Skip to main content
Search IntMath
Close

Solar Taxi vs Oil Storm

By Murray Bourne, 19 Jul 2007

The Solar Taxi is a 3-wheeled solar powered car that started its world journey on 11 July 2007. The car is driven by Swiss teacher Louis Palmer.

solar taxi
The Solar Taxi [Source: Ubergizmo.com.]

The official site is solartaxi.com [but it is a terrible site; badly organised (a hodge-podge of languages) and with some links going to pure advertising sites]. After a lot of persistence, I finally managed to find the English language blog Solartaxi (which has since disappeared).

I was surprised at first to read some negative comments from Off-Grid [no longer available] about Solar Taxi, but I have to agree that there seems to be a large "hype coefficient" with this venture.

However, I wish Palmer well and I hope the journey raises awareness of what has been possible for many years, and must become a reality soon.

Oil Storm

I saw the drama Oil Storm last night. This is a chilling story (made in 2005, before Katrina) of some very real possibilities, some of which have subsequently come to pass:

  • A large hurricane destroys the oil facilities in the US gulf states
  • Terrorists attack oil facilities in the Middle East
  • The US economy plunges into a depression, with shortages of all basic supplies
  • A crash on Wall Street
  • The Chinese outbid the US for oil

See the summary of Oil Storm on Wikipedia, and a trailer.

Oil's days are numbered. Sell your SUVs. Sell your Hummers. Go green.

See the 1 Comment below.

Leave a comment




Comment Preview

HTML: You can use simple tags like <b>, <a href="...">, etc.

To enter math, you can can either:

  1. Use simple calculator-like input in the following format (surround your math in backticks, or qq on tablet or phone):
    `a^2 = sqrt(b^2 + c^2)`
    (See more on ASCIIMath syntax); or
  2. Use simple LaTeX in the following format. Surround your math with \( and \).
    \( \int g dx = \sqrt{\frac{a}{b}} \)
    (This is standard simple LaTeX.)

NOTE: You can mix both types of math entry in your comment.

top

Tips, tricks, lessons, and tutoring to help reduce test anxiety and move to the top of the class.