its tiny display, you couldn’t see what was going on. But for the iPad, users have a lot more screen to work with. For that reason, having more than one application display side-by-side would work just fine.

One of the problems here could be power usage. Remember, that’s what constrained Apple from including multitasking in the first place. If more than one application is being displayed simultaneously, it’s hard to imagine that the battery could sustain much of that activity. Then, the background power-saving tactics wouldn’t apply to whatever apps are displayed.

Still, even without multiple app display, multitasking will make the iPad a far more useful device for work. Even if it remains a little less functional than a netbook or laptop for that end, you could get real work done. That should allow the iPad to appeal to a broader audience — beyond just the crowd who wants another entertainment device.

(Nav Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

You might wonder why anyone would want to buy Palm Inc. The smartphone maker has no shortage of challenges, including intensifying competition, disappointing sales for its Pre and Pixi devices, and a history of missteps by management. With roughly 12 months of cash on hand and an accelerating burn rate, some analysts see little or no value in the company’s common equity.

But that hasn’t stopped investors from piling into the stock after yet another takeover rumour emerged out of Taiwan on Friday suggesting that HTC Corp. is in talks to buy Palm.

Speculation that Lenovo Group Ltd. could be a bidder drove the stick higher earlier in the week. This might make more sense since the PC maker has a very small presence in the mobile market, however, it may not have the cash to acquire Palm.

Given HTC’s work with Google Inc.’s Android phones, it probably doesn’t have much use for Palm’s devices or operating system. However, there is some logic to the deal, according to Jay Yarow of the San Francisco Chronicle.

For one, Palm has a fat portfolio of patents. This is important because HTC is being sued by Apple Inc. for patent infringement. If HTC owned all of Palm’s patents, it could counter-sue Apple.

Palm is also a better-known brand, something HTC could use in the U.S. market. “While Palm’s status is slightly down, it’s still better than HTC,” Mr. Yarow said.

He also pointed out that Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein is still considered “a stud.” So too are a lot of other people at Palm, providing HTC with lots of brains and talent.

Finally, Palm is cheap. It’s market cap is below US$900-million.

Jonathan Ratner

by Jonathan Hiskes

At least one miner killed in this week’s tragic disaster in West Virginia seemed to sense that safety problems in the mine might prove fatal. 

Josh Napper left a note for his girlfriend and toddler daughter the weekend before he died.  As his mom, Pam Napper, tells CNN, it said, “If anything happens to me, I’ll be looking down from heaven at you all. I love you. Take care of my baby. Tell her that daddy loves her, she’s beautiful, she’s funny. And just take care of my baby girl.”

Pam Napper, whose brother and nephew were also killed in the accidents, says her son had noted safety problems at the Massey Energy mine. 

Here’s her interview with CNN: 

 

Related Links:

Before the Massey mine disaster, there was Crandall Canyon

Grist: hating on Don Blankenship before hating on Don Blankenship was cool

Bike love in unlikely places—Detroit, Dallas, Abu Dhabi

Imagine that you’re a homeowner who has managed to stay current on all your mortgage payments. And then you find out that the bank has not only foreclosed on your house, but they’ve also sold it at auction. That’s exactly what happened to to a couple in Georgia.

The husband says he was outside working on his truck, minding his own business, when a fella approached him with paperwork, saying, “Hi I just bought this house.”

Yep, someone at Bank of America screwed the pooch big time on this one, somehow listing the couple’s $500,000 home with no delinquent payments as a foreclosed property, which was subsequently auctioned off on the steps of the county courthouse. And it all happened without the homeowners knowing anything about it.

When they initially contacted BofA about the kerfuffle, the bank confirmed that the mortgage payments were current, but would not admit that a mistake had been made.

“They sold my house overnight and they need to fix this fast,” said the wife.

Here’s what the braintrust at BofA has to say:

It appears that a mistake has been made in this case. We are working diligently to research and rectify the situation as quickly as possible. We apologize to the Achaibar family for this unfortunate mistake.

As for them, the couple is just happy to not be out on the street: “Thank God it was a nice person who bought our house or he probably would have put us out.”

