It reminds me of the "Smoking hairy golfball" prediction of computers back in the eighties.

CPU power consumption in the hundreds of watts makes it smoke. Surround it with a shell of RAM for fast access, and thousands of I/O wires make it hairy.

But yeah, not a practical design.

Now the shell of RAM reminds me of M&Ms. MMMmmm.

Yeah, air flow and electromagnetic interference. Cases are generally an integral part of keeping EMI under control. Operating out of the case is fine for the occasional hardware debug, but not general use.

Silly Putty (R) ?

@13,

A friend of mine with a solar array tells me they can withstand golf ball sized hail at 120 mph. Tempered glass is pretty strong.

My understanding (from an old Flanders and Swann album) is that when something good happens, it's "another triumph for Great Britain!", but when something bad happens it's "England loses again".

Nanosolar is looking very interesting. For Massachusetts residents especially, look at Evergreen Solar http://www.evergreensolar.com/app/en/home/

Since they're a Massachusetts company, the state provides extra rebates & such.

That, plus maybe cheaper iron phosphate lithium batteries in a few year and I think we may have a winner.

Check out the DHS 5 year anniversary poster.
"One Team, One Mission: Securing the Homeland".
http://www.dhs.gov/xtrvlsec/programs/gc_1169676919316.shtm

Is it just me, or it the logo, er, um, rather phallic?

Decades ago I had the idea of modifying a dot matrix printer (who remembers the DEC LA35) as a raster scanning tattoo needle. Didn't work.

Then when ink jet printer came out, iron on tattoos. You print your design with an ink jet (or today, maybe a color laser printer) on transfer paper and get out your iron. Never actually tried it...

Cool that Unicode includes this. How about Voynich manuscript text?

@5, try this...
http://www.bugbrother.com/echelon/spookwordsgenerator.html

Here's a sample:

-=-=-

From: d3ripc@interpol.int
To: leslie.blake@mail.dss.mil
Subj: SECRET VOJNA TAJNA (TOP VERY SECRET - Balkans)

Nikolai Patrushev, head of Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB), told Pakistan's Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) about Solenzara (Southern Corsica) frenchelon station : a nuclear expert sent CRW (UK Counter-Revolutionary Warfare)`s anarchists and terrorists nym servers logs to Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) !

Ask 634th Military Intelligence`s contact of Microsoft greed & sadness & unhappiness Dpt via http://www.cia.gov/ for Ref. NAVWCWPNS, NSWC, USAFA, AHPCRC, ARPA, SARD, LABLINK, USACIL, NRCNSA/CSS.
-=-=-

I like to append stuff like this to e-mails, font size 1, text color white.

Be careful with these. A friend bought three for holiday gifts, two of them burst into flame. There was no protection for charging the lithium ion battery, and they hate being overcharged. (Read "rapid thermal disassembly") Hopefully the better ones of these do have appropriate charging safeguards, especially if children will be using them.

Yes, we did contact the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and yes, we ruined Christmas for thousands of kids. :-(

Power density of moving air is

Power = 1/2 * Air Density * Area * Velocity^3 * efficiency

Air density is about 1.3 kg per cubic meter.
Say the wind is blowing at 6 meters/second (about 13 mph), there's about 140 watts per square meter.

But that's limited by the resistance the turbine offers to the wind, otherwise it will simply blow around it, it turns out the absolute maximum power is 16/27 of that, or about 83 watts. Small wind turbines might get one quarter to half of that, maybe.

And that's for a one square meter cross section. Hard to tell, but a molded piece of plastic I doubt is going to be much bigger than that.

For some reasonable power, say a kilowatt you'll need over 60 km/hour wind with a one square meter area and 50% efficiency.

Info on small wind turbines at http://www.truenorthpower.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=19

re: 9, jitrobug,

According to their web site, it's more like 480 watts, and the noise level is 60 dB, I wouldn't want to be in the same room. Yep, it's a fancy dehumidifier with filters and UV antiseptic light.

I like the copy where it says "AirWater begins with nature's atmospheric water - source created by God."

How do you get Bush on the list? All you need is one person named "George Bush" or even "G. Bush" on the list, and the resulting matches do the rest...

Any volunteers?

re: battery disposal...both lithium and alkaline batteries are classified by the U.S. Gummint as "non-hazardous waste". but lithium can be recycled.

http://www.ehso.com/ehshome/batteries.php has more details and links.

The Lurking Horror. Scariest game I ever played. Text based Infocom game based on H. P. Lovecraft novel. It had sound effects. Not much, creaking doors and ambient noise. Played it all night with a friend years ago 'cause we were terrified to stop in the middle without resolving it. Graphics in games these days are impressive, and some of them use it to great effect and have excellent writing, but imagination is still better than the best graphic card.

"...these diminutive drives are little larger than a set of car keys..."

3 by 5 by 0.7 inches, someone has some giant car keys!

Just to add fuel to the fire, keep in mind that a food Calorie is equal to 1000 thermodynamic calories.

So a gallon of gas contains about 35 MJ and that 2 ounce Snickers Bar has 280 food Calories, or 280,000 calories, or 1.17 MJ.

