Happy end of Earth Day, everybody.  Speaking of exciting Earth Day news, I just read that in 2009, an all-electric vehicle will be sold in the United States:

A Norwegian automaker backed by Silicon Valley investors plans to sell in the United States an electric car that goes 110 miles without a charge and costs less than $25,000.

Downsides?  It only goes 65 miles per hour and only has two seats.  But hey, if you’re commuting to and from a city all the time, this is a sweet ride.  I’ll have to do some more research when I get a chance to find out more… looks neat!

Hulu.com is the coolest website ever.  On it, you can watch full length episodes of a ton of TV Shows and some full-length movies for free.  They have lots of popular shows like The Office, The Simpsons, etcetera, but they even have one of my favorite obscure shows of all time: Jack of All Trades!  The website just launched today, but based on my test viewing of one episode of Jack of All Trades, it runs really smooth and is very easy to use.  When watching, the only interruption is a commercial once every 10 minutes or so, and the commercials are only about 25 seconds each, which is not bad at all.  I highly recommend checking Hulu out.

I bought a Macbook Pro prior this past August, prior to my first semester of law school. Previously, I was using a Dell Inspiron 5100 I purchased four years prior, which gave me no problems, but was a bit slow and getting to be past its prime. I figured it was time for a new computer, so after a lot of consideration, I decided to buy the Macbook Pro.

The first and second computers my family ever owned were Macs, but there was simply no good software out there for Macs at the time so we switched to a PC. But over the past couple years, I noticed more and more people switching to Macs, so I became curious. One thing led to another, and I spent a lot of money to get the shiny thing I’m typing on right now.

Looking around at my law school classmates today, I notice a lot of people have switched to Macs, even during the semester. One day when I was working in the library, one of my friends asked me about whether or not I liked my computer. She said she was having trouble with hers, and wanted to buy a new computer. A few days later, she had a Mac. Similar situations have occurred with other friends.

For those of you who don’t know, Pandora is a free online radio service that plays music for users based on their individualized preferences.

Pandora is a wonderful, easy to use website.  To get started, you type in the name of one of your favorite songs or artists, and the radio begins playing similar music.  To fine tune the player, you can add more songs or artists, or mark a song with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to indicate your preferences.

Pandora is also very good at finding good music, for me at least.  When I initially went to Pandora, I typed in my favorite artist, Ben Kweller, and was instantly showered with some of my other favorite artists including Weezer, Ben Folds, and the Barenaked Ladies.  In addition, I discovered more great artists I had never heard of before including Sherwood, whose first CD “Sing But Keep Going,” is on my list of all time favorite CDs.

But due to pressure from the RIAA, Pandora, along with many other similar online radio services such as Last.fm and Slacker, may be shut down.  From Pandora’s Founder:

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora,

I just got back from an interesting talk by a man named David Pimentel, who has written and given lots of advice regarding the national use of ethanol and biodiesel as sources of fuel to replace gasoline. Although many people believe that ethanol will be the fuel of the future that will free us from our dependence on oil, Pimentel disagrees. He asserts that ethanol production is economically unsound, environmentally unfriendly, geographically impractical, and ethically questionable.

Ethanol production is economically unsound, according to Pimentel. This is because it costs much more energy to produce ethanol than it creates. According to his January 2005 paper on ethanol and biodiesel, the following energy balances exist for these production techniques:

• Corn Grain to Ethanol: -29%.
• Switchgrass to Ethanol: -50%.
• Wood Biomass to Ethanol: -57%.

In other words, it costs 29% more fossil energy to produce a given amount of ethanol than the energy the ethanol itself contains (that’s a jumbled sentence!). So if you produce 1000BTU of energy worth of ethanol, it will cost you 1290BTU of energy to produce it.