Blog

http://fingerprintglasses.wordpress.com/wordless-wednesdayphoto-of-the-week/

Eco Factor: Solar panel array to generate 2MW of renewable electric power.

Florida Gulf Coast University has launched the US’s largest university-sited solar panel array that is capable of generating up to 2MW of green electric power. The installation features over 10,000 solar panels installed on a 16-acre site.

(more…)

It’s Christmas day, so we’re asking you to go a little easy on Peek here, but we’ve got a sneaking suspicion that our request will be cutely ignored in comments below. This week’s episode of How Would You Change features Peek’s latest handheld — you know, the one that only does Twitter. We didn’t find the creature too incredibly useful / valuable during our time with it, but that’s not to say it couldn’t be molded into a pristine object of desire. Speaking of which, how would you go about tweaking or overhauling the TwitterPeek? Make the screen resolution higher? Change the user interface? Add support for apps, email and calling? Make Peek pay you to use it? Sound off below!

How would you change the TwitterPeek? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Article

We just literally heard Jesse Divinich predict the decline of video game releases on retail. Now, he’s got a few mroe predictions up his sleeve, this time targeting Grand Theft Auto. If his crystal ball turns out

If you are interested to know, 2009 saw 1,099 video games released officially to US retailers. That’s seven games short of the 1,092 video games released back in 2008. While that number isn’t all too staggering, Jesse

There are a lot of Christmas classics, many of which are now but a click away, in a cavalcade of online video clips available from movies and television.

While I style myself as a Scrooge, each and every one gets to me right where it counts–most especially the first I posted below: Judy Garland at the peak of her promise, singing, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in the movie, “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

Every time I hear it, all is right with Judy and with the world

Which it wasn’t and it’s not, but the clip will make you believe it for a moment.

So, have yourself a Merry little Festivus now, and enjoy four others too:

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”

“It’s a Wonderful Life” (colorized version, last scenes)

“How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (not the Jim Carrey horror show):

“The Brady Bunch” (Christmas minisode)

“Seinfeld” (”Festivus” episode)

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

More than two years after information about Comcast’s data delaying techniques came to light, a class action lawsuit over the issue has come to a close with a settlement of $16 million and no statement of wrongdoing from the cable giant. That means Comcast continues to tout its newer bandwidth management protocols and those of you that used Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack or Gnutella betwen April ‘06 and December ‘08 and/or Lotus Notes on the service anytime in the summer of 2007 can head over to the settlement website to either opt out of the class action or receive a $16 check. So is that enough cash to make up for the time wasted waiting for Naruto fansubs, Gutsy Gibbon images and the like to finish downloading?

$16 million settlement over Comcast’s P2P throttling nets the affected $16 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 21:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Mutlichannel News, DailyTech  |  P2PCongestionSettlement  | Email this | Comments

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Article

A quick post just to let everyone know that I’m still among the living and that I haven’t given up posting for good.

MD and I have taken off a few days and are in Dallas with kids and grandkids celebrating Christmas.  It snowed like crazy all yesterday afternoon, and, according to the newspapers, Dallas has had its first white Christmas since 1926.  And we were here to witness it.  At left is a photo looking out the back door.  Granted, it’s not a New England eight inch snow or a Colorado two foot snow, but it’s a pretty substantial snow for Dallas.  Maybe it’s a harbinger of good things to come, although the last white Christmas preceded the year in which the Great Depression started.

I’ve been absent from posting because MD and I have been incredibly busy with Sous Vide Supreme stuff.  I just thought we were busy during the developmental stage.  The post-developmental era has consumed enormous amounts of our time.  Especially since our invention had such a nice write up in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago.  We’ve been inundated with requests for interviews from multiple media sources and for write ups for this and that.  And all that is not to mention a week’s worth of filming in Seattle.  We’re making a true infomercial on the Sous Vide Supreme with emphasis on the ‘info’ part.  So many people are unaware of what the sous vide process is, so we’re going to tell them.

We’ve teamed up with chef Richard Blais, whom many of you may know from Top Chef, Iron Chef America and other TV cooking shows.  He couldn’t be any nicer nor any easier to work with – a really great guy who can cook like you wouldn’t believe.  He will appear with MD on the infomercial that will start running early next year.  Below is a photo of the two of them camping it up on the set.

