Monday Links: December 8th, 2008

Super sized links this week to make up for my absence last week.  Please be patient with us as we continue to tweak the new layout.  And by “we” I mean Jarred.

• Better Place is a California company based on the idea that switching to electric cars need not wait on as-of-yet undeveloped next generation batteries (often cited as what’s holding electric cars back), but rather can be accomplished by leasing batteries to electric car owners and offering a large number of swap stations for freshly charged batteries.  For those of you who have propane grills, you’ve probably done this with your propane tank for years: you drop off the empty tank and pick up a full tank.  Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place, was profiled in Wired a few months back.  Well it turns out Better Place will be able to test their system in Hawaii:

The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network. [...]

By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with an Internet-connected web of tens of thousands of recharging stations [...] Better Place L.L.C. of Palo Alto, Calif., will make all-electric vehicles feasible.

• Here’s a good piece from the Guardian (UK): 10 big energy myths.  The only myth on the list that I find objectionable is this one:

Myth 7: climate change means we need more organic agriculture

The uncomfortable reality is that we already struggle to feed six billion people. Population numbers will rise to more than nine billion by 2050. Although food production is increasing slowly, the growth rate in agricultural productivity is likely to decline below population increases within a few years [...] So we need to ensure that as much food as possible is produced on the limited resources of good farmland. Most studies show that yields under organic cultivation are little more than half what can be achieved elsewhere.

This response from Treehugger is well taken:

[W]e need to both tackle rising meat consumption and improve the yields of organic agriculture and decrease the impacts of conventional farming if we are to achieve sustainability – fortunately there are plenty of ideas to help us on our way without reaching for the pesticides just yet, from vegetarian and low meat diets to urban aquaponics to wireless soil sensors. And of course agrichar, which Goodall is a big supporter of, offers great opportunities to increase yields while producing energy and also sequestering carbon in our soils.

• Austin is the latest city to explore Smart Grid technology:

In technical-speak, the project addresses the software challenges of “distributed generation” – the idea that people will start generating power from their homes, reducing dependence on centralized power plants.

• Scoble vents about the many ways in which direct messages on Twitter are completely useless.  I agree wholeheartedly; while I don’t get the volume of Twitter DMs that Robert does, I can vouch that there are well over 100 Facebook messages sitting unread in that inbox waiting for the day when Facebook gives me a “Delete All” button.  I read the Facebook message when it’s emailed to me.  Why make me delete it twice?

• I expect to write about the potential for Obama’s network soon, but in the meantime I thought this post was spot on (emphasis in the original):

Look, the administration’s efforts are admirable. [...] I think it’s great that the Obama people are committed to trying, and to involving people with the process by some means other than providing their credit card numbers [...]

But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The magic value of social media tools is that they let people communicate among themselves, not that they let them communicate with a big institution.

Social media lets you listen in when people talk among themselves. The social web helps people self-organize into groups and movements. It helps them share collective intelligence. If used by government itself, these tools can open up government process to public inspection. It’s socially transformative technology that enables a constant, real-time, global conversation. It will change the world in ways we don’t yet appreciate.

But it’s intellectually dishonest to lay these tools out there and pretend to listen attentively to the incoherent rumble of a billion fingers pounding keyboards all across the land.

• Mashable takes a look back at 20 key events on the web in 2008.

• This video of a frozen pizza assembly line is ridiculous.  [Hat Tip: Kottke].