Sanyo's Solar Money Shot

Sanyo calls their creation the Solar Ark. But let’s face it: it’s the Sanyo Solar Penis. At over a thousand feet long and 120 feet high, it’s the biggest solar wang in the world.

The Ark is actually is pretty cool piece of technology. It’s covered with over five thousand high-efficiency solar panels — enough to generate 500,000 KWh of clean, green electricity. There’s a built-in solar energy museum, and multicolor lights across the Ark’s surface can be used to spell out a variety of animated messages. Viagra commercials, perhaps.

No doubt Sony is dying of solar envy.

Sanyo’s Solar Penis Is Bigger Than Yours

Oxygen Bar for Dogs

Dogs are slowly replacing human children. In Japan, there are already more households with dogs than there are households with kids, and the service industry is right up there to pamper them. Here we see a canine oxygen bar--just one of the many luxury services available to dogs in Japan, like haute couture and yoga.
The owners of this facility already have about 20 oxygen bars for humans, but decided that our dog friends could benefit from clean air unattainable in cities like Tokyo. The dogs are placed in this glass cylinder and blasted with air for 30 minutes. Then, supposedly, they feel better. Image by AP
Tokyo oxygen bar offers pick-me-up for pooped pups [Reuters]

i09: High-End Oxygen Bar Slows Down Canine Aging [Japan]

Ethanol from Garbage!

garbage by ~miss-vomit
What a great idea!

DETROIT — General Motors (GM) says it is investing in a fledgling company that claims its secret process could be able to make ethanol from waste in large quantity as soon as 2010 for $1 a gallon or less, half the cost of making gasoline.
Bill Roe, CEO of 18-month-old ethanol maker Coskata, says the company's process uses bacteria developed at the University of Oklahoma and existing gasification technology to generate 99.7% pure ethanol, plus water. He says the method should leapfrog cellulosic production, which has been seen as the next step from today's ethanol production using corn.

GM won't disclose its investment, but Roe says it's enough to make Coskata "a speed-to-market play. I don't think most people saw this coming," he says. "Most talk about cellulosic ethanol is futuristic."

Coskata's process can use garbage, old tires and other waste, but Roe says wood waste probably will be used at first because it's available, cheap and easy to handle.

More from General Motors finances ethanol maker Coskata

Hat tip to Wagga for this find.

In other news, January 13 through 19 is Slow Down Week.

A lot of voters are irrational, and it shows

Samantha - Red and Blue by *photoswithattitude

Wagga sent the following "fodder". I certainly agree that a lot of voters are irrational - as are the politicians.
Thoughts...?

We haven't even made it to the California primary, but millions of Americans are already sick of hearing about the 2008 race.
Bad as the torrent of news is, I find the repetition of myths about voters and voting even more galling. Whether you're arguing with friends or watching the news, you hear many claims about how American democracy works that just aren't true.
1. People vote their self-interest.
In fact, there is only the tiniest correlation between income and party. The country is not divided into two camps: the poor, who vote Democrat, and the rich, who vote Republican. If you consider your own experiences, this is hardly surprising: Are your rich friends really Republicans and your poor friends Democrats?
Self-interest is also a bad predictor of views about specific issues. Yes, the elderly heavily support Social Security and Medicare, but so does almost everyone else. The old bumper sticker says, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament," but men are actually slightly more pro-choice than women. And so on. Pollsters have found a few exceptions where self-interest really matters, such as smoking restrictions, which smokers obviously tend to oppose. But overall, where voters stand has little to do with where they sit.
2. Unselfish voting will solve our problems.
We often blame political problems on the selfishness of our fellow citizens. If people would just sacrifice their own interests for the country's good, our problems would be solved, right?
Hardly. Selfishness is not the only cause of political strife. The U.S. electorate is bitterly divided by ideology and religion, and that's what makes our political disagreements so intractable. After all, if voters were truly selfish, they would negotiate amicable settlements and take what they could get, instead of zealously fighting the same battles year after year.
Even if the American public put aside ideological and religious differences, unselfish voting could easily be dangerous. If people are mistaken about how to make society better off, their good intentions will produce bad consequences. A selfless doctor who believes that leeches will cure cancer is dangerous. So is a selfless voter who truly believes that high tariffs will cure unemployment.
3. Voters' errors balance out.
It's fashionable to dismiss worries about the mistakes of the average voter by praising "the wisdom of crowds," to use James Surowiecki's phrase. Sure, the average voter knows little about politics, economics and policy. But for every voter who overestimates the benefits of tariffs, carbon taxes and the Iraq war, doesn't another make the opposite mistake?
Actually, no. Voters are frequently wrong in the same way. This is particularly clear in economics. If you've never studied economics, you're not equally likely to oversell or downplay the benefits of free trade. Instead, people who know nothing about economics are staunch protectionists, and people who know a lot of economics are avid free-traders.
The fact that voters' errors fail to cancel out seems strange. Why would people have strong opinions about a subject they've never studied? The simple answer is that a lot of voters are irrational, and it shows. In politics and economics, people believe what makes them feel good, even if the evidence is against them. For most Americans, it feels a lot better to scapegoat Mexicans or Chinese for the country's economic woes than it does to calmly examine the facts.
4. Political disagreement is all about values.

More from Five big fat lies about voters

There's nothing like good 1950's camp - and Marilyn Monroe

I'm currently watching the Seven Year Itch...



Marilyn via SReed99342
After enjoying The Seven Year Itch there's some annoying perm and Boomer era Harvard Law schoool film which reminded me of this...

I hate Barbie!

I hate Barbie by *jennipenny

Jennipenny's red fishnet series is featured at Zillowed, a blog that links to Zillow Book and continues my many tentacled and slightly insane corner of the "Blogosphere".

More Tentacles!

Milk via Daily Dreamtime