Ecogeek

Honda has just released a smattering of new details on it's all-new Insight. The car will be the cheapest hybrid vehicle available when it goes on sale in the spring of 2009, but it won't be the most efficient.

Imagine strolling a few steps in your underwear to pick fresh tomatoes from the garden, without ever leaving your apartment. All that and more in an urban desert, no less.

There's a new way of wiring your lights...and it doesn't involve wires. Pretty freakin' cool actually. Right now, your light switch has a physical connection to your light. When you flip the switch, a circuit is completed and the light turns on.

But connecting every light to every light switch basically requires twice as much wiring for a house's lighting system. That's just dumb.

LCD and plasma TVs are actually more efficient per square inch than those old-fashioned CRT screens. But that doesn't mean they consume less electricity. In fact, simply because they are, on average, so much more gigantic than old CRTs, they consume far more electricity.

There's hybrids...and then there's hybrids. And while this isn't the first time we've seen buses that can ride on train tracks (two years ago we wrote about these in Japan) this is definitely the coolest concept we've seen.

Can a hybrid engine be shrunk small enough to fit within the very narrow confines of a motorcycle? Honda thinks it can do it and if I was going to bet $700 billion of taxpayers' money on that gamble, I would place the bet on Honda.

The Japanese automaker says it is working on hybrid motorcycles and the first models could be on the market within two years.

By 2011, Honda plans to take it even one step smaller and introduce scooters with hybrid engines.

At the top of my list of dropped stocks today you'd expect the banks. But what comes next...what, would you guess, is the biggest loser outside of the banking industry in my portfolio.

Is it the big corporations like GE who have a huge hand in banking and financing? The luxury stocks like Apple who sell expensive items that might be less appealing in a recession? No and No. It's the solar stocks.

Why? Why on earth would a crisis in the financial sector kill these renewable energy stocks.

I am primarily an ecogeek, but I can't deny that I'm also just a geek. And so I, of course, love the open source, free software and creative commons movements. Without those powerful forces EcoGeek would absolutely have never existed.

So, yeah, I hate digital rights management. I believe that it's contrary to the spirit of creation and should not exist. But I don't get to talk about it here, because its all geek and no eco.