“Windmills may finally be ready to compete with fossil-fuel generators. The technology trick: turn them backwards and put hinges on their blades.” According to this article in the MIT Technology Review, a cheap, lightweight turbine may be here. Check out their list of players in the Wind Industry, too.

“Hemp car is an alternative-fuel project car that utilizes hemp biodiesel for fuel. Industrial hemp would be an economical fuel if hemp were legal to cultivate in the United States. Industrial hemp has no psychoactive properties and is not a drug. Hemp Car demonstrates the concept of hemp fuels on a national level and promotes the reformation of current law.”

“Throughout the angry Senate debate about whether to limit subsidies to wealthy farmers, lawmakers kept referring to ‘the Web site’ to make their points. ‘You can see on the Web site -- 10 percent of the farmers get most of the money,’ said Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma.... [The site] operated by the Environmental Working Group, a small nonprofit organization with the simple idea that the taxpayers who underwrite $20 billion a year in farm subsidies have the right to know who gets the money... not only caught the attention of lawmakers, it also helped transform the farm bill into a question about equity and whether the country’s wealthiest farmers should be paid to grow commodity crops while many smaller family farms receive nothing and are going out of business.”

From the New York Times.

“Beijing Organising Committee of the 2008 Olympic Games (BOCOG) opened a two-day Olympic Design Conference in Beijing on Tuesday in a bid to find the most appropriate ways to impress the world visually. Beijing Mayor Liu Qi said in the opening address that through the magnificent and unique ‘Olympic look’, Beijing will unfold the great charm of this global sporting event and the history of China. Meanwhile, Beijing will also ‘promote the concept of “New Beijing, Great Olympics”, and demonstrate and elevate the image of Beijing and China in the world’, added Liu, who is also BOCOG president.”

From the People’s Daily.

“Every morning in the apartment building where I live I take the elevator six floors down. One morning a woman appeared with her bicycle as I was waiting for the elevator. Though we live along the same corridor, I had scarcely seen her before, and we had never spoken. Japanese public behavior in residential space is customarily limited to either reserved nods of recognition or restrained ‘good mornings’ and ‘good afternoons.’ Everything changes at the elevator, as I was especially surprised to see this particular morning.

Suppressing my annoyance (a bicycle takes half the space in the small elevator), I gestured for the woman to enter when the elevator arrived and the door opened. She acknowledged my courtesy, and positioned herself inside. There was just room enough to accommodate me in front of her. As the elevator descended, suddenly I felt a hand touch my collar, and smooth it down over my tie! ‘Arigato gosaimas’ (thank you very much), I managed, when we reached the bottom floor and I could turn to face the woman. She smiled faintly and bowed in turn.

I was stunned for hours afterwards. Japanese never touch. It’s not even customary among themselves when they meet to shake hands. So how to explain why this woman would so casually reach over and adjust my collar? In public! And yet, not exactly. The space of an elevator is small enough, and, perhaps more important, brief and ephemeral enough, to admit a private character. Therefore, an individual can relax, and accord another a degree of warmth inadmissible once the elevator doors open once more. My moment of contact, I concluded, could have only happened in an elevator, and then perhaps only in Japan. Suddenly the mundane seemed luminous with an entirely different meaning to transit space.”

See “In and Out of Elevators in Japan” by Terry Caesar, published in the Journal of Mundane Behavior.

“Elevator space in Japan is considered both as an example of transit space generally and as an example of the practice of a particular national identity. The paper argues that there is an intimate relationship between the social script outside the elevator and variations possible on this script inside the elevator. In Japan, these variations serve to express the improvisational, private character of personal interaction possible inside elevators, over against the fixed, public character of behavior outside them.”

Found via Consumptive.org.

“For eight days in 2002, 14 student teams will compete to capture, convert, store, and use enough solar energy to power our modern lifestyle. Solar Decathletes will be required to provide all the energy for an entire household, including a home-based business and the transportation needs of the household and business. During the event, only the solar energy available within the perimeter of each house may be used to generate the power needed to compete in the ten Solar Decathlon contests.”

Found via SynEarth.

“Brain scans on Gulf War veterans in the United States who are suffering from debilitating diseases may have resolved why 130,000 US and British servicemen and women complain of mystery illnesses.... The damage to the brain was likely to have been caused by the use of organophosphate pesticides to kill desert flies and lice at the American and British tented camps in Saudi Arabia; the anti-nerve gas tablets and vaccines given to frontline troops and inhalation of chemicals after the Americans bombed an Iraqi chemical weapons store.”

From The Times of London.

Construction has begun on a “security barrier to separate Israel from the West Bank.” BBC: “As always, it boils down to a question of land: Israel taking Palestinian land to ensure its security.... In the absence of a peace settlement, the fence has raised all the old questions about where Israel ends and the West Bank begins.” Some villages will be split in half, or annexed entirely. VOANews: Yasser Arafat “described the $220 million fence as a ‘sinful assault on our land, an act of racism and apartheid, which we totally reject.’” News24: “Veterans from both sides of the Berlin Wall say Israel’s... plan to erect 110km of fence along the West Bank will fail ultimately, much as the Cold-War divide through Berlin eventually crumbled.”

Update March 23, 2003: While the first wall proceeds apace, Israel is planning a second wall.

From Peter Hall:

“The news has become a worrisome visitor in our lives over the last few months, and it arrives in an ever-increasing variety of forms. TV news, according to one recent survey, still reaches most households, but text-based news provides the supplementary information — on web sites, newspapers, email, palmtop bulletins and even zipper signs. A cursory glance at this particularly rich array of printed and transmitted words reveals a genre of media in flux — the typography of news. Typography was never more important to us, and yet never less noticed.”

See also The News Aesthetic.

Found via xblog.

“The materials we use to build our buildings and the energy we consume to keep them comfortable take a tremendous toll on the environment. Since 1989, [the National Resources Defense Council] has showcased green features, including energy-efficient lighting and appliances and innovative building components, in each of our four offices. Now we work to make green design standard practice. We educate developers about environmental technologies and promote incentives for using them. We develop energy-efficiency and other green standards for buildings and fight for their adoption. We also work with homebuilders to develop forest-friendly building techniques to save wood in residential construction. And soon we will open a green design museum in our new state-of-the art Los Angeles office.”