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Honda is preparing to release 200 fuel cell powered vehicles, called the FCX Clarity, on Southern California and Japan. I think I want one. They claim 270 miles distance between fillings, and they apparently are working on a home based electrolysis system so you can refill in your own garage! The cost is $600/month to lease. Not cheap, but not as high as I would have guessed.

Just one more reason I smile every time I see the cost of gas rise.

Check out this BBC article, or Honda’s FCX Clarity Page.

He’s basically reading from chapter 6 of his book, but a very reasonable speech none-the-less.

See, Asian casino’s are trying to lure gamblers away from the table games to more profitable slots (physorg.com)! They may be simple to play and flashy, but they are not as fun and have a smaller payback (a payback, which by they way, you can’t even know because it is programmed rather than following from the rules of the game!).

Note to Asian Gamblers: Stick to those tables!

Thanks to a co-worker, I’ve recently purchased what might be the best mouse ever. There are a number of great things about it. First of all, it is well-built, small, and the sensor works really well on any surface. But a few things in particular stand out.

First of all, the wheel works in two modes, which you can select by pressing it down. In the first mode, it works like every other mouse-wheel I’ve used, “clicking” through a series of position as you scroll it. In the second mode, the wheel is nearly frictionless. When you give it a spin it keeps on spinning until you stop it, allowing you to fly through long documents. This can be amazingly handy (although also a tad difficult to get used to).

Secondly, the receiver is small enough that you hardly see it, and I can leave it in my laptop while throwing it into my backpack without any fear of breaking anything.

Thirdly, it came with a nice little remote USB port (connected via wire) that I can plug into my desktop and place on my desk for easy plug in if I want to use it on my desktop. This, by the way, proves much more useful for other devices (flash drives!) than the mouse, as the mouse pretty much lives with my laptop.

Finally, it comes with a nice little bag for transport. It can be had for about $50, at places like tigerdirect.com. If you’re thinking that $50 is more than you’re willing to pay for a mouse, think about this: How long have you had that mouse you’re clicking with now? That $50 purchase should be around a long time!

I stopped by a Barnes and Nobles on a recent trip to Orlando, looking for something to read on the plane ride back home. I ended up walking out with “The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments”, by George Johnson (Amazon). Although I could have saved $10 getting it on Amazon (why does anybody buy books at a place like B&N if they aren’t in a hurry?), I don’t regret it. It proved to be a short and enjoyable trip (the former perhaps being a requirement for the latter) through MORE than ten groundbreaking science experiments over the last four centuries, describing how many of the basic facts we now take for granted about our world were tweaked out by clever and persistent experimentation. He tells a great story, without overwhelming it with too much tedium to put you to sleep, but enough that I felt like I knew what was going on.

Although physics dominated, Johnson’s list covered everything from Galileo rolling balls down tracks and his clever mechanisms for timing them in order to discovere basic laws of acceleration, to William Harvey opening up the mysteries of the heart, to Millikan measuring the charge of an electron (and showing that charge was in fact carried by discrete particulars in discrete amounts), and even Pavlov and his salivating dogs made the list. It was an enjoyable, enlightening, and inspiring read. It makes me wish for the chance to discover some hitherto unknown fact about the universe that no human had ever before seen. It also made me appreciate some of the things that seem obvious now but weren’t always so obvious.