Biofuels cause food prices to soar

Photo courtesy of The Guardian

A lead article in the Guardian reports that a leaked World Bank paper estimates that the price of basic foodstuffs has risen 75%, due to the diversion of basic crops to biofuel production. It seems that the report has remained unpublished to avoid embarrassing the U.S. government (President Bush has said that biofuel has caused the price of food to rise by only 3%) and for fear of getting the World Bank into political hot water.

The report identifies three main factors in this enormous price rise. A third of the US's corn and half of the EU's vegetable oil now goes to biofuel; farmers are being encouraged to set aside land for biofuel crops; and speculators have got in on the act.

The Guardian has posted the report on its website.

Parking for Desperate Housewives

Some people don't like the idea of parking in spaces marked "Parking for Desperate Housewives." A new form of advertising is spreading across Southern California parking lots and my soon be making money for parking lot owners all over the country.

50 Worst Cars of All Time

LA Times columnist Dan Neil devotes special attention to each and every one of his fifty selections for the worst automobiles ever built in his article for Time.com.

I-35W Bridge Collapse Myths And Conspiracies

I-35W Bridge Collapse Myths And Conspiracies

By John A. Weeks III

http://www.johnweeks.com/i35w/i35wmyths.html

Bicyclists Beware!!

I just visited the Google HQ in Mountain View and saw some employees riding this thing around. Apparently it's called the "conference bike." It's only a matter of time before bicycling is supplanted by this technological marvel.

Conference Bike!

-jt

Crazy custom vans

Need some ideas on spicing up your van? Here's a gallery of amazing makeovers from Japan.

Frisco loonies

You can do a lot of stuff in San Francisco, but some things you just can't get away with.

"Whatever happened to the Segway?"

A couple of years ago, we were taken by surprise when two members of the general public entered the Transportation Library mounted on Segways (but at least they wore clothes.) This was one of the few times these machines have been observed. Apart from rich eccentrics and UC Berkeley PD officers, who actually uses these things? Once expected (by their sellers) to quickly make every sidewalk into a Segway freeway, in 2007 these critters and their riders are still head-turning rarities. And most ominously, the Library of Congress doesn't provide a term for the Segway in its Subject Headings, an indication that the amount of literature about the machine is pretty negligible. London's Independent newspaper bucks the trend with an article that ponders the Segway story, and here's a video where experts try to remember life before the Segway.

Aviation innovation

An aviation idea that may require further R & D.

Toronto's GO Transit Hacked

Tronto's GO Transit (Greater Toronto Transit Authority) was hacked. From Computerworld:

“It was Thursday evening, April 27, about 5:30, and I was leaving Toronto and I was taking the GO Transit train,” said [Stephen] Nicholls, vice president of the National Citizens Coalition. “Each car has a little electronic advertising sign and messages scroll across them and usually it’s something like buy tickets to this event or messages about train safety. But this time the message on the sign was reading ‘Stephen Harper eats babies,’ every three seconds. Stephen Harper used to be my boss and he’s president of the organization I work for right now.”

Nicholls, who lives in a suburb of Toronto, thought the message on the sign was strange and figured it had to be some kind of parody, with some kind of kicker explaining what it meant. But there was no punchline, he said.

“My first thought was maybe I’m hallucinating and that this couldn’t be. So I sent an e-mail to the GO Transit people and I put it on my blog. I never got any messages back from the GO Transit people over the next couple days,” he said. “But people in the blogging community picked it up, and it sort of got all over the place and local media picked it up. Then I talked about it on a radio station and suddenly the GO Transit people were contacting me. They explained that a hacker got into the system and changed the message. Apparently, this person did it with a wireless device [that] costs about $25 ... at any hardware store or any tech store.... They don’t know who it was and apparently it was running all last weekend on different trains.”

The LED signs are programmed with an infrared remote, and apparently weren't password protected all the time. The signs will most likely be protected now though.

Stephen Harper doesn't eat babies.