Nanosolar is now producing panels that make solar power cheaper than coal for the first time.  Current photovoltaic panels use expensive and fragile silicon wafers.  Nanosolar has developed a process to “print” photovoltaic material onto flexible rolls of aluminum cheaply and quickly, producing solar panels for less than $1 a watt, and enabling construction of large solar power plants for $2 a watt (coal plants cost about $2.10 a watt to build).  The cost should continue to drop as production scales up.

Wherever I am, I can type “w recipes” into my browser’s address bar and get an editable list of recipes I’ve tried and liked. If I type “w books” I get a list of books people have told me to read. Or “w rails” to see the notes I’ve been taking as I’ve been learning to program in Ruby on Rails. I can also do this from my iPhone, using a special search page I made.

What’s a Wiki? It’s the same kind of software that runs Wikipedia - it’s easy for anyone to view and edit pages, whether or not you already know how to make web pages. But you can have your very own wiki, and you can keep others from being able to view or change it. Then a Wiki becomes a useful tool to organize your information, and have it accessible from wherever you are.

The software that runs Wikipedia is called MediaWiki. It’s free, but it’s tricky to set up and probably overkill for you. I’m using a simple wiki called W2 by Steven Frank, which is optimized to look good on standard web browsers as well as on iPhone. If you have a web hosting provider (and who doesn’t these days, right?), you just upload the files to your site (it’s written in PHP), optionally password protect it using an .htaccess file, optionally set up a Quick Search in Firefox (so you can just type “w” instead of “http://yoursite.com/index.php/”), and you’re good to go. It saves files as plain text, no databases to muck around with.

I use it every day.

I just bought this book on Art Nouveau.  This turn-of-the-century style is marked by its bold, organic, flowing lines and intricate ornamentation, and has had a strong influence on modern graphic design.  The stems of flowers and vines are prominent - in fact, Art Nouveau has even been called “stem style.” The work of Alfons Mucha, with its radiant, neoclassical women with flowing robes and hair that almost resembles celtic knotwork, is quintessential Art Nouveau.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative is a project by the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology to bring live streaming video and data from the deep sea to internet users for free. It should be available in the “next few years.” (via SF Gate)

Range Fuels is building the world’s first commerical cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgia, producing 100 million gallons per year. Cellulosic ethanol makes use of normally discarded plant material, such as the husks and stalks from corn, or easily grown switch grass. The process creates 16 times more energy than is required to create it, vs only 1.3 times for corn ethanol, which only uses the kernels of the corn. The plant should be online in 2008. (via AutoBlogGreen)

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will collect 90 terabytes of images of the whole night sky every three days using a 3-billion-pixel camera, in order to detect faint long-term astronomical changes, or rapid changes that we don’t normally see because we were looking at the wrong part of the sky at the time.  The 8.4 meter LSST is scheduled to go online in 2013.

Unlike today’s “parallel hybrid” cars, where a normal gas engine and an electric motor are both mechanically connected to the wheels, the Volvo C-30 Recharge Concept “series hybrid” has four electric motors, one in each wheel well, and a diesel engine that isn’t connected to the wheels - its only job is to act as a generator and recharge the batteries when they are low, or send electricity to the wheel motors if the batteries are empty.

The car can travel 60 miles on batteries alone before the engine kicks in - and since you can recharge it by plugging it in at night, that means if you drive less than 60 miles a day, you’ll never need to buy gas. And in a 93 mile drive starting with full batteries and a full tank, you would effectively get 124 miles per gallon. (Yes, that electricity from your wall probably doesn’t come carbon-free, but even if 100% of it comes from coal-fired plants, your overall emissions will still be far less than a conventional gas engine.)

Sadly, this car exists only in a test version, and may never reach production. However, GM is using the same basic design in their Volt hybrid car, with just slightly lower specs, which is entering production and should be available by 2010.

Director R. Luke Dubois spent three days filming actress Lian Amaris Sifuentes moving in extreme slow motion on a set in the street near New York’s Union Square, made to look like an old-fashioned boudoir.  Her performance, in which she goes through the ritual of preparing for a date, will be digitally sped up by sixty times and shown as a feature-length film, such that the actress appears to move at a regular pace while city life races by in the background. New digital processing techniques are used which result in smooth motion, unlike the normal fast-forward that we are used to. Scheduled for exhibition in galleries and on HD-DVD in 2008.

Breakfast wonderland
Clouds of steam rising frozen
From hot buttered toast

With eyes closed I flee
Into the eastern wind, yet -
My toast is still warm