The infomercial filming went without a hitch, and the food that Richard Blais prepared in the SVS was incomparable.  On the eve of the filming my brother sent me a YouTube of an infomercial that had a few problems.  I forwarded it on to the rest of the team, and fortunately the Sous Vide Supreme functioned a little better than the popcorn popper in the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ve also teamed up with the retailer Sur La Table.  They will be carrying the Sous Vide Supreme in their stores and in their catalog right after the start of the year.  MD and Richard will be doing demos in several of the stores, so if you want to see the SVS in the flesh, so to speak, head on over to a Sur La Table near you and take a look.

This entire sous vide experience has been different than anything we’ve ever done.  It’s really nice to see articles and reviews that are all positive instead of the hatchet jobs we’re used to getting while promoting low-carb.  No one accuses us of being purveyors of dangerous fad diets, of encouraging people to eat more artery-clogging saturated fat, of being doctors of death (which we’ve been called on live radio) or of simply trying to make a quick buck at the expense of the health of those gullible enough to follow our recommendations.  The new experience has been rewarding and a lot of fun but incredibly time consuming.  Thus my absence from my blogging duties.

But I’ve been absent in electrons only.  I’ve been flying all over the place carrying a satchel of scientific papers that I’ve been reviewing and preparing to blog about.  So I’m fully loaded with ammo and ready to write after I’ve taken a fews days of a breather.

I haven’t been totally offline, however.  I’ve been keeping up with the blogs I  read regularly and haven’t been able to resist commenting when something gets under my skin.

Food writer Michael Ruhlman did a great review of the Sous Vide Supreme, and in the comments section someone took me (and the SVS team) to task for profiteering.   As you might imagine, this kind of thing really gets my hackles up, especially since we are still way, way in the red on this project.  I kept myself in check (the good Mike won out as MD would say) and wrote a couple of mild  but informative comments.  You can read them here.

My friend Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess, whose blog I read religiously, wrote a funny post on bacon featuring the kind of ill-disciplined child who gives the South a bad name.  Amy, who is an inveterate low-carber, wrote the post from the perspective of how much she likes bacon.  Of course some commenter couldn’t resist slamming low-carb diets in general and Gary Taubes in particular, so I couldn’t resist resorting to form (the bad Mike sort of won out on this one).  If you’re interested, you can read that exchange here (two comments). The guy turned out to be pretty nice and even sent me a friendly email via Amy.

Speaking of Gary Taubes… he tipped me off on an interesting paper on HDL that I’ll post on soon and I’ve uncovered a few others on the fallacy of the lipid hypothesis.  It looks like the mainstream is ratcheting up its jihad against low-carb again with a few spurious papers badly in need of a public dismantling.  I’ll soon be tanned, rested and ready to shred.  And to go after the statinators, the great medical menaces of our time.  Plus I’ll throw in a nice post on how long it might take the low-carb diet to become the diet recognized by all as the correct diet for most everyone.

Until then, I’m going to lay low and try to catch up on my non-scientific reading.  Speaking of which, I got a great book as a Christmas present from my grandkids today.  It is Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson and is about US Air Flight 5149 that went into the Hudson River last January.  Although the book extols the skill and courage of Capt Sullenberger and crew, its main emphasis is on the aircraft they flew: the Airbus 320.

Twenty five years before Flight 1549 took its plunge, a highly intelligent, charismatic French fighter pilot and test pilot named Bernard Ziegler talked the management at Airbus to let him design a plane that almost flew itself.  Ziegler recognized that pilots exhibited a bell-shaped curve in their level of skill and expertise and that some of the less skilled had ended up killing themselves along with all their passengers after getting into situations that more skilled pilots may have gotten out of safely.  He wanted to design a plane with layers of built-in redundancies that would allow all pilots, but especially those less skilled, to worry about the major goal of any pilot who is in trouble – getting safely on the ground – without  being distracted by all the little details of flying.  In other words – and in very simplistic words – if pilots could simply make the decision to land, the plane could almost fly itself.  When pilots get in tricky situations it is sometimes difficult to get out of them without stressing the plane to the point of structural damage.  As the pilots are trying to avoid disaster they have to worry not only about their main problem – a loss of power, say – but have to baby the plane to keep it from breaking up.  Ziegler fixed all that with the Airbus by designing it to perform maximally under control of multiple computers while the pilots tend to the main problem at hand.  Since the computers control these functions of the plane by electricity it’s called flying by the wire.

