Thursday, October 25, 2007

Solar Decathalon

Last week on the Mall the Department of Energy had a competition for people (university groups) to build solar powered homes. They had to make the homes functional and livable (though not necessarily affordable, so some of the houses are really expensive given the amount of house you would be getting). It's a pretty cool idea. Unfortunately, I didn't find out about it until after it was over, so I couldn't go down to Washington to see it. But the competition website has pictures and NewsHour with Jim Lehrer did a report on it.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

And the judge went in for that

I was in court yesterday - pretrial motions. One of the other cases on the docket was setting their trial date. And the defense counsel had possibly the best reason ever why the trial couldn't start the day after the Superbowl. His wife is the chief legal counsel for the NFL players union, and she has to go to the game. So he also has to go to be his wife's (and this is a direct quote) "cabana boy". So they had to pick another day to start the trial.

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

creepy and weird

I was at a student's house this evening, and a guy came and knocked on the door. He said he was from the power company and that he needed them to turn off everything electrical in the house so he could read the meter box. That seemed an odd request, since why did he have to come at all to do a meter reading, and why was he there at 6 in the evening. But the brother of my student was talking to their dad at the time and the dad said that he didn't know anything about a guy from the power company coming. So he called Pepco, and they didn't know anything about it, which doesn't bode well. So obviously the next thing he did was call the police. So we sat barricaded in the house waiting for the police to come as this guy wandered around the yard trying to get our attention. And then the power went out, so we were a little concerned that he was going to murder us while we sat there at teh dining room table, or something like that. So eventually the police got there, and the dad got home from work (the mom had taken the youngest kid to soccer practice or some such activity), and the guy left. But it was very disturbing while it was all going on.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Happy Reading

This week is Banned Books Week. In its honor, everyone should try and read at least one book that has been banned at some point. To help with your reading selection, here is the list of the 100 most challenged books of the 1990s. It's not that they were necessarily written in the '90s. It was just that people decided they hated them in the '90s. So have fun taking a stand against censorship.