Nah - I'm not Al Gore, and wouldn't classify the house as a McMansion by any stretch of the imagination. But the meter ticks at around 29000kWh a year. I guesstimate that about 20000kWh of that is heating, since it's electrical.

Before you tell me put some insulation in let me just state that the house is actually below average per unit of area and especially so per unit of volume when compared to other houses at this latitude.

It's either 0 or 1 for me. Nothing plugged in. The single green LED on the thermostat on the wall will light up depending on whether it's cold enough and late enough to indicate the floor it heated.

When I turn off the lights I can't see a thing in the bedroom because the windows all have these blackout curtains that hardly leak any lights.

I have trouble sleeping in hotels these days.

I agree the battery packs are and will be installed in different locations in different cars. The pack changing station does get more complex when changing multiple smaller batteries, rather than just one big one in a standardized location. There has been enough stories on industrial robots on slashdot to make me consider this is a fairly trivial problem to solve compared to lots of other stuff we are capable of.

Even so I don't think the cost for the swapping station really comes in to play. You personally don't need to own one and businesses will recover the capital over time. The up front cost is going to be greater, but when done properly, you can service many different types of EVs with a single station and enable a far greater freedoms in car design and weight distribution, just the thing you're talking about. With swappable batteries you need to be able to access them from the outside of the vehicle, but that's about it.

If Better Place is able to achieve reliable coupling with their scheme, I wouldn't think say 5 smaller couplings would be unworkable. When you increase the number of couplings, you decrease the amount of current each has to carry, making each one cheaper. This does not just simply add up to 5 times the connection problem compared to having just one.

For the packaging, I don't think that in any one of the cars you listed the battery pack is a single cell. Some more packaging is probably required, but given a reasonable size for a exchangeable unit, I don't see the difference being that great. Also for the cost of the pack, you would be leasing them anyway.

You listed a few profiles for batteries; two in fact. High power and low power. The amount of energy is just the number of the packs in the EV. The lease on a high power battery is likely to cost more. Not unlike premium fuel that costs more over the regular stuff. Also when battery tech improves, the capacity and the power output increase, but this can be negotiated between the EV and the battery.

Quick charging is, while also solvable, a completely different beast. With the swapping stations you can charge the batteries a bit slower anticipating demand, with less need for expensive high-voltage high-amperage infrastructure all over the place when compared to ubiquitous quick charging.

I think the swapping stations and standardization are a good idea, at least for the time being. My musings just give the idea some more versatility compared to the single-big-pack model. Maybe when battery tech improves further and we come up with economical superconductors the picture would be very much in favor of dumping the swapping stations.

I somewhat see our point with the voltage/discharge profile, but the other things are quite manageable. Even then, at least at the beginning, there can be just a few types. When things develop, maybe the battery wouldn't need to be just a "dumb battery", but rather have electronics to enable backwards compatibility.

Shape of the pack? Why not have multiple smaller packs in each vehicle? With today's technology I don't think it is far-fetched to standardize technology to detect/communicate where they are located in each car. Given they're developing wheels that have the motor in the hub this would enable us to have vehicles laid out quite freely. Heck, even a motorcycle is readily doable this way. Oh, and with smaller units, you could do this at home too.

Hookups/couplings? I imagine you service your car every now and then, change the oil filter and whatnot, why must the EV be different? The batteries can be serviced, too.

You could still charge while parked, but have battery swapping stations when in a hurry. I don't think we would need quite as many of them as we currently have fuel pumps.

That's what I thought as well. While I'm not a native english speaker, I don't think "one of whom" rules out the possibility that the other is as well.

Yes, I get that, but I was thinking that the cart had both, the vertical axis turbine powering the wheels when going (directly) into the wind, while when going downwind the cart would have the propeller run by the wheels.

Then again, maybe the just propeller would work upwind as well, if you get more torque to the wheels than there is drag.

If you built a cart with something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine#Vertical_axis_design could you then move into any direction relative to the wind as long as there is SOME wind?

That's what we have in Finland at least. First you have to physically go to the bank to identify yourself and then you get a login/password and a physical list of key-value pairs for online banking. When you start to run out of said keys you go get another list from the bank or order one through mail. Then you change the list using a value from the previous list and input the number of the new key list.

In order to compromise in this system someone would have to have access both to my specific key list and my login/password combination.

Of course that doesn't help at all if someone compromises the bank's systems, but in that case it wouldn't make a difference whether I used online banking or not.

It baffles me that something as simple as (or similar to) this is not being used as I do believe it makes online banking a whole lot more secure.

The problem with foam is that with increased insulation the temperature in the nuts will rise. This could potentially lower fertility, so unless you install a cooling system as well...

I watched a documentary of sorts about EM allergies. I found it quite funny that some of these people carried with them a meter that would tell them the level of EM radiation (reminded me of a dB meter) so they would know when to be anxious.

I imagine proving whether a person is really "allergic" to EM radiation on a frequency range would be very simple in a double blind test. Could it be the case that even if somebody does have reactions, and can prove it, no-one will believe it anyway?

Personally though, I think these people need help dealing with their irrational fears. Then again, it's really up to them to seek help, which is in turn unlikely because of all the attention they get because of their "affliction".

When one is paid for doing the work, it's not "one's own time", it's "time of one's own choosing."

Teachers teach/sit in meetings far less hours a day than most people in other fields. The planning work is supposed to happen in between. If they don't do it during office hours, but rather go somewhere else, and do the work later does that make that time their own time?

Maybe teachers should be "chained to the desk" for 8 hours a day and forced to do planning work while not teaching? I'm sure they would love that arrangement.

I'm not convinced they're paid only for teaching. I'm not payed only for writing code either, though that is the expected end result of my work. My mom used to teach and at least in this corner of the world the teachers are required to do planning work necessary to teach and are considered to be compensated for that time in their salary. Hence the extra material they create / plans should should be considered public property or at least be shared among colleagues. It's tougher for teachers just starting out with new material and gets easier once you've done planning and extra material, so you can reuse it the next course / year. At least here I would very much frown upon someone trying to profit from something they've done while being paid for it and not sharing it.