1. Drought is a serious problem in many parts of the world, going well beyond our California 'limit the days you water your lawn' irritation and well into 'We are going to die without rain' territory.
It's boom or bust in parts of India, where they actually look forward to monsoons - and sometimes they can't happen soon enough. But what if the water gods are fickle? Some crafty leaders in male-dominated Bihar think the solution is to have young girls walk around naked.
How does it work? Naked virgins simply embarrass the weather gods, who will apparently do anything to get them to cover up, like make it rain. Scientifically, the people in Bihar feel validated in their approach. It has always worked before because they keep making the girls walk around naked until the monsoons come. And they always come. But this is the worst drought in 70 years so they may be watching girls walk around naked for a while longer.
2. Electric car breakthroughs are all the rage. We're all old enough to have seen this cycle plenty of times; outrageous claims about improvements are made yet oddly never seem to pan out. MIT's electric vehicle team says they are not in that camp. Their elEVen project uses iron-phosphate cell batteries. It gets a 200 mile range out of a charge, which only takes 11 minutes!
The problem? It requires almost 8,000 of those A123 LiFePO4 cells and rapid-recharge requires 350 kilowatts. "That's enough power to blow the fuses on 20 residential homes at once ... so we'll be hooking up directly to MIT's power plant to get that kind of power," team member Radu Gogoana told Network World. Oh, and the batteries cost $80,000, so don't pre-order this bad boy just yet. I'm not being hard on MIT, they clearly have a lot of money to spend and I'm a guy who bought a gigantic 1X CD burner for $5,000 to distribute a program so I get that economies of scale will bring that down. It's still funny that in the numerous puff pieces we will see on this very few people will mention the obvious.
3. I like the "House" television show. I don't have the time to watch a lot of TV so it doesn't make the cut but when the wife has them recorded and I am sitting there with her I like watching them - though maybe that's because she always smells nice, "Dancing With The Stars" can be pretty good in that context also. But House episodes seem to be a little predictable, even to me.
Heck, we even created a House drinking game because regular viewers can predict how things will flow. Some fans have gone even farther and can even write whole scripts, which saves me 44 minutes of time watching an episode (commercials go bye-bye, thanks to the awesome Replay, which was too good to ever make it in the marketplace).
Cracked also has a version but this one is funnier because it isn't some elaborate graphic design.
4. Finally, I leave you with a movie clip of Fighter Maker (Playstation), which is arguably the greatest 3-D fighting game ever made. And by that, I mean it is a pile worthy of our ridicule.
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