Driving Signals 2.0

From au-my.com:

"Helps you improve communication with other drivers & express yourself [emphasis added]. Fix display module to rear windscreen & use remote control in the front of the car. Battery operated - No Wires - Single and Multiple message options."

For the traditionalist-combine the 'mean face' with the finger for bonus emphasis.

Get Your Scrolling Marquis On

From popgadget.net:

Check out "the interactive clothing concept," brought to you by Uranium Jeans, a French company that has started making jeans and clothing with embedded thin flexible micro screens. "Luminous and communicative," and "the very latest thing," says the company on its website.

Yeah, but does it tell you the temperature, time, and that you'll be fined for smoking in the vicinity of your person?

A Lion in the House-Part II

There really isn't any way to adequately describe the tragedy of terminal childhood cancer. The fear expressed at times in the faces of these kids is just harrowing.

My observation in watching this is that if one had to choose, early childhood would be the most tolerable and least traumatic of a period to endure such an ordeal. As the doctors/nurses repeated throughout the film, no matter what happens, they continue to be kids. The most trivial game can brighten their present, and distract them from their pain. But once a kid hits their teens, that more developed sense of forethought and sense of self sets in, and with it a complicated view of their illness.

I hate to imagine what it would be like at that age contemplating a future without you in it. As I watched Tim (above) asked by his doctor, after all treatments to eradicate his cancer had failed, if he wanted to discontinue treatment and go home, putting it behind him, or to resume a miserable course of treatment to try to prolong his life as much as possible, I felt the utmost sympathy for his response that he never wanted to stop. He's 16-what else is there but the future? That's everything that is supposed to be. There is absolutely nothing to justify any other action; no fond memories of years well spent, of growing up and recognizing yourself, of children raised and successful-there is nothing except the future. What a question to be asked at that age, and how forceful of a push to maturity.

And as the viewer you are always hoping that a kid will come through, knowing they won't. And as one watches Tim submit to this realization, watches his evident depression while in his hospital bed, his mother's denial and avoidance, and his corresponding loneliness, and voiced fear of death-you can feel nothing but a visceral sense of the hell that this is. Kids don't die this way, you think.

Any parent watching this film who wasn't filled with gratitude for their fortunate reach into the genetic lottery is an idiot.

A Lion in the House-Confronting Childhood Cancer

I just saw part I of this docufilm on childhood cancer, produced by Independent Lense and ITVS. I have to say it was one of the most emotional documentaries I've seen. There were some points while watching it where I felt like I was intruding on these families' very personal moments. I know I wouldn't have the 'journalistic' ability, or disconnectedness, to sit behind the camera and just observe.

For Chicagoans, part II is on Saturday morning at 2am (!!), but it's the weekend and it's well worth it. Click on the logo above to visit the website.

If you live in a metropolitan area, ITVS offers public screenings of some of the films they produce to some cities, so check out their webpage/contact persons, to see if you can see one on a big screen somewhere.

My Photoshop Talent-Unveiled

(Click to Enlarge)
I took this photo at the Chicago Art Museum some time ago-I decided to run it through some filters to see what would happen. This one came out with a sort of mild impressionist brush look (no, that was not the name of the filter, lol).












Athena.

Make Your Congressmen YOUR Bitch. Fight For Net Neutrality!!

The telco/cable industries want to start charging you extra for services you already use, without limitation: Skype/BitTorrent/P2P etc. If you don't pay, they'll DEgrade speed to those services. Or how about redirecting you to sites whose companies paid them more? Why? because the FCC once again, sold out. Tell congress to protect your pipes.
http://www.itsournet.org/

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Modified Hybrid Gets 100 MPG: Worth it?

Greg Hanssen has no reason to be intimidated by rising gasoline prices. That's because his car gets 100 mpg, which he gleefully boasts on his custom California license plate. At a recent conference on hybrid vehicles, Hanssen impressed the auto engineers in attendance with his modified Toyota Prius.

-----------------------------------------------
Caught this in the article also: "Frank gave a Mercury sedan a similar makeover and now the car gets 200 mpg."

So is it worth it? Let's figure this out. The cost of modifying these cars to support this mileage is $12,000.

11gls (typical hybrid tank) @ 200mpg = 2200mptank @$3.2/gl = $35/tank
20gls (typical car tank) @ 25mpg = 500mptank @$3.2/gl = $64/tank

At a cost of $12,000/mod?