When Sully and crew brought the plane down safely in the Hudson, they were flying by wire.  And as the author William Langewiesche puts it

They had no choice.  Like it or not, Ziegler reached out across the years and cradled them all the way to the water. His assistance may have been unnecessary, given the special qualities of these particular two [the pilots of Flight 1549], but there is no question the practical effects were profound.  At the moment of the bird strike, when the engines lost thrust, a conventional airplane would have tried immediately to nose down.  It would have wanted to go into a sharp descent, and would have required whoever was flying to haul back on the controls with some strength and to retrim the airplane for a slower, more moderate glide, while disciplining the wings to stay level until the decision could be made to turn around.  None of this is inherently difficult, but it imposes insidious demands on the crew in an emergency, when they are already busy with more important concerns.  It is an accepted reality that the repetitive and menial jobs, associated with baseline control subtly impinge on a pilot’s capacities, and that during periods of truly high workloads, even simple thoughts are difficult to have.

Imagine trying to disarm a bomb while also having to deal with menial chores and talk on the phone at the same time.

This fascinating book doesn’t detract from the skill and heroism of the crew of Flight 1549, but explains in detail why they were able to make it look so easy.

I loved this book.  I opened it in the morning and had it finished before lunch (lunch was sous vide turkey, if you must know).  If you have any interest in aviation, Fly by Wire is a must read.  Despite the fact that the author dissects in detail a number of commercial aviation disasters in the recent past, the book actually makes one feel safer flying, especially in an Airbus 320.

This post is already longer than I had intended it to be, so I wish you all a Merry Christmas.  I’ll be back soon.

Merry Christmas from Dallas

I’ll leave you with a couple more photos.  Below on the left is my Southern grandson testing the snow barefooted.  On the right is MD slicing the sous vide turkey we had for lunch.

The Australian has an article on a forthcoming report by the Australian Academy of Science on renewable energy – Green power feasible.

The report, titled Australia’s Renewable Energy Future, puts the scientific might of the academy up against sceptics claiming that renewables cannot meet baseload energy needs.

It challenges assumptions underlying an economic model of renewable energy take-up developed by the CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics on the grounds they are too conservative. In the virtual futures generated in the modelling, geothermal and solar thermal would remain as only minor components in Australia’s energy mix until 2040.

The model could not capture recent technological advances and the stimulatory impact of government intervention, Professor Dopita said. In the real world, it risked becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, helping to reinforce a focus on fossil fuel in policy formulation.

“We can change the way we do business entirely by stimulating those new industries, getting them past the economic thresholds that make them appear to be uncompetitive with coal,” he said. “If you give the appropriate financial incentives early on, the whole thing snowballs. As the technology accrues the advantages of scale, it becomes self-sustaining and provides new employment and export opportunities.”

The academy estimates Australia has enough accessible geothermal energy to meet 26,000 years of its power needs. More than 30 companies aim to deliver geothermal energy to the grid, the renewable energy report says.

However, the accessible geothermal resource is concentrated in granite formations in the outback. To cut energy losses in getting the hot rock power to the cities, the government would need to invest billions of dollars in a high-voltage direct current long-distance electricity transmission system.

Filed under: Spy Photos, Sedan, Performance, BMW, Luxury

The 2011 BMW M5 is having its heart and reflexes tested at der Nürburgring. Thus far, the company has kept a remarkably tight lid on the details of what the buyers can expect from the forthcoming supersedan, but varied and persistent rumors all point to more power, more usability, more economy, and more edge.

The next M5’s twin-turbo V8, said to be a tweaked version of the one in the X5M and X6M, could have somewhere between 570 and 600 horses in its corral. Carbon and aluminum will undoubtedly be featured prominently, and a Kinetic Energy Recovery System could also figure into the mix. Maybe it’s just us, but it looks like the front end is going to wear some serious wheel arches as part of the visual package, too.

The only obvious, and disappointing, hole in all of the scuttlebutt so far is whether the new M5 will be offered with a manual transmission. We hope BMW knows that there is indeed a wrong answer to that question…

[Source: Carscoop]

Spy Shots: 2011 BMW M5 clobbering the ‘Ring originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

El concepto de este crossover destinado a competir con el Toyota Urban Cruiser por su tamaño fue presentado originalmente en el Salón de Ginebra y luego tuvimos la oportunidad de apreciar sus características en Barcelona.

