The government might be causing more unnecessary interference on planes by asking people to shut their devices down for take-off and landing and then giving them permission to restart all at the same time. According to electrical engineers, when the electronic device starts, electric current passes through every part of the gadget, including GPS, Wi-Fi, cellular radio and microprocessor.

It’s the equivalent of waking someone up with a dozen people yelling into bullhorns.

I’m really excited about this project. As a kid I was fascinated with vehicles that didn’t use internal combustion engines. In particular I remember reading a Boy’s Life magazine that had drawings of what cars of the future might look like, and how they might run on hydrogen, solar power or batteries. I also loved reading about cars like the sunraycer that could drive from one end of Australia to the other without using any gasoline. Dave was going to retrofit his 90′s(?) convertible cavalier at first, but I convinced him if he was going to spend a bunch of time and money on a car, he may as well like the way it looks when he’s done with it. Enter the Z.

The plan is to post car-related items there, instead of here, as the project continues, but I may not be able to resist mentioning progress here too.

–Tim Ferriss

I remember it being pretty cold and windy on Lummi Island, but we had great weather, and were able to see Mount Baker, some of the Cascades, and (presumably) the North Shore mountains in British Columbia. I managed to get a couple good pictures of Lucy, too. This one has to be my favorite:

We ate/drank some delicious syrup, listened to an informative talk on maple sugaring, wandered around Victoria, and saw some awesome seals and eagles the last morning on our way out of town.

This is my first batch of photos using lightroom 3 (thanks mom and dad!) and its newly improved noise reduction. I’m happy with the results, but it almost feels like cheating when you take an iso 800 image and remove all the noise. And if you’re not careful it’ll end up looking like a watercolor. Next up are some pictures from xmas on Lummi Island with the fam.

first time: 3319 points, acuraccy 94.6%. Second time, 10961 points, accuracy 91.3. Carpal tunnel here we come!

Why does the media bother counting the occurrences of words in the State of the Union Address and reporting on them? Has someone proven that doing so is worthwhile, or that it gives an accurate impression of the entire speech? Using Google to trend search terms over a period of time seems interesting to me, but knowing how many times Obama said “together” in the first several minutes of his speech doesn’t, particularly.

This reaction — this extreme pessimism about the economy’s ability to live with cap and trade — is very much at odds with typical conservative rhetoric. After all, modern conservatives express a deep, almost mystical confidence in the effectiveness of market incentives — Ronald Reagan liked to talk about the “magic of the marketplace.” They believe that the capitalist system can deal with all kinds of limitations, that technology, say, can easily overcome any constraints on growth posed by limited reserves of oil or other natural resources. And yet now they submit that this same private sector is utterly incapable of coping with a limit on overall emissions, even though such a cap would, from the private sector’s point of view, operate very much like a limited supply of a resource, like land. Why don’t they believe that the dynamism of capitalism will spur it to find ways to make do in a world of reduced carbon emissions? Why do they think the marketplace loses its magic as soon as market incentives are invoked in favor of conservation?