Good Morning, John. It’s Wednesday, April 11th and I hope you don’t mind if I do something a little bit different today. Last week you showed us a day in the life of John Green. Writing, as writers do. This Week, I would like to show you a little bit about what I do, but not so much by video-taping myself staring at my computer and typing, cause we discovered by watching your video that that wasn’t very interesting. But instead by discussing some of the biggest issues happening in green technology at the moment:
Residents of the virtual world “Second Life” were surprised by floodwaters rising in virtual versions of Tokyo, London and the Netherlands. The floods were caused by global warming activists, but not in the cool hacking the system kind of way, in the really lame asking everybody’s permission and then doing it kind of way.
You might not know this, but there is more silicon purchased by the solar power industry than by the microprocessor industry. That's right, silicon isn’t very easy to make in fact, it's really dangerous and produces a lot of toxic chemicals. Unless you are a marine sponge. Marine sponges are one of the only organisms in the world who can convert aqueous silicon to crystalline silicon. And the sponges do it without producing any toxic chemicals at all. Scientists at the university of California at Santa Barba are figuring out how those sponges are doing it, and they had some success.
When we talk about lighting there are a few things that matter:
1. How bright the light is.
2. How big the light is.
3. How much energy the light uses.
4. How many toxic substances go in to creating the light.
Compact fluorescence were doing pretty good there until number 4 with all their mercury, but now Phillips Electronics has produced the luxion rebel an LED that is tiny, produces tons of light with a little electricity and absolutely no toxic substances. This is great news, until you consider the fifth thing that matters when it comes to lighting and that’s price and this is not very cheap.
I’ve got a lot of these and I'm not proud of it (shows a cd spindle) That's a lot of plastic for very little gain, but some clever guy in some clever place has posted a picture at flickr, of his ingenious use of CD-Spindles. (shows a picture of a sandwich inside a CD-Spindel)
A motorcycle created and maintained by A123-Systems has broken the electric motorcycle speed record once again! The motorcycle is powered by a LOT of lithium-ion batteries and broke the speed record using 10-cents of electricity. That’s pretty good. The bike peaked out at 156 mph and finished the quarter mile in 9 seconds.
The city of Sidney turned off its lights. All of them for an hour last week. And it saved an amount of carbon that sounds very big. Lots of tons of carbon. But mostly it was just a great opportunity to take a pretty picture and say that ‘Australia is doing something’. Even though, they won’t sign onto the Kyoto-Protocol. Not that us Americans can talk.
And that’s the news from Ecogeek.org If you want to find out more details on those stories or read up on more green technology news, check out Ecogeek.org. So what did you think John. Was that.. was that, like, was that good? You liked that? I’m thinking about doing a podcast for ecogeek and I wanted to try it out. Any opinion is appreciated. Cool. I’ll see you tomorrow.
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