Per aspera

Today’s sign of the impending apocalypse:
Monkeys control robots with their minds - CNN.com
This can lead to no good.

Via Graham, this is a rather impressive collection of celebrities singing along to one of the most impressive speeches a politician has made in my lifetime.

I’m voting in the Democratic primary on Tuesday, which is the first election with national implications since 2001, when I moved up to Massachusetts, in which my vote might actually […]

Eric and I were discussing renewable energy at Christmas dinner, and how the challenge isn’t generation, it’s storage. I described hearing about pumped hydro storage, which was a new idea to the table (I’ve only run across it once myself, in, I think, a comment thread at Matt Yglesias‘ blog). So I googled […]

All environmentalists are French hippie pussies:
Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that’s up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it’ll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will […]

BBC News:
Climate change campaigner Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The committee cited “their efforts to build up and disseminate knowledge about man-made climate change”.
Mr Gore, US vice-president under Bill Clinton, said he was “deeply honoured”.
Mr Gore, 59, won an Oscar for his climate […]

The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension still exists. It’s one of the first things I found on the web when I went online in 1995. Its technology is current, but it feels the same as it did a decade ago, still dense and weird.
This is immensely pleasing to me. An old friend bearing new ideas […]

Jennifer, friend of Per Aspera, sent me a link to a trailer for documentary a friend of hers has done. It looks friggin’ great:

And today, it totally got BoingBoinged. Which is kind of unsurprising, actually, because this is straight up their alley.
Nearly concurrently, Eric, who is like a brother to Per Aspera, sent […]

This is apparently Honda’s new fuel-cell concept car. Sexxxy.

There’s this comparative distinction that open-source proponents like to make, when describing free software:
“Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”
It means, basically, that when folks who care about such things speak of “free software,” they’re talking […]

Boing Boing: Bacteria eats chocolate and shits electricity
I imagine vats of these little bastards, metabolizing away underneath the local Shell station:
Microbiologist Lynne Mackaskie and her colleagues at the University of Birmingham in the UK have powered a fuel cell by feeding sugar-loving bacteria chocolate-factory waste. “We wanted to see if we tipped chocolate into one […]

Hot damn: 
WASHINGTON, May 18 /U.S. Newswire/ — House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wis.), along with Ranking Member John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) and others, today introduced bipartisan legislation to preserve Internet freedom and competition. Over the last decade, the Internet has revolutionized the manner in which Americans access and transmit a broad range […]

Via Majikthise:
Researchers at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition envision their work giving Army Rangers 360-degree unobstructed vision at night and allowing Navy SEALs to sense sonar in their heads while maintaining normal vision underwater — turning sci-fi into reality.
The device, known as “Brain Port,” was pioneered more than 30 years ago by […]