Georgia Plant is First for Making Ethanol from Waste

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Kathleen Schalch:

for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and pursuing energy independence lies in cellulosic ethanol. That’s ethanol that could be brewed from things like corn stalks, straw, wood chips — things we normally throw away.
Companies have been racing to find cost-effective ways to make this form of ethanol. A company called Range Fuels in Georgia is scheduled to break ground Tuesday on the world’s first plant for making cellulosic ethanol.

Audio
Range Fuels website.

Angkor: When It Rains, You Score

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Stephen Brookes:

Rain was lashing against the side of the plane as we broke through the clouds. Below us, Cambodia stretched out like a perfect disaster: fields flooded to the horizon, palm trees whipped by the wind, a sky so dark and heavy it seemed about to collapse. As we dropped closer, we caught a glimpse of two people pushing a truck through knee-deep water, struggling to keep from being washed away.
“It’s fantastic!” I said to my wife, whose hand was clamped on mine in a vise-like grip. “It looks like we timed this perfectly!”
We’d come to Cambodia to see the famous temples of Angkor, those magnificent ruins that make up one of the most extraordinary landscapes in Asia, if not the world. And we’d come in July — in the heart of the monsoon, which sensible people had told us was pure madness. Wait until the dry season, they said, when the skies are clear and you’re guaranteed as much sunshine as you can handle. Go during the long, wet summer — when more than 50 inches of rain falls — and you’re certain to get stranded in your hotel, swatting at mosquitoes and hoping you don’t come down with malaria.

Smart ForTwo Review

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Martin Schwoerer:

The Smart ForTwo isn’t so much a small car as a short one. At just eight feet from stem to stern, it’s by far the shortest car on the market. What’s the difference between small and short? A small car can stay low to the ground to achieve excellent handling and fuel economy. A short car only excels at one thing: unmetered parallel parking. The first-generation Smart proved the point. As reviewed on TTAC, it was a noisy, slow, poor-handling, stiff-legged, bouncy and crashy car with meh mileage. So, Daimler says it’s rectified the first-gen’s faults. Is Version 2.0– headed stateside in 2008– ready for prime time?
The new ForTwo maintains its Tonka-toy proportions and look at me I’m wearing designer glasses (without a prescription) unconventionality. There’s now a painted parenthesis around the driver’s compartment: a clever if unsuccessful attempt to reassure drivers that Smart’s got their back (as there’s nothing much behind them). From certain angles, the slash-marked Four Two looks like a Pokemon with weird sideburns. Anyway, there’s no denying that observers (especially women) fight the urge to muss the ForTwo’s metaphorical hair and pinch its figurative cheeks.

Illustrations with bite

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John Nack:

I’ve been running across examples of illustration designed to shake things up & reflect on the world, for better & for worse:

  • [Note: Not for those offended by profanity] Paul Krassner’s 1963 “F Communism” bumper sticker is a an incredibly efficient little satire of politics and obscenity. Check out Kurt Vonnegut’s commentary on the work for historical context.
  • On war & walls:
    The NYT features a piece on Baghdad muralists hired to beautify, or at least adorn, the city’s grim anti-suicide-bomber blast walls. “With few opportunities for work, [the artists] are delighted with the money, but are also uncomfortably aware that all they can do is paint the symptoms of a conflict that has mired their city in death squads…”
    Elsewhere in the region, elusive British street artist Banksy has decorated Israeli’s security wall.

  • Back in this part of the world, online company Brickfish kicked off a contest to “Design your own border fence” for the US-Mexico frontier.