Electric Josh

Dad (the paleobotanist) has always said that the best way to generate power from the sun is to use the extra efficient photosynthetic pathways that green plants are good enough to provide. Guys at MIT are trying.
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Why not to drive on your cell phone.
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The Patent Busting Project. Nice.
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Here's one for this space's readers who are Harvard employees: "As many of you know, I've been entertaining the thought of moonlighting this summer as a stripper to earn more money to pay for school in the fall..."
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Americans living abroad describe what people think of Americans. Why is this kind of thing so hard to find, and why such a novelty when it gets put in the paper?
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Bonus business tip.
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The fan on this underpowered Intel laptop is whirring away quite inexplicably. This despite top reporting that the machine is 95% idle. Can someone please construct a laptop computer that is fanless and doesn't double as a 75W space heater so that I can look at textism without waking up the whole house and sweating?
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Had ice cream for dinner, put the baby to sleep with the least fussing I think she's ever put up (this after one of the happiest days she's had in some time), and then sat on my grass (mine, dammit!) and watched the clouds turn from pink to dark gray as the sun went down. It wasn't quite a Burlington sunset, but it'll do.
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That last picture led this space to this. "That's okay Howard Dean."
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My cousin Ariah and her boyfriend Dave are just way too badass! Nuclear physicists both, of course.
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Hey, now that I have a GMail address does that mean I'm cool?
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Bizarre Spider-Man comic strip art, including the sentence, "Take that, people with diabetes!" Reload the page for more. Update: Be warned that some of them are pointlessly vulgar. Update: Oh never mind. Look for the link on boingboing (in the sidebar) if you must.
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Commute, a photo essay of getting to work in New York. I should really do one of these, along with the traffic simulations that I've been meaning to do for like two years and have hardly touched.
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Work imposed radio silence was briefly interrupted by beautiful weekend on the beach. Baby pictures therefrom soon. Now back to work again.
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Real work is still crushing this space. Get back to work!
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Why we can't see faults in our partners or our children: part of the brain shuts down.

Among other areas, parts of the pre-frontal cortex – a bit of the brain towards the front and implicated in social judgment – seems to get switched off when we are in love and when we love our children, as do areas linked with the experience of negative emotions such as aggression and fear as well as planning. The parts of the brain deactivated form a network which are implicated in the evaluation of trustworthiness of others and basically critical social assessment.

Okay, so that was irritating. I let the DNS registration on this site's domain name (daghlian.net) expire, which set loose an avalanche of stupidity, bizarre ICANN regulations on registrars, and customer service which devolved almost immediately into apologies and marketing, although I guess the mere existence of a customer support number is an improvement for this outfit. At any rate, as you can no doubt tell, this space is back online. Sorry for the outage.
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Do I even need to tell you what this is about? Does it even matter?
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While this space was accumulating the need to vacation, John Perry Barlow continued his bizarre pseudomedical adventure: "If I felt any better and could find a just war, I'd join the Marines."
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Gas mileage measurements are failing utterly for hybrids, and seem pretty unrealistic for regular internal combustion engine cars besides.
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Work has been dragging out to sixty hours a week of late, which has just about ruined this space's author on recreational computing. Like how when you first learn to drive it's just about the greatest thing on Earth, and you can't imagine passing up an opportunity to drive yourself great distances across the Vermont countryside or even (gasp!) to Boston and back, but then you get a job and are forced to commute precisely eleven miles away and then back again, underground, through dense, frequently stopped traffic with other ornery commuters every single day, or 62.6 miles of the same beautiful scenery at 75 miles per hour twice daily for twenty years: driving ain't so fun anymore, huh? This space will bounce back to life when this hopefully temporary condition abates. A trip to the west coast should help.
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