Metro Family Nearly Loses Home in Error [MyFoxAtlanta.com]

In 1908, the New York Times and Paris’ La Matin sponsored a race around the world. Starting in New York, competitors would go through Albany, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Valdez, Kobe, Vladivostok, Omsk, Moscow St. Petersburg and Berlin before concluding the race in Paris. The race would cover 22,000 miles, mostly on unpaved roads, over 169 days. Six cars entered the race, but only three finished. Crossing the finish line first was a 1907 Thomas Flyer, driven by the team from the United States.

The Great Race, as the event was called, was an early effort to prove the reliability and functionality of the automobile. At the time, automobiles were seen as toys for the rich, not nearly as dependable as the horse and buggy. By promoting a round-the-world race, the event organizers hoped to portray the automobile as a viable method of transportation.

Fast forward one hundred and two years. A group of friends calling themselves Project Evie are seeking to do an even more epic circumnavigation, to prove the viability of the electric car as a practical means of transportation. Starting in New Zealand, the team will travel north through Australia, into Southeast Asia, across China, through Tibet, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. Crossing the Bosphorus Strait, the team will tour Europe before heading back through Turkey, south through the Middle East and down into Africa. A boat will take them across the Atlantic to South America where they’ll resume the drive through South and Central America and into the United States. Ultimately, their journey will conclude in New York City, but only after covering some seventy thousand miles, across seventy countries and six continents.

The two car team will face political unrest (such as crossing from Pakistan into India, or getting into Iran with an Israeli passport stamp), absence of charging stations (although they plan to improvise by tapping donated power from industrial sources), landmines in sub-Sahara Africa and the possibility of bandits or random violence throughout much of their trip (there’s a reason that the Paris – Dakar race isn’t run on the African continent any longer). Ask anyone who’s travelled the globe, and they’ll tell you the same thing: success or failure is often determined by the amount of local knowledge you have. Knowing who to bribe and how much to pay is often the difference between a successful border crossing and a lengthy jail stay in countries that don’t understand due process.

The Project Evie team faces another threat as well; TAG Heuer and Tesla have teamed up on a big budget circumnavigation to promote the Tesla and TAG brands. Sticking to major world cities only, their “Odyssey of the Pioneers” tour will travel nearly 23,000 miles over six months. Given the backing and funding of this event, it’s unlikely they’ll be facing hardships beyond 100 thread count sheets on a regular basis.

Project Evie has yet to announce the cars they’ll use for the journey, but their website seems to heavily promote the BYD e6, a Chinese manufactured electric car expected to make its U.S. debut by the end of this year. The e6 is a four door, five passenger electric vehicle that boasts a range of 250 miles per charge and a top speed of 87 miles per hour. It’s iron phosphate battery pack can be quick-charged to 50% of capacity in only ten minutes.

Want to know more about Project Evie? Want to track their progress or make a donation? You can find their information here.

Source: The Daily Green

Intel, with its x86 architecture, has owned the corporate computing market for decades, but Barry Evans, CEO of Austin, Texas-based systems startup Smooth-Stone, thinks it’s time for a change. Smooth-Stone, which Evans co-founded in 2008, is using ARM-based processors to create a box for the data center. Its goal isn’t a slight reduction in power efficiency, he said, but to “completely remove power as an issue in the data center.”

However, the specifics of Evans’ stealthy company are overshadowed by one key question: Is ARM ready to invade the data center? Evans thinks yes, and I think the IP licensing company behind the architecture does too, because it appears to be cooking up something that involves using its architecture inside servers. Ian Ferguson, director of enterprise and embedded solutions at ARM Plc, declined to talk to me for this story, saying the timing was not yet right to talk about the company and servers “for a few reasons that I can’t discuss.”

Evans was formerly an executive at Intel, where he worked in the chip maker’s ARM business unit; he stayed with the division after Intel sold the line of chips to Marvell. Other members of the Smooth-Stone team hail from HPC systems startup Convey Computer and Newisys, a company that helped build the first server optimized for AMD’s Opeteron chips and was purchased by Sanmina in 2004. Evans was coy about what exactly Smooth-Stone is doing, but did say that the system the company is building is not designed for the high-performance computing market and will use ARM-based chips.

