Wow, we’re starting to see the mad scientist ideas coming out of the woodwork. Let’s build huge artificial volcanos to spew dust into the atmosphere to cool the earth. The idea is to create a temporary slowdown of warming so we have more time to get our act together. Every couple of years they’d shoot more stuff into the sky. Am I crazy or does this seem like a pretty bad idea?

Shades of Professor Frink…

Check out the Cyclean, a bicycle-powered washer/dryer invented by a Brit named Alex Gadsden from parts scavenged in a junkyard. Clean your clothes, help the environment and get fit at the same- or as he says (after demoing it at a festival),

"…you could say I had a laundrette running in a field in the Mendip hills, I was a stone lighter when I got back from the festival."

A stone is Brit for 14lbs.

BTW, that bike looks a bit like my beloved 1987 Bianchi Grizzly mountain bike, the only mountain bike I’ve seen with a lugged frame.

There is a growing car hacker movement that has local inventors and tinkerers making changes to hybrid cars to improve their mileage drastically. Basically, (check that link at the beginning of this post for a good FAQ) they add the ability to plug the car in and recharge the batteries from the grid. Additional batteries are added and the car is set to run on electric only for short trips under a certain speed. Over that the gas engine kicks in. It is also available if the batteries lose their charge.

The savings come in because the car runs on electric only for local trips, the vast majority of drive time. Electric is cheaper than gas and actual gas usage drops.

This is a simplistic explanation, however it begs the question: Why don’t the car makers embrace this if it’s easy enough for an individual to build? An unholy alliance with the oil business perhaps?

Ran across the Human Car while browsing. Kind of hard to tell whether it’s a bicycle car, some kind of human powered light rail or what. They do mention that they timed one at 80MPH, going downhill…

Oh yeah, they have a Human Car song selection you can sing along with- that’s a first for me!