Popular Mechanics has published a survey of alternative motor vehicle fuels. How far can you drive on a bushel of corn looks at the cost, energy density, infrastructure requirements, emissions, and availability of ethanol, methanol, biodiesel, natural gas, electricity, and hydrogen.

Absent from the discussion were diesel made from natural gas and coal, but it's still a good overview. Hat tip to AutoblogGreen.

Redfoot is a small but ambitious project attempting to develop an Internet scale operating system. It uses RDF for object identifiers and a distributed programming model called hypercode.

The hybrid consortium including General Motors, Daimler Chrysler, and BMW is beginning to bear fruit. I'm not sure why they're calling it a "full hybrid", but it does appear to be promising.

Rand Simberg has been blogging about the Space Access 2006 Conference. This post covers Jim Muncy's talk about space as a political frontier. The Shuttle is a dinosaur and the Crew Excursion Vehicle that NASA is planning for it's replacement promises to be another. A free market in Low Earth Orbit services would give the entrepreneurial mammals a change to fill unmet needs, but securing that free market will take political action. Read the whole thing and keep scrolling.

Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web by Tom Passin provides a gentle introduction to Semantic Web concepts and technologies. This isn't a programming guide, though there are markup language snippets for illustration. This book is useful for anyone interested in the future of the web without delving deeply into the technical details.

Like "Web 2.0", he "Semantic Web" is surrounded by both hype and skepticism. It sounds rather visionary and perhaps far fetched, but semantic web technologies like RDF and OWL are useful today without intelligent software agents flitting around the Internet doing our bidding. A more prosaic name might be the "Data Web" as these technologies present web data and knowledge in ways that machines can use while maintaining the distributed, evolvable characteristics that have made the World Wide Web a success.

The SciPy 2006 Conference is scheduled for August 17-18, 2006 at CalTech.

A tremendous amount of work has gone into SciPy and NumPy over the past few months, and the scientific python community around these and other tools has truly flourished. The SciPy 2006 Conference is an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas, learn techniques, contribute code and affect the direction of scientific computing with Python.

Conference details may be found here.

Technology Review has an article on Private Space which reviews the prospects for private space travel. It dismisses Virgin Galactic's planed suborbital passenger flights as not being real space travel, but this is unfair. While it's a big step from suborbital to orbital space flight is a big one, it's important to take that first step.

We had a good visit with friends back in Oklahoma, but it's good to be home again.

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore explains why he has come to support Going Nuclear as an important part of our energy portfolio. While renewables can make a significant contribution, they are too scarce and intermittent to supply the bulk of our energy needs.

The Google Calendar beta is getting good reviews but it's not for me. I want something that can operate independently of central servers with periodic synchronization. Chandler sounds like it'll work the way I want, but is a ways from prime time yet.

Kx Systems has released kdb+ version 2.3. The most notable feature of this release is transparent support for parallel hardware. Like other members of the APL family, the K language upon which kdb+ is based is conceptually parallel, operating on entire arrays of data at once. Kdb+ applications written for single core processors can take advantage of the increased performance potential of multicore processors without a rewrite.

We're visiting friends in Oklahoma for a few days. The drive down was pleasant, if a little long. Spring is in full bloom here, where things a just starting to bud in Colorado.

Ford has announced a relatively small twin-turbo diesel V8 engine. No word yet on which vehicles will get it, but hopefully it'll be offered in some US models. It seems to be about the right size for the Explorer, Ranger, and perhaps the Freestyle.

PyTables 1.3 is out. This release is significant for supporting NumPy objects. The web site has been given a makeover as a wiki.

You can now buy updated new real Cobras from Unique Performance according to Autoblog. It's not listed on their on-line catalog yet, though. A specific price wasn't mentioned, but it's supposed to be about the same for one of these carbon fiber beauties as for a Cobra reproduction. I saw a reproduction at the Denver Auto Show that was about $50,000.

Tasktoy is a simple, but effective, task tracking system in the GTD style. It's a Zope application offered as a free web service by Toby Segaran. Highly recommended if you're looking for a web based GTD tool.