Random Thought

Project Better Place is a name for an innovative company focused on building massive scale Electric Recharge Grids as infrastructure supporting the deployment of electric vehicles (including plug-in hybrids) in countries around the world. And Tel Aviv is one first to embrace Project Better Place vision.

Renault-Nissan the first automaker, to announce partnerships with Project Better Place to begin a mass deployment of electric cars making it possible for consumers to choose an electric vehicle that is much less expensive to operate, does not emit pollution or greenhouse gases and provides a better driving experience from their current automobiles.

Their promotional website praised the State of Israel for having a foresight in implementing an appropriate tax policy, and setting out a vision by which it can become the first industrialized nation to end the stranglehold of oil on its economy and environment. Renault-Nissan, likewise, has shown great vision and leadership , when agreeing to become the first major automaker to produce electric vehicles on a mass-scale to integrate with our infrastructure .

Project Better Place try to adopt the mobile phone business model where the motorist pays the equivalent of their current annual petrol bill for a mileage plan, they could be given the car to use, and it would become theirs after four years. Other mobile plans could operate - all you can eat unlimited mileage, pay as you go, and so on. The plan is to have the first of the cars on the road in 2009, 100,000 in 2010 and Israel off oil within ten years.

The motorist can recharge their electric cars at around 500,000 battery exchange stations and roadside charge points which which allow the cars to be charged whenever they\'re parked.

This is really a radical and brave undertaking I surely hope they succeed, so many other big cities would follow for mass adoption of ev and hybrid. The future of electric world is getting near.

"Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not." Vaclav Havel
Know more about Vaclav Havel

This week, Barcelona began importing potable water by ship as part of a broader effort to meet needs. Its reservoirs are down to 20 percent capacity. It spent USD$68 million to ship in drinking water from the southern city of Tarragona.

Spain’s average rainfall fell down 40 percent last year, many cities have restricted residents from filling their swimming pools or watering their lawns. But perhaps no municipality has developed such diverse and creative solutions as hard-hit Barcelona.

A biology professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, Frank Fish discovered that bumps on humpback whale, called tubercles, enable a whale to make tight turns and capture prey with astonishing agility.

Fish'sexperiments revealed that significant drag occurs at a much steeper angle on the humpback fin than it does on a sleek flipper. Each tubercle redirects and channels air over the flipper, creating a sort of whirling vortex that actually improves lift.

Fish is now using this technology perfected by nature to produce fans with serrated blades that use 20 percent less electricity than traditional models. This finding contradicts conventional designs that strive for the smoothest possible edges.

The technology can be used in a huge range of machines such as turbines, compressors, pumps, and fans that use blades or rotors – most anything that cuts through air, water, steam or oil.

my random thought wonder freely around the universe.

Searching for order in chaos is the motivation behind all of science, which can loosely be described as the search for pattern in the universe. So, does nature have any pattern and order beneath it?

"Does nature obey rules, and is it in any sense predictable?" Around 1600, Galileo discovered that timing the swing of pendulum is a very predictable and regular motion: its swing always took the same time and two pendulums of the same length had the same period. This is remarkable, considering the number of factors that might effect the swing of the pendulum including the motion of the air, irregularities in its the shape and differences in the strength of the push that you give it to start it off.

Several years later, Sir Isaac Newton described the fundamental laws of motion of the universe. Before Newton the world was seen as an unpredictable place in which events seemed to happen at more or less at random. Suddenly, many of the phenomena in this world could not only be explained, but also their future motions predicted.

Later in late 19th century and early 20th, James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of radio waves and Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity. All these discovery, made some scientists rather over-confident in their powers of prediction, indeed in the 19th century the great French mathematician Laplace said:

If we were to know with precision the positions and speeds of all the particles in the universe then we could predict the future with certainty.

Despite the confidence and scientific achievements, weather phenomena and the long-term effects of climate change seem to be very unpredictable and the idea of scientific predictability fits uncomfortably with human behaviour and the notion of free will.

Two big scientific discoveries have indeed challenged the notion of predictability. The first is quantum theory which gives a fantastic explanation of behaviour on the atomic scale, based - almost paradoxically - on a fundamental uncertainty of the precise behaviour of sub-atomic particles.

The second one is chaos theory that provide hint on the behaviour of the unpredictable phenomena like weather. The true essence of chaos - a simple mechanical system which we feel we should understand, yet which outsmarts us. All chaotic systems share these two features of being fundamentally simple (in that they are described by straightforward mathematical equations) and yet being unpredictable and unrepeatable, with the smallest changes having enormous effects later on. This is often called the "Butterfly effect". Lorenz, one of the chaos pioneers in the 1960s, captured the essence of this concept by remarking that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Borneo could lead to a hurricane in Florida.