I'm for walking and bicycling where I can, and I'm researching adding electrical assist with solar charging to my bike. Adding some panniers so I can haul a useful load should greatly increase my useful range about town.

Scrubbing Bubbles?

So many good reads. I remember decades ago buying Pinkwater's "Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death" on an outing to Boston. I was so absorbed in it I missed my T stop and didn't get home till 3:00 AM.

To answer HMPF, I have an English copy of Momo, great book. Translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn. Published by Penguin Books. ISBN 01400.79165. Hope that helps.

I'd also recommend the Mad Scientists' Club series. Written in the 60s by Bertrand R. Brinley, comprising 12 short stories and 2 novels. A bunch of small town boys using science to solve mysteries and such. http://www.madscientistsclub.com/ is the official web site, and links to Purple House Press http://www.purplehousepress.com/index.htm which publishes it as well as other children and young adult books.

Takes me back to grade school waiting for the Scholastic Book flier, Robert McCloskey's "Homer Price", William Hayes "Project: Genius", Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet series, Lester del Ray, "Runaway Robot", Jacques Futrelle "The Thinking Machine"...

I still periodically re-read these, as well as classics like "Winnie the Pooh" and "The Wind in the Willows". And, maybe not strictly a young adult novel, but James Schmitz's "The Witches of Karres" and Telzey Amberdon series are among my favorites.

Personally, I think EVERYTHING should have a self-destruct mechanism.

Lufthansa gives, and Lufthansa takes away.

A couple months ago flying through Frankfort. I took the 0.2 liter bottle of water, unopened, because I wanted to drink it later. In the airport, they took it away from me as a hazard. Go figure.

I'm calling on all travelers to call the authorities regarding the bins of potential bombs that TSA personnel are stockpiling in airports, right next to where they force hundreds of people to congregate.

What I don't understand is why at a 433 MHz clock, it seems lethargic compared to my old Amiga 2000 that ran at 7.something MHz. Ami always was ahead of the times... Ahh, fond memories.

I still like my XO and think the G1G1 will do some good in the world. The display is brilliant, the e-book mode is great, and with the small size and convenient handle, it's not the computer on my headboard when I have to google or read boingboing in the middle of the night.

Still a few rough edges, but I was pleasantly surprised that the SD slot understands HCSD. I've got 8 GB in there now.

Then there's the occasional post that needs to be deCAPitated.

The disemvoweling reminds me of the excellent SF short story by Hal Draper, "MS Fnd in a Lbry".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms_Fnd_in_a_Lbry has a nice synopsis & link to text.

Maybe they could get sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.

Varta Microbattery GmbH has a line very similar to this idea; PoLiFlex EasyPack line.

http://www.varta-microbattery.com/en/oempages/sales_literature/sales_literature.php
and scroll down towards the bottom.

Five sizes of prismatic lithium polymer from 610 to 2520 mA-h in a standardized flat, rectangular plastic housing. However they're only available to businesses, partly due to safety concerns.

That said, speaking as someone who has designed products using rechargeable batteries, one reason companies often use unique battery packs is to help combat counterfeiting, which is a major safety issue. There's a big market in cheap LiIon batteries made by companies with sub par safety features. With a technology where even batteries from reputable manufacturers demonstrate thermal events and are subject to vast recalls, gray market batteries pose a real risk.

The bigger the market segment for a particular form factor, the greater the chance it will be copied. Security chips can help here...it's not ALL about locking the customer into buying more expensive batteries. (Saving $20 on a cheap battery after buying a camera or cam-corder for hundreds or thousands of dollars may not be much of a bargain.)

Another issue is that when I work with a cell manufacturer I can specify the exact chemistry, capacity and such, for the lifetime of a product, and with the energy density of lithium batteries these days, it's much more of an issue than with other chemistries. If the manufacturer behind Green Cells comes out with a newer, higher capacity cell, it could be more prone to flaming, and I might not want that risk associated with my product. (Polymer batteries are generally safer than regular lithium ion batteries, so they may be okay, but they'll also be more expensive. A123 System batteries may also be interesting.)

And if whoever re-stocks the vending machine thinks he found a real bargain somewhere, I don't want to be the one to find out the hard way.

I'd also be wary of packaging LiIon to replace pairs of AA or AAA batteries. Since there are already NiMH batteries in those sizes, and products that charge the batteries in situ, it would be dangerous to be able to swap chemistries as the charging profile is drastically different. Flamingly different. A couple of years ago HP recalled almost 700k digital cameras because they incorrectly detected the battery type and tried to charge alkaline batteries.

I also recently got a few Black & Decker VPX cordless tools. I like them, the lithium batteries don't discharge when they're sitting on my tool bin, and they're much lighter than the old NiCad power tools they replace. The batteries are physically bigger than what this article is proposing, but it'll be interesting to see if Black & Decker licenses their use to other manfacturers.

"Universal-Cyclops Steel Corp". Man, they sure don't name companies like they used to.

The catalog page says it's 101" x 31" x 43". I don't think it would fit in my living room.