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RIP George… You will be missed!

BMW has been promoting their new GINA Light Visionary Model concept, which is essentially a modern car design which features a strong endoskeleton frame, wrapped in a durable but flexible fabric. Under the fabric, there are hydraulic actuators that allow the car to shift its shape. While the concept shows off some very cool, very flashy things, and while BMW promotes this as an early concept working prototype, I see this car as a huge leap forward for green transportation. One of our biggest issues with our current car designs is that they’re incredibly heavy due to the weight of the sheet metal. The more weight we can shed, the more optimized our power delivery can be. A car that is feather-weight due to the use of fabric instead of sheet-metal seems like a logical progression. Obviously, BMW has a long way to go to make sure it’s safe and stands up to the harshness of the road elements. Well, guys… what are you waiting for?


BMW GINA Light Visionary Model in motion

Oh man, it’s been weeks!! I’ve been super-busy with stuff, but had to take a moment to share this amazing Radiohead remix posted by James Houston/1030 on Vimeo:

Big Ideas (Don’t get any) from 1030 on Vimeo.
He had quite a challenge, given the time signature and ‘instruments’ he was using. I’ve never even seen “hard drive speakers” before. Wow. I would say the only part of this that doesn’t really sit right with me is the part where he claims it doesn’t sound good. I think it sounds perfect. Read more about it here: http://www.vimeo.com/1109226 ("Bitpunk" title credit goes to Kottke… perfect genre!)

Here’s a great talk on the continuing modern mindshare evolution… and why I don’t have cable:

Finally, we’re allowed to discuss the big project that we’ve been working so hard on, here at Yahoo!. Today, our CTO, Ari Balogh announced that we are “rewiring” the Yahoo! you know and love and allowing the platforms to be more open, in order to allow developers to not only use our popular APIs, but to actually plug their own, home-grown content in, right there, on the actual Yahoo! pages. The Yahoo Open Strategy, or YOS, affects pages such as the homepage, yahoo.com, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports and many others. Developers have the opportunity to build apps that actually run on the pages and allow users to hook in to their vitality streams, interact with content that might pertain to other content on the page or even play games, right there in the YOS canvas, on the related platform pages. This announcement in coordination with the SearchMonkey announcement gives the public a view in to the future of Yahoo!. Also, if you look closely, you might be able to spot me in one of the screen shots in Ari’s beautiful preso. IM IN UR VITALITY STREAMZ, POSTIN UP YUR CONNECTIONZ!

More info:
ycorpblog
Yahoo! Open throws down the gauntlet for the open social graph

Probably one of the cooler nerd-mails I’ve gotten in a while:

Dear PayPal,
When I purchase something on Ebay, and you ask me whether I’d like to modify my address, and I enter a new address, and you then tell me the item will be shipped to that new address, please, PLEASE, for jiminy-sakes, let me know that my purchased item, indeed hasn’t shipped to that address and instead shipped to an old, useless address in another city. Thanks.

As you can see, in this abbreviated screen shot, my package was supposed to ship to my work address, but instead went to freaking San Jose. I understand that this may have happened because the Y! address is “unconfirmed” - I am having a hard time dealing with the fact that PayPal chose to send the seller my old address, didn’t inform me of the address switch, and to this date, with the package “out for delivery” in San Jose, PayPal is telling me that my shipping is at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. This is a glaring bug, and proof that PayPal needs to step it up - absolutely unacceptable!!

Don’t forget! Earth Hour is tonight, from 8:00pm until 9:00pm. Turn out your lights to come together, send a message and save energy.

Very clever awareness test for the sake of cycling/driver safety:

Ah, this is a good one. As Mr Daring Fireball put it, if you like to laugh at creationists, you’re going to love this story.