Creo que a todos nos encanto su imagen alegre y gracias a la popularidad que obtuvo los rumores sobre su producción empezaron a colarse en la red, y ahora se ha confirmado su desarrollo debido a que fue pillado en sus pruebas de resistencia en Suecia.

Por el momento se especula que el SUV será presentado oficialmente en Marzo y podría ser equipado con tracción total, cuya ejecución estaría controlada por un sistema que envía la fuerza de forma separada a cada rueda.

Sobre el diseño no se puede mencionar mucho porque el coche está completamente arropado, podría ser porque circula sobre un lado congelado o porque no desean que se conozca algo de su imagen.

En cualquier caso se nota que el parabrisas delantero es más amplio y que la parte posterior es menos redondeada.

Nissan Qazana pillado en Suecia

Vía | World Car Fans

The race car drivers of Gran Turismo 5 are not the only ones busy showing off what they’ve got today. Big Daddy’s giving us a look around as well in this new Water Break video for BioShock

A very special holiday treat comes our way, thanks to Kazunori Yamauchi of Polyphony Digital. A new trailer for Gran Turismo 5 was shown at the Asia Game Show 2009, featuring two new city tracks: Madrid and

Filed under: Spy Photos, Sedan, Performance, BMW, Luxury

The 2011 BMW M5 is having its heart and reflexes tested at der Nürburgring. Thus far, the company has kept a remarkably tight lid on the details of what the buyers can expect from the forthcoming supersedan, but varied and persistent rumors all point to more power, more usability, more economy, and more edge.

The next M5’s twin-turbo V8, said to be a tweaked version of the one in the X5M and X6M, could have somewhere between 570 and 600 horses in its corral. Carbon and aluminum will undoubtedly be featured prominently, and a Kinetic Energy Recovery System could also figure into the mix. Maybe it’s just us, but it looks like the front end is going to wear some serious wheel arches as part of the visual package, too.

The only obvious, and disappointing, hole in all of the scuttlebutt so far is whether the new M5 will be offered with a manual transmission. We hope BMW knows that there is indeed a wrong answer to that question…

[Source: Carscoop]

Spy Shots: 2011 BMW M5 clobbering the ‘Ring originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: GM, Saab, Earnings/Financials

Don’t expect General Motors Corp. to make any new announcements regarding Saab now or in the near future, according GM spokesman Chris Preuss. According to a report in Automotive News, Preuss added that no new Saab deals are imminent with any interested parties.

Speculation and rumor-mongering have been rampant as Saab suitors come and go. In November, the deal with Koenigsegg Group AB fell through at the last moment. Then there was China’s Beijing Automotive Industry Holdings Co., but they stopped short and only acquired some of Saab’s assets and intellectual properties. Most recently, there was word that niche automaker Spyker Cars NV had made a second offer on the brand, after losing its first bid.

[Source: Automotive News, subs. req’d]

Hurry Up and Wait: Report says GM has no planned announcements regarding Saab originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Ricoh’s GXR certainly isn’t the most stylish camera out there, but it’s certainly one of the most unique. Boasting an ability to support interchangeable lenses and image sensors, this one offers up flexibility that few other shooters on the market can match. We’ve scrounged up a litany of reviews and hands-on impressions, and by and large, most everyone who got their hands around one enjoyed the experience. Photography Blog noted that the camera was “a remarkably mature first-generation product in an intriguing new photographic system, with excellent handling and image quality that will instantly appeal to all photographers who want to take pictures first and talk about gear second.” Unfortunately, it seems that praise quiets down a bit once you leave the bright outdoors and head inside, as the low-light performance was said to be less than awesome — though, to its credit, the built-in flash was deemed one of the better ones out there. We still aren’t seeing loads of evidence that ditching your starter DSLR setup for this is a smart move, but if you’re just now looking to upgrade from a P&S, you’d be doing yourself a solid by poking around in those links below.

Ricoh GXR review roundup originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 18:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink 1001 Noisy Cameras  |  Waloszek, Wouter, Photography Blog  | Email this | Comments

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Article