Derailment
A Train Of Thought That Jumped The Track

So, it's almost 2010 and there's no sign of my jetpack. That's fine, it probably wasn't such a great idea anyway (it would suck to commute in the rain). What I am excited about is smart power grids.

Read the rest of this story...

Recently I saw one of Shell's Real Energy TV ads. I have TiVo, so I'm used to zipping through ads, but this one caught my eye because it was a good bit longer than the usual ad. This spot featured a Shell engineer working in Southeast Asia, who was being interviewed by a local reporter about the work Shell is doing there. I won't go through the whole story, but to summarize, after the interview, the engineer is sitting in a restaurant with his teenage son, who is drinking a milkshake. The kid slurps the last bit from the glass and his dad says, "Do that again." He has a "eureka moment" which leads to a design for a flexible drill that can snake into otherwise unreachable places to extract oil.

Read the rest of this story...