Electric car takes another step to practicality

A German company has produced a battery pack that allows an ordinary car to travel 375 miles on a single charge. It’s not a record, but is arguably the most impressive overall performance.

The record for a single charge appears to be 623 miles, achieved by a converted Daihatsu van. However, that only averaged 27 miles per hour and the vehicle could only carry the driver, with no room for passengers.

In contrast, the DBM Energy Audi A2 has all four original seats and drove at an average speed of 55 mph. That’s hardly going to leave other drivers standing on the speed limit-free German autobahns, but it certainly means the car would be practical even outside of urban locations.

Indeed, while the Daihatsu test drive was on a race track, the Audi journey was between Munich and Berlin.

The Allscarelectrics blog notes that the CEO of the company producing the vehicle has a keen eye for public relations: not only did he drive the vehicle during the test, but even offered to let waiting journalists charge their cellphone with the remaining energy at the end of the journey.

DBM says the car can be fully charged in six minutes at virtually any power socket. It says the battery system is already used by a logistics company in fork lift trucks (running 28 hours without recharging), and that it’s ready to go into large-scale production if it finds a buyer in the auto business.

The Greasiest Sandwich Ever AKA The Angry French Canadian

The Angry French Canadian: a 20″ french toasted Parisian baguette covered with poutine, steamies, and bacon, all smothered in 100% pure maple syrup from the tit of The Mother Maple Tree. As a French Canadian myself, I approve of this sandwich, and my very pregnant wife would probably approve as well.

Thanks Big Eater!



Kilogram on yo-yo diet

A United States agency is calling for the abolition of the kilogram.

That’s not to say the National Institute of Standards and Technology wants to get rid of the unit of measurement itself. Instead it believes it’s time to stop using the physical object (or “artifact”) that determines the precise mass that makes up a kilogram.

The kilogram is the base unit for mass in the International System of Units (or “SI” from the French, which is the main international system for seven key measures: mass, length (base unit the metre), time (the second), electric current (the ampere), thermodynamic temperature (the kelvin), luminous intensity (the candela) and amount of substance (a measure used in particle studies, for which the unit is the mole). In each case, all other units of measurement are decimal derivatives of the base unit.

What makes the kilogram — and thus mass as a whole — unique is that it is the only SI unit still based on a physical object. Everything else is based on a physical process that remains constant: for example, one meter is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one second, divided by 299,792,458. (That number does stem from the original, physical definition, but by being fixed it’s not affected by physical changes.)

It’s also believed that all of the kilograms are gradually declining in mass over time through material decay. Unfortunately, and ironically, there’s no way to verify this under the current system as, by definition, the original kilogram always has a mass of, well, one kilogram, regardless of any physical changes.

To make things slightly worse, although the ampere, mole and candela are all based on physical processes, they all involve a measure of mass, meaning they are in turn reliant on the stability of the kilogram.

There has been serious talk of switching the definition of the kilogram for the past five years or so. The most common proposal’s precise definition involves calculations that frankly I don’t dare try to summarize for fear that I get things wrong and somebody tries to recreate them only to end up tearing the fabric of space and time.

The key, though, is that the definition of the kilogram would be based on the speed of light and a fixed amount of energy, the unit thus deriving ultimately from E=MC2.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has filed a resolution to bring about the change and hopes it will be discussed and adopted at an international meeting next October.

Halloween 2010: GAS’s Facebook Fans Costume Picture Compilation

Yesterday, when we asked our Facebook fans to send in pictures of their Halloween costumes, we never thought that so many would participate! While we simply can’t post them all (there was waaaayyyy to many for that), we can at least feature a few of the ones we liked best, just like the one above from our friends at Ball State University, Muncie, IN. Enjoy!

Now here’s one of the sexiest Catwoman costumes I’ve ever seen

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Search Engines Get More Human with Blekko

Well, aside from the curious name (it sounds like what my son says when he eats something he really doesn’t like) it looks like Blekko has people talking. And talking to the tune of $24 million in funding.

What on earth is Blekko? According to TechRadar, Blekko is a search engine with a radically new approach. Instead of relying on keywords, algorithms, and SEO, Blekko relies on human input instead and thereby trying to combat the market-saturated web, where every search result seems either sponsored or placed because of SEO finagling. (I should know, I’ve spent a good amount of my life as a freelancer writing SEO-specific web copy).

The brains behind Blekko claim that their approach of “narrowing down your search to groups of websites pre-approved by other users as being the best source of information (instead of the most popular)” vastly reduces spam and marketing placement in searches. Intead of having algorithms making decisions, humans are.

In a way, it’s like superimposing Facebook over a search structure, from the sound of it. And I think the model has promise, especially on a smaller scale. I’ve found that looking for specific, somewhat obscure information is getting harder and harder on the web these days, especially when it’s location-based (between sponsored ads and the map overlays and whatnot). Blekko, as the article points out, will unlikely be the face to challenge Google. However, its ambitions–to put the internet into the hands of users rather than machines–are noble and, I think, promising.

But not everyone agrees. CNET calls Blekko a “biased search”. (Rafe Needleman of CNET shed some light regarding the name of the company, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, “[Blekko] whose name means, according to CEO Rick Skrenta, Our naming firm sucked, so we went with this instead.”) Which, I suppose, in some ways, is. But at the same time, it’s also making use of one of the best features of social networking: crowdsourcing. If, instead of getting information that’s simply keyworded or sponsored, we get information that experts in their field have approved, it can only help people in the long run. So maybe it’s not Facebook so much as it’s Wikipedia, albeit with approved and not created content.

Back to Blekko, though. Currently Blekko is in beta, and there’s a good amount of information to be gleaned from their site. First, there is their bill of rights:

  1. Search shall be open
  2. Search results shall involve people
  3. Ranking data shall not be kept secret
  4. Web data shall be readily available
  5. There is no one-size-fits-all for search
  6. Advanced search shall be accessible
  7. Search engine tools shall be open to all
  8. Search & community go hand-in-hand
  9. Spam does not belong in search results
  10. Privacy of searchers shall not be violated

All very heartening to hear. While Google is good at volume, its strength is no longer in pinpointing exactly what you want.

In regard to the way that Blekko works, the “human touch” part comes from the use of slashtags. Yes, slashy slashy, as they say. You make and then include slashes (like /beer or /geek) with your searches, thereby categorizing various pages automatically. You can then use your own categories, or branch out to your friends categories or those in the larger social network. Got a friend who knows a great deal about Star Wars figures? You might want to check out his “starwars /toys” search.

It may be that Blekko finds support among geeks most of all. After all, we revel in categorization. I know I’d love to have a far more specific search, filtered by experts in the network, rather than having to wade through what happens to be popular. And I trust my geeks more than just about anyone else.

What do you think about Blekko? Are you categorizing in beta? Share your expertise.

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Geeky Politics: Signs from the Rally to Restore Sanity

Even if you weren’t in Washington DC for the massive Rally to Restore Sanity, you too can experience the overwhelming sanity by having a look at some of the signs touted by reasonable yet impassioned attendees. As it turns out, there was a fairly high geek demographic, so here are a few of our favorites.

As someone in the Flickr comments already pointed out, this code probably won’t work because it throws an additional PartisanException. caobhin (CC)

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