Savings is $29/tank. $12,000/$29= 414 tanks of gas before recovery of mod expenditure.
Average person drives 29miles/day. (http://tmi.cob.fsu.edu/act/travel%20and%20commute%20facts.pdf)

So that's 414 * 2200miles/tank = 910,800miles/29mpday= 31,406 days/365 = 86 years.

So 86 years before that investment pays for itself. Wow... So this might be for the green-minded only. But, there are a number of other things you could consider that might justify the purchase.

First, say you're prepared to pay, likely in some kind of payment plan, this kind of money in the first place. For instance, you may just walk into a dealership with a sufficient income to afford a cost equivalent to the hybrid cost, plus an extra $12k or so, without having a definite car in mind. So you're prepared to 'not have' money on a monthly basis in proportion to whatever average monthly payments on a car of this price range would be.

But what most people who have this kind of 'disposable income' don't consider, is the fuel costs on monthly basis. Given our typical, 'decent gas mileage' car above, a tank should last you a couple of weeks, +/-. So that's an extra $70/month, plus the time in filling up you waste. Tack onto this *snacks* that people will commonly buy at a gas station, which may or may not be significant, but whatever. So let's say $80/month.

That's suddenly $80/month that you don't have when purchasing a typical car. And a lot of people don't think about it.

So let's say you're looking to purhcase a typical sedan in the 30,-35k range. Here's a list of such cars, many are commonly bought as you can see.
http://tinyurl.co.uk/vdtn

Now, you can buy a Honda Civic hybrd for $22k, mod it for 12k, and have an equivalently priced car that gets 100mpg. And since many people just kind of buy gas 'as it comes,' without really factoring it into a budget, there is an element of it *seeming* like you have that much more spending money on a monthly basis. Because while even though you actually *do* have more spending money month to month (even if you were to consider 100mpg as opposed to 200), you are achieving it by purchasing a car of a different size class, thus giving up things such as interior car space, trunk space, and power.

So you could have a hybrid for 12k less than a typical sedan, whilst paying just under half on gas *NOW*, or you could pay the equivalent cost of the sedan, mod your hybrid, and have some extra money month to month, filling up only once every 2 - 2 1/2 months, *LATER*.

I guess it kind of depends on your lifestyle, and whether or not you're much of a pre-planner.

Or... you could spend $12.5k on a Yaris and get the gas mileage of a hybrid anyway... I think they come in 6 packs now.

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Dolphin Language Abilities and Intelligence

This is a really cool overview on everything you've heard about dolphins' ability to communicate with humans, and attempts to teach them language. Turns out, like a young child they can understand representations of the world, and apply them to the real world-something chimps/gorillas have trouble doing.
Easy read-clears up some misconceptions.

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ISPs to intentionally degrade types of usage?

As the possibility of a tiered internet looms overhead, I've been wondering, aside from these deep packet analysis cisco routers I've been hearing about, how would an ISP 'make you' pay for, what now seems to be termed, "quality of service?"

Apparently there are laws written preventing ISPs from blocking traffic from a competitor to a user, but, as Jay Thomas of Narus, which has been developing network analysis technology for some time, admits:

"...There's nothing that keeps a carrier in the United States from introducing jitter, so the quality of the conversation isn't good," Thomas says. "So the user will either pay for the carrier's voice-over-Internet application, which brings revenue to the carrier, or pay the carrier for a premium service that allows Skype use to continue. You can deteriorate the service, introduce latency [audible delays in hearing the other end of the line], and also offer a premium to improve it."
-Taken from arstechnica.

Now this just pisses me off... To the point where the next suit-wearing exec I see, I'm gonna swiftly kick in the nuts. And btw, Narus' software is already being used in Germany to block VoIP calls.

The nerve behind these tactics is just baffling. Maybe instead of trying to weasel in extra costs they could go back to, oh, I dunno...making their current service better? For instance, maybe even on par with what they advertise? Everyone in the U.S. already expects to get only 50%-75% of the current speeds they pay for. And when you compare these speeds to those countries' speeds whose economies vastly underperform compared to our own, it becomes just shameful.

Anyone who sends me legit video of any one of these execs responsible for this trend getting severely kicked in the nuts... $5, cold cash.

Grateful Dead "defies the laws of nature" by Giving Away CDs.

-Dan Glickman, MPAA president

BBC Interview with Dan

Lol. These bozos are really running out of justifications. Next they'll be invoking god.