running round the valley

tesla motors is awesome

Martin Eberhard of Tesla Motors gave an excellent talk tonight at vlab. These electric cars are the future. He should put up his slides comparing the various ways to power a car and their efficiency. It's *very* convincing. I remember visiting the tesla website several months back and seeing a cool new gadget, but what was missing was the punch that Martin gave tonight (that these electric cars are *so* much more efficient than all the alternatives). Another nice tidbit is that lithium ion batteries have improved in efficiency by 8% each year for the last 20 years and there's no reason to see this trend stop in the next 10 years. (another data point for the technological singularity)

Communities and Pi

Today I was at Community Next, a conference on the future of online communities. There were some interesting talks, so check it out online when it's available. A random coincidence happened during one of the transitions between talks when Noah raffled off a prize. Instead of doing the regular drawing, he asked for the person who could recite the most digits of pi. Surprisingly (or not) I was the only one who ventured to do it. In high school I had memorized it to around 500 digits, and the first 100 got burned into my long term memory. Oh, and the prize was an ipod nano - who knew that useless trivial would pay off years later!