Youth Inspired Robots

If you are running firefox 3- go to the address bar and type in the following:

about:robots

There’s nothing I love more than analogies - well except for the 0.5 release of Songbird, the music player based on the mozilla engine. It is in the Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla family of applications. Built on the open-source, open-standard philosophy of making damn good software. It has rich integration with sites like last.fm and hype machine. Check it out and give it a spin. It’s still in beta, so go easy on it.

Solar power is on the verge of hitting the big-time, close to achieving a scale and affordability that will allow it to replace dirty coal-fired power plants and significantly reduce global warming pollution.

But a Texas agency has proposed rules that will create a serious barrier to solar’s widespread deployment. One of the ways solar can be cost-effective is if a homeowner is given credit by their utility for excess electricity put back on to the grid, known as “net-metering.”

On Friday, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) issued a surprise proposed rule which create heavy burdens on customers wanting to install solar panels and provide financial rewards to the utilities, but provide no guarantees that customers who generate surplus electricity will ever get paid.

Tell the PUC to go back to the drawing board and develop a rule that will help grow solar power and make sure consumers are fairly compensated:

http://environmenttexas.org/action/clean-energy/net-metering?id4=ES

No, it’s not a band. It’s a really interesting project I found while zigging and zagging around the net. I’ve been on this futurism/transhumanism kick for the last several months and things only got more serious after BIL. I found this neat video on Space Collective.

My friend Ry, who is probably longest known friend from College Station, rebuilt the top side of a pinball machine with his buddy Bruce from Austin. Ry never ceases to amaze me with all the different stuff he does. One day he’s rebuilding his Volvo station wagon with his laptop - the next he’s climbing a mountain in Colorado looking for gold.

 Tomorrow, October 24th, 7PM at First National Building in Downtown. Check the refreshbcs.org site.

Join Ed Schipul, from Houston-based Schipul – the Web Marketing Company, as he discusses the highs, lows and in between bits of starting your own technology company. Learn the basic economics of a new business, phases of a Web business and rules of being a billionaire. Are you crazy enough to start your own tech company? Then you definitely need to be here!!!

To find out more about the speaker, see Ed’s CV here: http://www.schipul.com/edcv/

This should be a good talk from someone who’s been in the industry for quite some time.

And by the way, this meeting marks our first 1/2 year (I just did the math!)

The idea behind Cafe Scientifique is that for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine people can meet to discuss the latest ideas of science and technology which are changing our lives. The aim of the
Cafe is to bring science into conversation and back into our culture.

The first Cafes Scientifiques were held in the UK in Leeds in 1998. From there, cafes sprang up in Newcastle, Nottingham and Oxford and then
gradually spread throughout the UK. Currently, more than 30 cafes meet regularly to hear scientists or writers on science talk about their work and discuss it with
diverse audiences.

Cafe Scientifique is a forum for debating science issues, not a shop window for science. We are committed to promoting public engagement with science and to making science accountable.

There are 6 speakers scheduled for the coming year, with the first on October 23 at 7:00pm at Revolution Cafe.

The first speaker is Prof. Mike Alvard from the Anthropology Dept. at Texas A&M, and his topic is “The Evolution of Cooperation.”