However it’s not enough to swap out x86 chips for those based on ARM and expect the new systems to work. For one thing, it takes a lot of low-power processors to equal the performance of a single multicore Nehalem chip. An even bigger challenge is getting all of the cores to work together efficiently, a problem that another low-power systems company, SeaMicro, likely is solving as well with a box that contains 512 Atom chips. When I asked Evans if Smooth-Stone had built a custom chip to handle the networking and coordination of the ARM-based chips, he said, “Our IP goes all the way down to the silicon level.”

As for when the rest of the world will see this product, Evans declined to give a date, nor would he list customers. But engineers at Cisco, Microsoft and Dell have all mentioned Smooth Stone to me and appear to know something about what it’s attempting to do.

I’ve written about how x86 may be on the verge of losing its hegemony as mobile computing turns to ARM-based architectures and graphics processors from AMD and Nvidia move upmarket into high-performance computing and even into some servers. But the commodity servers that populate the world’s data centers (there are still a few specialty servers using Sun’s Sparc chips or IBM’s PowerPC chips out there, but they are not in the mainstream) seemed fairly safe.

After all, there’s a ton of software written for them and the low cost of such machines makes it hard to imagine someone swapping them out for specialty boxes. Evans doesn’t deny the lure of the commodity server, but because of the need to add so many more servers to meet our rising demand for computing, and the incremental power gains associated with them, he’s betting that the end of x86 domination may be in sight. I’m curious whether alternatives to commodity machines can make it inside the data center, and will be talking about it with some smart people at our Structure conference in June.

“Think of the install base of servers and all of the new servers coming online and how most approaches today save 10 or 20 percent on power,” Evans says. “Now imagine saving 99 percent on power and how completely that changes things and takes power out of the equation.”

If that’s what Smooth-Stone does, it could certainly get CIOs thinking.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

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GOOG Slips Modestly Through Mid-day
The stock has been range-bound ($560 – $570) for the past 2 weeks, as the market awaits Q1 results. GOOG trades at 18x 2010 EPS and 19x Enterprise Value / EBIT.  Potential near-term catalysts include the March quarter earnings release on April 15th; updates on changes to paid search results; Android adoption; and benchmarks surrounding newer initiatives, which have mostly been disappointing (Wave, Chrome, Base, broadband network, mobile ads, etc.). Google’s main challenge remains that search is maturing, and the company has yet to develop a strong second growth engine.

Google Benefiting From Rebound In Online Advertising, Look For Strong Quarter (Market Watch)
Google is largely expected to post a solid quarter when it reports next Thursday. Out this morning are a few positive reports:

• Justin Post published two research reports on Google this morning. First, a Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) suggests that search advertisers will spend 14% more in North America during 2010 than in 2009.  Clearly this is good for Google, which should grow revenue 12% this year according to Post.  In addition, Google remained the number one search property in March (it’s pretty much a one-horse race at this point), with 176 million visitors or 16% year-over-year growth. YouTube visitors were also up 24% year-over-year to 103 million.
• Susquehanna analyst, Marianne Wolk believes that Google’s strengths in the mobile ad space are substantial advertiser reach, favorable pricing to publishers, technology and cross platform capabilities. Weaknesses include limited mobile display and a less “owned” target market. Overall Wolk believes Google is well positioned to take on Apple. She maintains her Positive rating and $735 price target.

Google / AdMob Approval Gets Help From Apple’s Mobile Ad Efforts (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s mobile advertising platform, iAd yesterday. The new system “could end up helping Google defend its acquisition of AdMob.” As the FTC decides whether or not to challenge the deal, “Google has been arguing that mobile advertising is a nascent and competitive field. Earlier this week, a Google spokesman referenced Apple’s expected entrance into the market in a statement defending the deal’s competitiveness.” An AdMob spokesperson even said that Apple is “going to be a strong competitor for sure.” And doesn’t Google know it. The two have been at each others’ throats in just about every market it seems recently (mobile, cloud computing, among others).

