Big, Green, and Chilly

Back into normal weekday form folks!  That means technology, politics, science, funny news and hopefully a little engineering while we are at it!  Also make sure to vote on the poll that way I know what kind of subjects you are primarily interested in!

See the post, after the jump!

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First news of the week that I think truly matters is that the government is going to announce that 2.5Billion dollars is going to be available for development of high speed rail.  Most of this money is going to go towards California and Florida which seems like a good plan with additional money going to Michigan(don't understand), Virginia, and other sites.  I love trains and I do love that our government has actually started improving our infrastructure instead of infrastructure that we destroyed in the past decade.

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In this sort of green tech line of thought, a few days ago I read a neat story about  the UAE's plans to develop a carbon neutral, waste free city.  This sounds wonderful however I am not super hopeful this is really going to happen in any sort of reasonable or true time span.  To imply no waste is a bold statement.  There are all sorts of waste that human's generate like garbage, emissions, extra light and sound, and others that aren't directly associated with the city(such as allocation of goods).  I can commend them on having a plan, all the U.S. seems to be doing is allocating money for projects that don't make sense, like putting in expensive, large scale solar in Pennsylvania.  Just to note, it would literally be more beneficial to build a solar plant in Seattle, with it's larger insolation value, than in Pennsylvania.  Sometimes we need to step back and think about what exactly the returns are, is a lawmaker just pushing for this so that way they can say they brought money into the state, or are they using the nation's money in the way that will serve the greatest utility?

So another article I noticed over the weekend was an interesting piece on Japan and India, teaming up, in light of the recent problems between Japan and China.  Essentially what the deal would mean for both countries is that Japan could export their nuclear technology and India would be able to have nuclear technology that they didn't develop(which if you have ever looked at Indian infrastructure is certainly  a good thing).  Also India would begin exporting rare earth metals which are crucial to the tech firms based in Japan.  Lots of interesting economic pressures being applied to all of those countries. 

Now I know that I haven't been delivering on my cool engineering piece as much as I should so today you get something that a lot of folks never realized worked/was used.  Acoustic cooling, basically a method of utilizing cooling effects caused by acoustics without the use of refrigerants.  Check out a fun, if slightly older article about Ben and Jerry's using it to make their ice cream.

and on that note, keep the moment positive