Pivot and other stuff

• I’ve been off air for the last few months mostly coming up to speed on Office 2010 whilst developing some rather cool Excel training materials in PowerPoint 2010 as a potted set of training materials with hands-on demos, combined with videos and narration
• In between work and play I’ve also been developing a new company selling e-bikes over at http://cyclotronic.eu. A 2 year incubator company selling LEV (Light Electric vehicles) whereby I intend to have my own branded models and technology at a some stage. Grin factor 10 when you ride an e-bike into town, especially when you power up the hills – it’s like being a bionic man! Muscle power + electricity – a powerful cocktail for you adrenaline junkies and not to healthy types as well..
• Out of the Office 2010 apps, Excel 2010 impresses; mostly due to the outstanding speed it loads and performs calculations on Pivot table data. With Power Pivot it can handle a million rows of data on the 32-bit version and 100’s of millions of rows in the 64-bit version of Excel 2010 allied with Windows x-64 bit + oodles of RAM
• How does Power Pivot work? Clever compression algorithms that compress data both on disk and in memory .. more
• Gary Flake of Live Labs demos Microsoft Live Power Pivot. He shows off rather impressive PhotoSynth (Silverlight?) like application that can be used to Pivot web data. You can download it here. There will also be a Silverlight application you can embed in your own site, with your own content later this summer 2010

MS PP site
MS PP Gallery site – password is Pass@word1

MIT – Project elEVen

• Radu Gogoana a MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is leading a team of engineers that are building a prototype EV (electric vehicle) that uses 8000 Li-ion batteries driving a 250bhp motor capable of up to 200 miles. They hope to be able to charge the system in about 10 minutes after final trials using a smaller battery pack. The car weighs circa 2 tons and has a 0-60mph in <9secs. The weight of the motor and batteries alone makes this car non-viable, but the research work will no doubt produce some interesting results
• MIT are also working on carbon nanotube (capacitive) batteries as an alternative to ‘dirty’ Li-ion/Li-Pol batteries. The environmental impact of these legacy battery technologies outweigh their worth due to the chemical fallout involved in production

• MIT are also developing virus built batteries, quote:

“To achieve that, the researchers, including MIT Professor Gerbrand Ceder of materials science and Associate Professor Michael Strano of chemical engineering, genetically engineered viruses that first coat themselves with iron phosphate, then grab hold of carbon nanotubes to create a network of highly conductive material.

Because the viruses recognize and bind specifically to certain materials (carbon nanotubes in this case), each iron phosphate nanowire can be electrically "wired" to conducting carbon nanotube networks. Electrons can travel along the carbon nanotube networks, percolating throughout the electrodes to the iron phosphate and transferring energy in a very short time.

The viruses are a common bacteriophage, which infect bacteria but are harmless to humans'”

more

Racing Green – electric tour

• Just picked this up via #carpool (twitter) on The London Imperial College’s partnership with Radical Sports SR8 to modify an existing sports car into an EV Electric vehicle. The aim is to start from the southern most tip of South America and travel to the northern most tip Alaska. Looks like it will be a very hard ride! Capable of 390Km distance and peak power of 500 BHP! 0-100km/hr in 7s. I’d like to know the data on CO2 output based on battery usage and production. So weight for weight, how much CO2 does this car consume over the journey including it’s creation… carbon fibre production probably has fairly high carbon footprint
• Looks like we’re set for EV F1 racing at some stage.. Formula 1-EV anybody?

Arctic sea ice almost gone

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

• Freak weather in the USA and Philippines is raising concerns amongst scientists, government and military officials about the fallout should the arctic ice caps melt completely. Policy makers in the USA, both Republican and Democrats.. are meeting to discuss how they might turn around the massive destruction of the polar ice caps and glaciers by injecting an aerosol like artificial cloud (sic) into the upper atmosphere by employing military jets or a mile high tower (sic) at a cost of circa $7 billion per annum
• On further reading up on MSNBC, there is grave concern that we are entering a run-away-train situation with the ice caps melting entirely in the next 5-10 years (sic). The question remains what if anything can we do to reverse the unexpected accelerated ice-melt that is now being witnessed
• It’s interesting that since global warming was initially reported that no news coverage is now being given to this serious situation..  it’s as though the news organisations have been told to zip-it and not fan public concern – read more:

Expert: 'Almost out' of old Arctic sea ice
Willing to give up blue skies for climate fix?
Europe OKs climate aid, but not amount

The ice is melting fast!

• A couple of recent videos from TedTalks on the speed that the poles and glaciers are melting.. The first one shows the sophisticated use of remote controlled time-lapse photography to show the rapid ice flow into the sea from North and South poles and Greenland's glaciers. The second one is of Lewis Pugh, who decided to swim for 20 minutes in the Arctic! sea (sic)
• For a detailed and mostly scientific conversation on said see
• So the new Toyota Prius get’s my vote. Just think all those unsold cars sat on the dealers forecourts, that will rapidly depreciate as vehicle manufacturers rush to market with hybrids and pure combustion-based cars fall by the wayside

Lewis Pugh’s thread

Volkswagen Jetta TDI - Review | Hybrid Cars

• Boy do the American’s have a different idea about what constitutes  real-world economy. I’m looking at 40-60mpg as standard, but the yanks are looking at 29/40mpg city/motorway!
• An half average diesel these days can easily get 50mpg if driven sensibly with higher fuel savings on longer routes and some free-wheeling down hills ;-)

Volkswagen Jetta TDI - Review | Hybrid Cars

Mitsubishi IMIEV - Llewtube

• New video from Robert Llewellyn's Llewtube on the new Mitsubishi Innovative Electric Vehicle
• There blog is here

Dale Vince – Lotus electric car anyone?

• I watch Robert Llewellyn's weekly video podcast, where he interviews various luminaries and key figureheads in all things tech. Here he’s been driven by Dale Vince, of Ecotricity UK. Dale setup one of the first wind turbines in the UK, near Stroud (where I used to fly my model planes near). Dale is an avid eco-warrior and is working with Lotus to provide the wind turbines local to their factory and work site. I’m speculating, but given the relationship with Lotus, I’d say the early prototype Dale is seen here driving, stems from a Lotus chassis. Makes a lot of noise, but apparently goes like a rocket
• If it ever reaches production, I’d be surprised, but then again, Dale looks like a man on a mission..

Station fire - time-lapse

• Got this via http://mag.ma

• And still the traffic goes on.. fires within fires, yet less controlled..