New VW goes into limited production in 2010: gets over 200 MPG

No joke.

It's not much to look at, it seats two in tandem rather than side by side, and it looks like it has nothing for cargo space, but it's carbon fiber and has a drag coefficient of 0.16. Estimated price is $30-40k. They've had it for years, but weren't considering production until carbon fiber tech came down in price. Well, it's come down.

Aside from the looks, it'll be interesting to see how it does in safety tests and I'd like to know what the repair bills would be like. They also don't talk about what the acceleration is like, and considering the size of the engine, I would expect it to be kinda sluggish.

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/07/laugh-at-high-g.html

Happy Patriotic Explosion Day!

For Americans, they rest of you are allowed to have a perfectly good day also. :-)

http://www.ozyandmillie.org/

Doonesbury Say What?

"There is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal. Maybe it's only Western people that can self-govern. Maybe it's only, you know, white-guy Methodists who are capable of self-government. I reject that notion."
-- George W. Bush, London, June 16, 2008

I have absolutely nothing to say in response to this quote.

Elemental Extinction?

"I mourn for the dodo, poor fat flightless bird, extinct since the eighteenth century. I grieve for the great auk, virtually wiped out by zealous Viking huntsmen a thousand years ago and finished off by hungry Greenlanders around 1760. I think the world would be more interesting if such extinct creatures as the moa, the giant ground sloth, the passenger pigeon, and the quagga still moved among us. It surely would be a lively place if we had a few tyrannosaurs or brontosaurs on hand. (Though not in my neighborhood, please.) And I’d find it great fun to watch one of those PBS nature documentaries showing the migratory habits of the woolly mammoth. They’re all gone, though, along with the speckled cormorant, Steller’s sea cow, the Hispaniola hutia, the aurochs, the Irish elk, and all too many other species.

But now comes word that it isn’t just wildlife that can go extinct. The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century."

Scaremongering? Reality? Dunno. And the article continues...

http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0806/ref.shtml

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/01/2331207