America discovers that bailout will be used to pay Wall Street bonuses.

Goldman big winner in government’s revised bailout of AIG. But maybe there is some justice, Goldman stock is tanking hard, with no end in sight. If it drops far enough, some other predator will eat them.

Fed defies transparency aim in refusal to disclose loans. Bloomberg is suing the Fed to force them to disclose the recipients of $2 trillion (yes, trillion) in emergency loans.

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Bill Marriott is CEO of Marriott International, a hotel chain some have mentioned as being a possible boycott target in the wake of Prop 8. He is Mormon and says he keeps religion separate from business.

We were among the first in our industry to offer domestic partner benefits, and we’ve earned a perfect 100% score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index for two years in a row. Many of our hotels have hosted LGBT community functions and events for years.

Then perhaps he could use his considerable influence upon the LDS hierarchy to get them to reconsider their political opposition to secular gay marriage?

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Inhabitat

This svelte steam powered car was created using salvaged parts (including tea kettles) and is capable of achieving speeds of 170mph!

A mix of contemporary technology and Victorian steampunk sensibilities, the vehicle is more than 7.5 meters long and 1.7 meters wide. It has a 13,000rpm two stage engine, and can produce over 360hp. The projected top seed of 170 mpg requires the generation of 3 megawatts of heat, which is generated by burning liquid gas. To create the vehicle, the team used steam valves from a power station, a water pump from a fire engine, and the aforementioned heating elements from tea kettles.

More from Steamcar.co.uk, the developers of the car.

The previous world record for a steam car was set in 1906.

In Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History, author David Kirsch documents the fascinating history of cars from 1890-1920, when steam, electric, and gas-powered vehicles were common, and it was unclear which technology would predominate. Kirsch thinks gas-powered vehicles won out because a) steam could be unreliable, b) electric took too long to charge (!) and perhaps most crucially, c) kerosene lamps were being replaced by electric bulbs, so kerosene dealers simply switched over to gasoline - and they already had a nationwide distribution system in place.

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(Photo by Daniel R (MisterDarcy)

SFist on this sign on a San Francisco home.

Really, this is almost as hateful as the people who voted for Prop. 8. And it’s unfair to LDS ilk who actively fought against Prop. 8.

I completely agree. Screaming “I hate bigots” makes you a bigot. And is beyond counter-productive.

Update: the sign has been taken down.

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Artist’s conception of a wave farm of 750-kW Pelamis wave converters.

Chemical and Engineering news has an excellent overview of the various technologies being developed to create electricity from moving water. The primary methods are wave and tidal.

Wave

Waves are powered by winds and uneven solar heating, he says, and wave energy works best in ocean depths of at least 50 meters, before waves lose energy to the friction of a shallow sea bottom.

There are many designs being tested now. Some will go mainstream.

Tidal

Natural constrictions can also help funnel the tidal flow to turbines, he notes, pointing, for example, to the mile span under the Golden Gate Bridge, which results in powerful currents as the huge bay fills and drains twice a day.

Imagine how much power could reliably be generated every day with masses of underwater turbines under the bridge.

A distant possibility is ocean thermal

Thermal energy … uses differences in temperature between near-surface and deep-ocean waters to generate power [and requires] huge investments and a long payback.

This is the same principle as geothermal, but on a vastly larger scale.

In just a few years, we will hopefully see enormous amounts of new wave and wind energy power - and solar and wind power as well.

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I’ve (finally) updated the Blogroll. It now lists the blogs that I read in Google Reader.

After a hiatus, I’ve been getting back into programming. So, I wrote the Google Reader subscription list out to opml, then wrote a routine in Foxpro that read the opml, parsed it, then wrote it to html, which was cut-and pasted into the Blogroll.

It feels good to get geeky again. Yes, I’m sure there’s some way to do it with 6 cryptic lines of perl or something equally cool in xsml, but hey, it works. The next time it’ll take maybe ten minutes to do. But I do plan to learn xsml too…

Let me know if your blog isn’t there, the parse routine did hiccup a couple of times.

If you aren’t using Google Reader, check it out. It’s a great way to read blogs or anything with an rss feed, because everything is in one place, no flipping from site to site to see what is new.

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Bursting with post-election glee, Mr. Ayers revealed that he has indeed been advising Barack Obama all along, even in such matters as his election night appearance. “Who do you think told Michelle to dress the whole family in red and black?” asked Mr. Ayers. “Way to subliminally convey our radical egalitarian, anarcho-communist values!” Mr. Ayers says he looks forward to implementing further “right-on” changes.

It was on the Internet so it must be true.

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