Random Thoughts of Chris Tilley

I got a very interesting email a couple of weeks ago regarding Hydraulic Hybrids. This reader sent me to Mother Earth News. There there is an archived article about a Hydraulic Hybrid that some 'advanced students at Minneapolis, Minnesota's Hennepin Vocational Technical Center' built back in 1978. No that is not a typo 1978. Check the article about for all the details. They were able to get 75 mpg nearly 30 years ago. The automotive x-prize goal of 100 mpg seems very doable now.

There are at least three companies entering Hydraulic Hybrids in the Automotive X-prize. Now that there is a track records for Hydraulic Hybrids I have a even more confidence in those entries. I can even see these beating the plug in electric hybrids.

It sounds like from the email and some of the other things that I read that these people got shafted in a number of different ways which would probably explain why we are not currently driving hydraulic hybrids. I am not going to go into those. It pisses me of but I am much more interested to see these current teams succeed and the technology brought into regular use.

Somebody is going to make this work and with the exposure of the x-prize we should start seeing them on the road. As I always say there is money to be made finding solutions to global warming.

A couple of months ago I got fooling around with the Amazon.com API and had this idea to inventory my books. That lead to the thought that it would be a great idea for a website. I started coding and purchased the domain name inventoryyourbooks.com. Schlock Mercenary mentioned LibraryThing in his blog. My favorite webcomic and I've been waiting for an excuse to use this banner.

Needless to say LibraryThing has already done everything I had planned plus tons more that I hadn't even thought of. They have 250,000+ registered users and 18 million books stored. Not to worry I really wasn't that far along. My only regret is that I didn't find this site 6 months ago. I would have spent the time entering books instead of coding.

Oh well more time to work on one of my other ideas. WhereIsTheRadar.com