Win one for the Zipper

This is a nice enough idea, separating the battery from the car, linking power generation and distribution, and then essentially selling you the "minutes" rather than just the car and then going your separate ways.

But they need to go one step further. This model won't scale in the US; we're too big, too mobile, and nobody is going to stop 18 times to replace a battery just to relocate or haul the family truckster across country (talk about running out of gas; you'd need a forklift to bail you out).

What they need is for a business model here is a sort of Ultra-Zip Car. You don't buy anything other than a use-privilege. You're a member, and, in fact, ultimately not that many cars are privately owned. A few gas-powered cars or clean-diesel hybrids are in the fleet for edge tasks that just don't make sense on 100% electric supply. When you move, you leave the car right where it is. There will be thousands just like it where you arrive. Something like that could genuinely be deal-changing and, over the course of many years, could fundamentally restructure how we think about transportation in this country.

Tie this model to green energy (as they note they're specifically doing in Denmark) and suddenly you've gotten around the generation/distribution connundrum of technologies like wind. Just store it in all the cars and get it back later (if you need it in a pinch) from the cars plugged in. Texas suddenly becomes the Saudi Arabia of wind energy.

Dropping some LHC

Large Hadron Collider fun fact(s) of the day:

In experiments, researchers found that an 86-microsecond exposure of the beam would bore a hole 40 meters into a block of copper.

I see. Maybe this explains why they decided to go with a graphite composite.

...instead of letting it burn a single 1.5-mm-wide hole into the cylinder, CERN engineers designed the system to “scan” the beam onto the face of the cylinder, much as the electron beam is scanned in a cathode-ray-tube television screen...

Then let me be the first to say "Where's the oscillator on this thing? I want to watch the other broadcast!"

Finally, it's worth noting that:

Though the graphite beam dump becomes very hot (about 750 °C), it does not melt. In fact, after it cools down it can be reused a few hours later.

So they won't have to run down to the spar to get yet another 10-ton graphite cylinder encased in 1000 metric tons of steel and concrete. That there is good planning. Officer thinking, even.

The Smallening

Rolling Stone cutting its size down, going glue-back.

Sad, but true. I must admit that I particularly love this line:

On balance, going to standard size should appeal to advertisers, according to Brenda White, senior vice president for publishing at Starcom USA

Why the fuck should that necessarily be so? Advertisers like eyes. Period. RS is (reportedly) at its highest circulation ever. This is like saying people will just naturally prefer New Coke in the total absence of any evidence to support it. After all, it's new! Didn't you see the name? New!

And then there's this all-too-depressing note:

In the large format, long articles often turn up as daunting expanses of almost uninterrupted type. With the revision, such pages are smaller and less intimidating, and more likely to be broken up with photographs.

Yep, we like our 2nd grade level picktoor books. Don't skaer me with that there tipe of your'n cause'n I don't cotton to the readin' so much.

“We’ve evolved,” Mr. Wenner said. “But the core tradition, the mission, remains the same.”

Indeed, Jann, shorter articles and, preferably, just a picture about Brittney are irreducibly the core tradition of long form music criticism and politically charged articles. Hunter S. Thompson became the face of the magazine mostly because of his brief, 10 word bullet points (and lots of pictures) about how Avril Levigne is totally kewl.

Mark my words: this is officially the middle of the end (the beginning was the demotion and summary deletion of anything approaching serious criticism alongside the transformation of the other content to little more than Maxim-style laddy-mag filler).
Content may come and go, but you generally don't mess with your fundamental brand image and survive. McDonalds, for instance, may as well adopt a large red "D" logo and a friendly but comically edgy cat-spokesman named Terry. How did New Coke work out? More of the same.

My remarkable, nay oracular insight into the future? Single copy newstand sales (what they claim to be after) will not be positively affected by making the magazine more generic in appearance. I know, I know. Rocket science.

The Paper

From Bernie Mac's Tribune obit:

"When I started in comedy in the clubs in 1977, blacks couldn't do certain clubs—not because they were segregated. They just didn't want to put the [black comics] out there," Mac told the Tribune in 2007.

Huh. Wonder what he could have possibly said. Probably not "gentlemen," though. Good thing they protected us from whatever that might have been. Also here:

"I ain't scared of you, [expletive]!" became a signature tag line.

Presumably not talking about [black comics] there...

Can't we, as a nation, agree that the problem isn't really so much that 6 year old, delicate eyes are getting all sorts of filthy idears from the nasty newspaper, and instead, that the real problem is much more along the lines of: with few exceptions nobody younger than 65 gives a shit about the paper anymore? And from there, isn't some sort of, oh, I don't know "solution" starting to be pretty fucking obvious? And it's not something that involves ever more trend pieces about how more and more couples are using the intarwebs to shop these days.

Not saying that cursing in the paper is the, or even a solution, but at least adopting a way of discussing more complex subject matter in a way that doesn't immediately infantilize the readership you're so desperately trying to court could be a good fucking idea.

Chartsengrafs

This is a start, at least:

Let me make a point about efficiency, because my Republican opponents - they don’t like to talk about efficiency," Obama said.

"You know the other day I was in a town hall meeting and I laid out my plans for investing $15 billion a year in energy efficient cars and a new electricity grid and somebody said, 'well, what can I do? what can individuals do?' Obama recalled.

"So I told them something simple," Obama said. "I said, 'You know what? You can inflate your tires to the proper levels and that if everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper level, we would actually probably save more oil than all the oil we'd get from John McCain drilling right below his feet there, or wherever he was going to drill.'"

"So now the Republicans are going around - this is the kind of thing they do. I don't understand it! They’re going around, they're sending like little tire gauges, making fun of this idea as if this is 'Barack Obama's energy plan.'

"Now two points, one, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is, but the other thing is they're making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.

Fine. But what we really need in this fight are Ross Perot style charts and graphs. Hard numbers. Hit McCain right where he's most vulnerable: his total lack of understanding of anything numerical. He's already said he doesn't get economics, is unaware of the computer, knows nothing of the innertubes. The simplest pie chart will strike him like a bolt from the distant future; and he's guaranteed to do us the honor of saying so on national television. Every one of these idiotic GOP-lead, media enabled "ain't it funny?" lines needs to be systematically dismantled beyond the point of comfort.

Brazen, prideful stupidity and its media enablers must be exterminated from the public discourse. Starting now. Because it's only going to get worse, and because McCain is counting on a bunch of silly issues like this sopping up all available debate time. If they actually were to, you know, debate three or four times, well, let's just say that would be a GOP disaster.

After 9 or 10 years of this non-stop nonsense, we're so steeped in it we don't even notice anymore. It's going to take 15 or 20 years to march it back. Start now.