Hilarious and awesome at the same time!

Would you like to be a Marijuana Consultant? – Boing Boing.

We can now image the shadow of a single atom. That is amazing!

In the shadow of the atom – Boing Boing.

When I left for work this morning fog was so thick that I could see maybe 30 feet. Then during the day it cleared out, clouded up, and rained. 12 hours later driving home from work it’s snowing, unplowed and my driveway had 10 inches of snow on it to shovel. Utah is not making a good impression on me.

A few weeks ago when the Black Marble pictures came out I noticed this. I tried to zoom in on Google maps and see what it was but came up empty, so I left it. The answer us kind of disturbing.

A Mysterious Patch Of Light Shows Up In The North Dakota Dark : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR.

File under technology is awesome.

MAKE | Kinecticate: Kinect-powered Email.

Wysips solar-cell display reaches 90% transparency milestone, we go eyes-on.

So this is cool. It appears that they are making a overlay film for your cellphone that converts light (I’m guessing not visible light) to electricity. 90% transparent right now looks quite nice. I’m thinking what if we put these in windows instead of cellphones. Put it between the two layers of glass in a double pane window. Conceivably these could provide all the electricity a house needs for night time lighting. That would go a long ways towards cleaning up our air and electrical grid.

“Unrelated” side note: I was at 24 Hour Fitness earlier today when they kicked us out of the gym due to the transformer across the street blowing up and knocking out power to the building. More reasons for solar power setups.

South Ocean Beach – Surf Report and HD Surf Cam | SURFLINE.COM.

If you find yourself stuck in an office or somewhere else, and need to get outside but can’t, here is a camera on the ocean. When I’m stuck in the cleanroom without windows and with tons of fluorescent lights, this helps.

Lehi changes Morning Glory Road to Morning Vista for business.

I work in Lehi. Man I need to get out of here. Seriously, a road named after a flower got renamed because the city council heard that there was another “meaning” for it on Urban Dictionary? I kind of want to add definitions to Urban Dictionary for the names of the council members.

Robots are awesome!

Compressorhead Ace of Spades – YouTube.

I just replaced a dishwasher. I feel like an accomplished homeowner. There were no mishaps either. Thanks againSkye Poitras!

I recently heard of someone buying an electric car and fueling it off a home solar setup. That got me thinking, is that cost effective? Both ideas by themselves are great, but pricey. So how’s it work out?

Gas car:
$4/gallon gas, 26 mpg car, 15,000 miles per year (divide by 12 months) = $192.31 per month in gasoline.

Electric car:
sunlight is free

Home solar setup:
Approximent cost of $15,000, 8 year loan at 5% interest is: $189.90 per month.

Now through my incredible powers of MATH I deduce that you save $2.41 cents a month driving an electric car! Alright, not huge savings but the point is, it is actually cheaper to buy an electric car and home solar setup combined than drive a gas car.

The assumption here is that the gas and electric cars cost and perform the same, which isn’t necessarily the case for everyone right now; it is the case for some though. Imagine if the oil company federal subsidies and tax breaks were taken away and given to programs to improve electric cars to make them the equal of a gas car. In a very short time gas would go up until it became non-cost effective for most people while electric cars would become cost effective, homes would become solar powered across the nation over time, so in all likelihood you’d buy a house in the future with a solar setup, thus making your monthly savings $192.31 instead of $2.41, and the air would be cleaner. I’m seeing short term, mid term and long term benefits here.

He looks small and far away but he was close enough to yell and talk to. Also, behind me about 100 yards are houses. I think I could live in Daly City.

I was 3 and a half. And a mouse, I think. And blondish! Check out my brother’s socks. Where do we get that kind of awesomeness these days?

He makes a great point here! How else will we learn about the amazing stuff out there?

She did this entirely on her own. The previous week she did it in the Porsche too. There once in place she stuck out her hand for the keys and once handed over, started trying to put them in the right place. Lucky for me the Boxster has the keys go on the “wrong” side of the steering wheel.

So why are we as a county getting ~20% of our energy from a 60+ year old nuclear power plant design that is known to have a number of safety issues, instead of basing it on a known safer nuclear technology? Highlights from the talk: no uranium, no plutonium, no ultra high pressure vessels, no need for large amounts of water, worst case scenario the design of the reactor causes itself to go into shut-down (not melt-down), and we already have a massive supply of the fuel? Also, the waste, 83% is inert in 10 years (not 10s of thousands) and 17% is inert in 300 years. 10 minute video from a NASA engineer.

I really wish we had stuff like this here. I could go from SLC to LA in two and a half hours, or to the bay area in two hours. It’s be great!

Google continuing to use their wads of cash for interesting and useful things. I would love it if all computers could boot in just a few seconds. Hopefully this filters out to all computers in the nearish future.

This is neat! This is the sort of thing that got me interested in engineering. MIT researcheds created self cleaning, anti-fogging glass.

This was a VERY long time ago!

What happens when you give a crowbar to an electrical engineer? Awesome things. Jeri Ellsworth is Still my hero!

So it turns out you don’t need a heart to live. These people had marginal hearts and got an inline turbine installed with the heart to help give the blood a boost. Turns out in a few cases some hearts stopped all together but the turbines didn’t. The people hadn’t even noticed their hearts weren’t. They’re literally running around with no pulse. Which is something else you can live without.

Nature Valley Trail View “Making Of” from Mat Bisher on Vimeo.

Toyota’s new concept car FT-Bh. I love it! I think it’s a great little city car. It’s small, lightly weight, seats 4, hybrid that gets 118 mpg combined. Amazing what you can do with low drag and low weight.