Last week the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the most ambitious energy and global warming legislation ever debated in Congress.  That is very good news and a good first step.  Of course, since Congress has never been anything close to providing leadership in the areas of alternative energy and climate change, the comparison to past non-action doesn’t mean much.

The other action last week that was a good first step was the announcement by President Obama that a deal had been made with auto manufacturers to impose new mileage and emissions standards for all cars and truck sold in the United States starting in 2012.  While this is very good, it is incremental improvement towards a necessary elevation of mileage standards if we are to gain independence from foreign oil, really lessen oil use  and resultant greenhouse gas emissions.

A growing number of energy, environmental and climate scientists have been providing evidence that even if humanity stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today, there would still be an increase in CO2 particles per million in the atmosphere during the next several years.  So complete stoppage would only start to slow this upward trend.  That is why incremental decreases in fossil fuel consumption will not end or alleviate the global climate change dynamics it will only slightly temper them.  All said, the new mileage and emissions standards are certainly a step in the right direction.  A step that should have been taken a decade ago, so this is just playing catch …

The mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope is a magnificent and historically important event.  The images coming to us from space as the astronauts work on repairing the telescope are beautiful, up close and personal and once again instill awe in those of us that watch.

For most of my life the increasingly incredible pictures and videos that have come back from space have taken we humans out of our planetary realm and realities and lifted up into the cosmos.  The world literally stopped and listened on transistor radios when John Glenn orbited earth in the early 1960s.  The whole world watched as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in July 1969.  The first space walks allowed us to live through others the almost unimaginable reality of a human floating freely in space.

Since then we have become detached from what NASA and other space agencies are doing up above as we have allowed ourselves to become somewhat jaded.  The first time things happen we are captivated, as they continue in on-going frequency they seem to lose their impact.  We no longer stop what we are doing to stand, listen and watch in awe. We again get absorbed both in our personal lives and the seemingly urgent and much more important political, cultural and economic dynamics of our world.

The Hubble telescope has been in orbit for 15 years.  In that time it has altered the knowledge and theories scientists have held about the universe and its infiniteness.  It has shown us …

The Great Recession of 2008-2010 in having a profound effect on the way we all live.  Yes, there is much hardship, there is much pain, there is much loss, there is a sense of damage we all feel.  That said, there are changes in the wind that point to profound long term benefits when we finally emerge into a new growth period in 2011.

First, as I predicted last fall “thrift would become the new extravagance, thrift will become the new cool”.  This has clearly become the case.  In recent months, the media is full of stories of how people are now enjoying the stuff they have and have capped the urge to constantly upgrade or buy more.  Thrift shops are doing a booming business as are all forms of do it yourself activities such as changing your own oil or taking care of your own yard.

Last fall I wrote that the “third economic wave would collapse” meaning that the ever increasing percentage of consumer spending as a part of the GNP would abruptly stop, and it has.  Last October the net savings rate of American’s was -0.5%; for the past few months it has been between 4.5-5%.  People are saving money at a level not seen for 20 years..  In my first monthly newsletter last month, I wrote about how we have all been scarred by the events of the 4^th quarter of last year.  Those of us who were raised by parents that lived through …

Last week G.E. announced an incredible breakthrough in storage technology.  This breakthrough allows the equivalent of 100 DVDs of content to be put on one disc.  This is another dramatic step in the on-going revolution of storage of the last decade.

As long time readers of this blog know I have consistently written about this revolution for three years.  It is one of the most profound yet least discussed technological transformations to occur in this decade.  Almost three years ago I wrote this column about the staggering development of a 1 gigabyte flash drive, up from the128mbs flash drive that was, at that time the cutting edge corporate giveaway.  In that column I mentioned that those new 1 gigabyte flash drives represented more storage capacity than existed in a desk top PC from the late 1980s.

Only six months later I wrote a column about how the new flash drives had 4 gigabytes of storage and were the size of a quarter.  Hey, look, I have a main frame’s worth of storage mixed in with my pocket change.  In that same column I marveled at the 60 gigabyte external hard drives coming on the market that would allow the aggregation of extensive media files.  That was just 30 months ago.  Now of course you can walk into any Best Buy and get an external hard drive with a terabyte of storage, and for the same price that the 60 gigabyte one was 30 months ago.

Exactly a year ago …