elkit in wonderland

Baby You Can Drive My Car

Wow, this is really cool: Neil Young Works to Make a Lincoln Continental Run on Clean Fuel.

Neil Young wants fuel-efficient cars, and as a politically active rock star, he wants everyone else to have them, too. But Mr. Young is not ready to give up his love of big cars, and he doesn’t think many other drivers are, either.

So Mr. Young, the iconoclastic godfather of grunge, has assembled a team to turn a nearly 20-foot-long, 5,000-pound 1959 Lincoln Continental into a vehicle that will run on natural gas, electricity or some other form of clean energy. His aim is to win the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, a $10 million challenge to develop a vehicle that can get 100 miles per gallon or better by 2009.

Check out the details: they're planning to run a rotary engine on natural gas. They expect to get 1,000 miles of driving out of one tank. A German engineer is involved. :-) And Young is making a documentary about this project, and sharing knowledge online, including clips on YouTube.

I've Been Looking So Long At These Pictures Of You

Garr Reynolds talks about John McCain's background visuals in his blog "Presentation Zen".

Make sure to read all the way to the end, where he says, "So the use of visuals were a bit off for John McCain's speech, but at least he didn't commit death-by-PowerPoint. (Below is an image of what that might look like...plus a few more alternative approaches)."

My favorite? I am torn between the Lawrence Lessig example and the Apple example (all the way at the end of his post):

Just Like Watching The Detectives ... It's So Cute

Jane Hamsher writes: "The Revolution Will Be Twittered."

There's absolutely nothing interesting about what the GOP is doing here in Minnesota. The party itself is like an enormous cadaver whose funeral is being held in the Xcel Center, and the wakes thrown by its drunken hedonist powerbrokers bear more than a passing resemblance to Roman vomitoriums.

Not that the Democrats in Denver were much more interesting -- more lifelike, to be certain, as the baton of power and pork passed over to them, but completely staged and lacking in spontaneity nonetheless.

What happened on the streets of St. Paul yesterday was something else altogether. Whereas Denver was the site of young people clutching their blackberries and hustling passes to more and better parties, in St. Paul they were creating a whole new model for communication, documentation and activism.

Members of the Coldsnap legal collective fanned out across the city and communicated with each other (and the world) openly on Twitter about what was happening during the protest, and were thus able to alert and steer journalists, observers and anyone else with an interest immediately to what was happening on the street throughout the day. Nothing that law enforcement did happened in secret, and ACLU lawyers and other observers were able to be quickly alerted to anything that was happening. When we first arrived we started following their bulletins in the wake of the weekend raids, and as more information came in verifying their reports it became clear that they were a highly trustworthy source of information.

Meanwhile, the Uptake provided an army of video journalists with Qik cameras that broadcast live on the internet. You could track their whereabouts on a Google map, and they provided on-the-spot coverage of what was happening in real time. Really, I can't recommend enough going to their main page and taking a look at what they managed to do yesterday. They also provided a lounge where visiting bloggers could have internet and video editing space, and that's where we were headquartered yesterday. We were able to not only hear about what was happening all across the city virtually instantaneously, but see their reporters quickly diverted to anything that was happening and watch as their cameras went into action.

It was like a million ants scurrying around the city, passing back bits of information that formed themselves into a whole in a completely decentralized manner. Its very nature defied efforts to control and spin and propagandize.

Take Me, I'm Yours

David Weinberger has a post up today that is titled "20 Things I've stolen" - which made me do a double-take. Then I saw it was tagged "copyright", which made me smile. Here are a few things I've taken from that very post on his blog (would he classify it as stealing since I'm acknowledging the source?):

1. I took an extra napkin from a Taco Bell for unspecified use “later.”
2. I sat on a bench on a hot day, enjoying the breeze as the man next to me fanned himself.
3. I read the headlines of a newspaper that was for sale in a kiosk box.
4. I divided a single-serving DingDong in two, and had it for dessert on two consecutive days.
5. I listened all the way through to a Metallica song emanating from my neighbor’s radio, but closed my window when the commercial came on.
6. I remembered the movie times in my newspaper from the day before so I wouldn’t have to buy a copy of the paper today.
7. When friend’s cat chose my lap to sit in, I petted it, precisely to discourage it from moving to the lap of its rightful owner.
8. I said “What a long, strange trip it’s been” without air quotes.
9. On the Amtrak “quiet car,” I listened to a man in the seat ahead of me explaining to the bored woman next to him how he gets such a great shine on his shoes. I have since used his technique, successfully.

Do take a look at the whole thing: "20 Things I've stolen".

Welcome To The Working Week

A List Apart is "calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide."

(Click on the button above or on this link to take the survey.)

When The Heat Dies Down

My laptop battery is seriously out of order. I should get about three hours out of a fully charged battery (and I used to), but now it discharges pretty quickly, diminishing to about 30% capacity in an hour. At which point, to add insult to injury, it just dies in its sleep.

Time to buy spare parts.

A Change Is Gonna Come

From O'Reilly Radar: Web 2.0 Is From Mars, Enterprise Is Up Uranus.

The Enterprise and Web worlds use different frames, like Lakoff's political frames: one is the stern father (the IT department) with strict rules, transgressors to be punished; the other is the nurturing parent (the API provider) who encourages experimentation, self-development, and happiness. These two have trouble seeing inside each other's world-view.

Carefree Highway

In Wired.com: Making Renewable, Carbon-Neutral Oil From Algae.

A San Diego start-up says it is using algae to make oil that can be refined into gasoline and other fuels that are both renewable and carbon-neutral, and it plans to produce 10,000 barrels a day within five years.

Doesn't that sound promising?

Here Comes The Sun

I see this blurb in Good Morning Silicon Valley:

SunPower said Wednesday that it is buying enough silicon from Saudi Arabia to make 2,500 megawatts of solar cells, 25 times as much as it produced in 2007.

... and can't help but think, oh, effin GREAT! We should be trying to wean ourselves off our dependency on Saudi oil, and what do we do? Trade it for a Saudi silicon dependency. Nice going.

Eat It, Eat It, Don't You Make Me Repeat It

  Pie Chart 
  Originally uploaded by elkit

I don't know what The Steve will unveil at the Macworld keynote tomorrow, but I bet it won't be as delicious as my newest high-tech development: the edible pie chart.

PS: Under the hood, it's apple pie following my usual recipe.