Google Hiring! Great News For The Online Advertising Market (AdWeek)
Last year, Google had its first layoffs ever, firing about 500 ad sales employees. The cuts were part of a re-organization following US sales boss Tim Armstrong’s departure to AOL. Company officials told AdWeek it plans to hire over 500 staffers in positions ranging “from a strategic partner development manager within the Google TV Advertising group to a display sales operations manager, media and platforms at AdX (Google’s exchange).” The move is an indication the company believes the rebound in online advertising is sustainable.  This should instill some confidence in GOOG investors.

YouTube Introducing New Feature As Incentive To Increase Traffic (Business Insider)
YouTube is introducing a new “as seen on” feature that will credit and link to sources driving traffic to a particular video. When a blog drives a significant (not yet specified) portion of a YouTube video’s traffic, an “As Seen On: ___” link will appear beneath the video, linking back to the referring site. Nick Saint at Business Insider believes this provides web publishers with an incentive to send yet more traffic to YouTube in the hopes of picking up referrals from the video giant. And more traffic means more ad revenue. Google is still experimenting with the details of the feature, which is only live on select videos for now.  The plan is to roll it out universally as a permanent feature.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Google Needs To Innovate Or The Stock Is Hosed
• Google Investor: Is The FTC Out To Kill The AdMob Deal?
• Google Investor: Android Continues To Gain Share; Quickly Catching Up To Windows

I am a huge fan of podcasts and podcasting and one of my favorites to listen to each week is Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech (TWiT). Now and then, angel investor and Open Angel Forum founder Jason Calacanis is a guest on TWiT, and not long ago he launched a podcast network of his own borrowing the “This Week in” name (with Leo’s blessing, of course). After success with his first podcast This Week in Startups (TWiSt) which Jason hosts himself, he is now creating a brand new podcast that is a perfect resource for startups and entrepreneurs: This Week in Venture Capital (TWiVC).

Sponsor

Venture capital is a big part of what we discuss here at ReadWriteStart, and Jason’s new podcast is sure to become an excellent source of VC news straight from the horse’s mouth. The premier episode is available now and features two-time entrepreneur turned VC Mark Suster, who authors the Both Sides of the Table blog, and who was previously a guest of Jason’s on TWiSt.

In the episode the pair discuss the recent collection of obnoxiously high valuations for startups like Foursquare and Quora, as well as the resurgent IPO market, an issue we mentioned earlier this week after the Nation Venture Capital Association released some record breaking numbers. Suster even discusses how his blog, mentioned above, has changed the way he does business as a venture capitalist.

TWiSt usually runs over an hour, and this first episode of TWiVC thankfully comes in around 45 minutes, a much more digestible length for a video podcast. Hopefully they will stay true to this length, as brevity and density is often a more enjoyable listen. Either way, I know I’ll be tuning in each week to catch Jason’s and other’s opinions on the latest VC happenings, and I think any early-stage startup or first-time entrepreneur should do the same.

Discuss

“I have researched his issues and based on our records the case is without merit,” wrote a Comcast spokesperson to local news investigator Amy Davis. She was looking into the case of Wayne, whose credit was damaged by Comcast just before he was going to refinance his house. This meant that on top of what he had already paid to lock in a lower interest rate, he had to pay several thousand dollars more.

The trouble started because Wayne refused to pay for Comcast service after never getting a working signal, despite multiple visits by Comcast technicians. He cancelled service, and that was the last he heard of them until he tried to refi his house.

Comcast rebuffed efforts by the reporter, but they couldn’t stop the wheels of justice. Wayne sued them in small claims court. The judge reached a different opinion from that of the Comcast spokesman, and ordered the cable company to pay up $5,087. That was $5,000 for the original damages, plus 5% annual interest, plus $7 in costs.

Most people don’t realize how easy it is to file a small claims court, and how good your odds are. You don’t even need a lawyer and it could cost only $50 in filing fees. To learn more about how to file in small claims, check out our posts, “How To File A Lawsuit” and “Suing Big Companies In Small Claims Court Is Fun And Easy.”

Comcast Eats Words, Pays Up [Ask Amy Blog]