By Josh Dzieza — The Verge

Earlier this week, during a disappointing Tesla earnings call, Elon Musk mentioned in passing that he’d be producing a stationary battery for powering the home in the next few months. It sounded like a throwaway side project from someone who’s never seen a side project he doesn’t like. But it’s a very smart move, and one that’s more central to Musk’s ambitions than it might seem.

To understand why, it helps to look not at Tesla, but at SolarCity, a company chaired by Musk and run by his cousin Lyndon Rive. SolarCity installs panels on people’s roofs, leases them for less than they’d be paying in energy bills, and sells surplus energy back to the local utility. It’s proven a tremendously successful model. Founded in 2006, the company now has 168,000 customers and controls 39 percent of the rapidly expanding residential solar market.

Read more

GM Overcoming Toyota & Ford Surmounting Honda, Unfailingly, For Life!

FIRST

The reason why Japanese automotive industry beat the U.S. car-makers is because, to them, it is an outright existential world to win and in the process spread a sense of Japanese exceptionalism.

They are fighting a most-lucrative World War merciless!

Continue reading “GM Overcoming Toyota & Ford Surmounting Honda, Unfailingly, For Life! By Mr. Andres Agostini” »

Quoted: “Legendary cyberculture icon (and iconoclast) R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell have written a delicious funcyclopedia of the Singularity, transhumanism, and radical futurism, just published on January 1.” And: “The book, “Transcendence – The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity,” is a collection of alphabetically-ordered short chapters about artificial intelligence, cognitive science, genomics, information technology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, space exploration, synthetic biology, robotics, and virtual worlds. Entries range from Cloning and Cyborg Feminism to Designer Babies and Memory-Editing Drugs.” And: “If you are young and don’t remember the 1980s you should know that, before Wired magazine, the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 edited by R.U. Sirius covered dangerous hacking, new media and cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs, with an anarchic and subversive slant. As it often happens the more sedate Wired, a watered-down later version of Mondo 2000, was much more successful and went mainstream.”

Read the article here >https://hacked.com/irreverent-singularity-funcyclopedia-mondo-2000s-r-u-sirius/

By Sarah Laskow — Grist

http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/moss.jpg?w=320&h=180&crop=1, (default)], [http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/moss.jpg?w=480&h=270&crop=1, (only screen and (min-width: 1px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5))], [http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/moss.jpg?w=640&h=360&crop=1, (only screen and (min-width: 321px))], [http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/moss.jpg?w=960&h=540&crop=1, (only screen and (min-width: 321px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5))], [http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/moss.jpg?w=1024&h=576&crop=1, (only screen and (min-width: 641px))], [http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/moss.jpg?w=1024&...PACE#1.5))]" />

A team of scientists over in Europe have decided to take the idea of “green” power very, very literally: They have developed a system to harness the energy generated by moss.

Modern Farmer:

Continue reading “Moss can power a radio, and could eventually charge your phone” »

Quoted: “Ethereum will also be a decentralised exchange system, but with one big distinction. While Bitcoin allows transactions, Ethereum aims to offer a system by which arbitrary messages can be passed to the blockchain. More to the point, these messages can contain code, written in a Turing-complete scripting language native to Ethereum. In simple terms, Ethereum claims to allow users to write entire programs and have the blockchain execute them on the creator’s behalf. Crucially, Turing-completeness means that in theory any program that could be made to run on a computer should run in Ethereum.” And, quoted: “As a more concrete use-case, Ethereum could be utilised to create smart contracts, pieces of code that once deployed become autonomous agents in their own right, executing pre-programmed instructions. An example could be escrow services, which automatically release funds to a seller once a buyer verifies that they have received the agreed products.”

Read Part One of this Series here » Ethereum — Bitcoin 2.0? And, What Is Ethereum.

Read Part Two of this Series here » Ethereum — Opportunities and Challenges.

Read Part Three of this Series here » Ethereum — A Summary.

Richard Branson, Success, Unpreparedness, Failure, and Death!

The Largest God of Entrepreneurial Success, “knighted by the English Crown,” wanted to teach us that the Power of Simplicity with Boldness is sufficient to defeat the Science of Complexity and a most-unprepared à –la-Sir-Francis-Drake company called: “Virgin Galactic.”

Continue reading “Richard Branson, Success, Unpreparedness, Failure, and Death!” »

Marilyn Monroe in London and Continuous Performance Improvement

This is an actual story.

I was the Insurance Broker House EVP for the world’s global oil corporation number two and got asked a delicate official favor from the Client.

To give you an idea of this piece of business, the Client was paying cash US$ 100 million for insured and re-insured premiums over their fixed and liquid assets. The latter via a major and reputable London Reinsurance Brokerage House.

Continue reading “Marilyn Monroe in London and Continuous Performance Improvement” »

Brandon Baker — Nation of Change

It’s good to refrain from wasting energy, but it’s even better to procure energy from items that you otherwise would waste.

That’s the thinking behind the latest announcement from Sainsbury’s, the second largest chain of supermarkets in the United Kingdom. The chain’s Cannock location will soon be powered solely by the company’s own food waste. Waste management and recycling firm Biffa has partnered with the store to use its advanced anaerobic digestion (AD) facilities and a power link that allows the Cannock store to use the waste generated from Sainsbury’s other locations.

Continue reading “British Supermarket to Power Itself Solely With Food Waste” »

Kurweil AI

MIT researchers discovered last year that when water droplets spontaneously jump away from superhydrophobic (water-repelling) surfaces during condensation, the droplets can gain electric charge in the process.

Now the same team has demonstrated that this process can generate small amounts of electricity, which could lead to devices that can charge cellphones or other electronics using just the humidity in the air. As a side benefit, the system could also produce clean water.

Read more