David Lidsky's Blog, page 4659

Reinventing Memorial Day: Creating Inconvenience and Relevance

Memorial Day has become just another excuse for a long weekend. Steve McCallion is exploring a way to bring back its meaning to Americans.

As I discussed in my previous post, the significance of Memorial Day, like other national holidays, has been overrun with America's drive for convenience and consumption, and an opportunity to connect people to America's core promise has been lost. As with any global brand, this gap between the promise and experience of Brand America will make it...

How Your Community Could Get $1 Billion to Test EV Technology

The Electric Vehicle Deployment Act, now moving through the House and Senate, could set up incubator cities for electric vehicles.

Struggling electric vehicle startups, take heart: The government might provide a major cash injection into the burgeoning industry.

As President Barack Obama pledged to explore more sustainable energy options in the wake of the BP Gulf oil disaster, the House and Senate have introduced this week the Electric Vehicle Deployment Act, a bill that asks the Energy...

Obama: BP Is Responsible for Spill, Offshore Drilling Will Be Regulated

After weeks of watching as the BP oil spill off the Gulf Coast destroys local communities and wildlife, Obama is finally getting tough on offshore drilling--and BP's role in creating this disaster.

In a speech this afternoon, Obama ripped into BP, saying, "Make no mistake--BP is operating at our direction. Every key decision and action they take must be approved by us in advance." BP will "be paying a lot of damages, and we're going to stay on them on that," the President said. Obama also...

Top Kill Stopped Flow of Oil Into Gulf, BP Says

The first stage of Operation Top Kill seems to have worked, according to the U.S. Coast Guard, which claims that the wellhead has been "stabilized" with drill fluid blocking the escaping oil and gas. "They've been able to stabilize the wellhead, they're pumping mud down it. They've stopped the hydrocarbons from coming up," said Admiral Thad Allen. The operation can only be deemed a success once the well is sealed up with cement--which can only be done once the pressure from the well is at...

Malware Tracker Map Gives Live Worldwide Coverage of Infected Computers

Right now, there are 1.5 million computers in the U.S. that are suspected to be infected with malware, although that figure seems inordinately low, but we'll come to that in a bit. I know this because of Malware Tracker, a Google Maps creation by the Enigma Software Group that uses data from its SpyHunter software to work out just how many computers worldwide have nasty worms and Trojan horses lurking inside them.

As it uses the Google Maps API, it's possible to zoom right into specific...

Acer's Lumiread E-Reader Scans Books on Any Shelf to Find Digital Versions

Acer's just announced its Lumiread e-reader hardware, with a neat feature--ISBN scanning for easy e-book finding. From a company like Acer, which dominates the netbook world, this is big news that might even help the e-reader genre survive.

The Lumiread follows the Amazon Kindle 2 design pretty closely, right down to the grayscale e-ink display and the chicklet-style QWERTY keyboard. We know it has Wi-Fi, that a future edition will have 3G, that it has 2GB of memory aboard (good for 1,500...

Infographic of the Day: The Era of Tough Oil

The irony of the BP oil spill is that it might push us into an even more destructive practice: Tar-sands oil extraction.

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When looking to causes for the Gulf oil spill, everyone has so far been focused on BP's carelessness and the lax government regulators who cozy up to the industry in hopes of a cushy job.

But the BP spill points to a much larger underlying problem, as The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert recently pointed out. We're headed toward an era of "Tough Oil," when fossil fuels will...

Design Crime: New Luxury Hotel is a Five-Star Disaster Shelter

Slumming it never felt so rich.

Move over Four Seasons! A new building concept takes its design cues from ad hoc
disaster shelters and can transform into just about anything including
yes, a swanky hotel! Like you're slumming it, but with turndown
service! The designers, WATG, call it pop-up hospitality. You
know like pop-up shops,
pop-up cafes, and, of course, pop-up relief
shelters.
Modular units, which they say resemble prisms (and we say resemble
melting ice cubes), are pre-fabricated...

Top Kill Stopped Flow of Oil Into Gulf, BP Says

The first stage of Operation Top Kill seems to have worked, according to the U.S. Coastguard, who claims that the wellhead has been "stabilized" with drill fluid blocking the escaping oil and gas. "They've been able to stabilize the wellhead, they're pumping mud down it. They've stopped the hydrocarbons from coming up," said Admiral Thad Allen. The operation can only be deemed a success once the well is sealed up with cement--which can only be done once the pressure from the well is at...

International Supercomputing Conference

On the world's fastest supercomputer, named Jaguar, scientists are simulating the past 21,000 years of earth's climate history -- a feat that would take average desktop PCs centuries to complete. Or, in science-speak: "After theory and praxis, supercomputer simulation is the third way of doing science," says conference organizer Horst Gietl. Churning through trillions of calculations per second, supercomputers like Jaguar are already yielding breakthroughs in climate science and medicine...