Please Join Solarize Lowell for Solar Financing 101 with Eastern Bank

Solar Financing 101 with Eastern Bank

Date: Thursday, November 8, 2018
Time: 6 to 7:30pm
Where: 50 Central Street Lowell, MA

Come join Solarize Volunteers, ReVision Energy, and Eastern Bank as we talk about how you can harness Solar Energy and Heat Pumps to power your home.

Solarize Lowell – active now! – reduces costs for clean energy upgrades by offering a group discount for everyone who signs up during the program.

Free Pizza for all those who RSVP & attend!

Please follow this link to RSVP!

Mecha-Leka-Hi, Mecha-Hiney-Ho

I’d never noticed, or at least made note of, the sheer number of giant robots there are floating around in my childhood memories.  One of the first animated cartoons I remember watching was Gigantor.  I can still remember the theme song. It premiered in 1964, so I’m guessing I saw it during it’s first run. It makes plenty of psychological sense. What little kid doesn’t want to be huge and powerful or to command something huge and powerful?

What brought this up? Well, of course the idea of building a giant humanoid robot, climbing into it and fighting another robot is pretty ludicrous and pretty awesome. It is so ludicrous and so awesome that, of course, groups of folks out there are building giant robots. To fight each other. While they’re inside of them. No, these aren’t remotely controlled creations like in other robot fighting leagues like Battlebots®. I’m reminded of Mark Pauline’s Survival Research Laboratories, except I don’t know if Paul the nine (eight? seven?) fingered would be, ummm, extreme enough to climb into one of these in an arena.  He’s given enough of his flesh and bone for his art.

The thing is, I would totally watch this.  I’d be a happy spectator.  There will not, however, be live spectators for the first fight sometime in September 2017.  Why not? Well they’re leery of killing their audience.

GO EAGLE PRIME!

I’ll update this blog post when they formally announce the bout date.

Apple Acquires Augmented Reality Company Metaio

Electric Motorcycles

As I’ve become more and more interested in green technologies, I’ve already decided that I’d like for my next vehicle to be electric.

For getting up and down from winter time mountain adventures, I see a Tesla Model X – http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx – or something similar in my future. But what about daily commuting? I could still use the Model X, but it takes up a good amount of space on the highway and even as an electric, it takes more energy to move than a smaller vehicle with the same rolling resistance and coefficient of drag.

Happily for me, there is a growing number of producers of electric motorcycles.

• Brammo Empulse – http://www.brammo.com/empulse/ Brammo Motorcycles is dead.  Well, not quite dead.  It looks like Brammo sold its motorcycle business to Polaris / Victory – http://www.autoblog.com/2015/02/06/brammo-empulse-could-become-victory-charger/ – we’ll see where this goes.
  • It went here!
  • Victory Motorcycles – http://www.victorymotorcycles.com/en-us/electric/empulse-tt-titanium-silver-havasu-red
• Zero S – http://www.zeromotorcycles.com/zero-s/
• Lit Motors – http://litmotors.com/
• MonoTracer – http://peraves.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/all-electric-monotracer-mte-150-brochure/
• Bultaco – http://www.bultaco.es/en/motos
• Motoczysz – http://motoczysz.com/
• Mission R – https://www.mission-motorcycles.com/ – seems to be dead.
• Harley-Davidson LiveWire – http://projectlivewire.harley-davidson.com

By the time I’m ready to purchase, there should be even more. Given how electric bikes sound, perhaps I’d need an appropriate helmet – http://www.airgraffix.com/collections/star-wars-themed-helmets/products/x-wing-fighter – Rebel Alliance anyone?  Then again, I could consider a Skully – https://www.skully.com/– augmented reality helmet.  Well, I would, except that Skully imploded earlier this year – http://www.digitaltrends.com/outdoors/skully-ar-shuts-down/.

Added 2014/12/22:

• Lightning Motorcycles – http://lightningmotorcycle.com/
• Energetica Motorcycles – http://www.energicasuperbike.com/
• Saietta Motorcycles (was Agility Motors) – http://saiettamotorcycles.com/ 

Still more:

• Austin Electric Powersports – http://www.atx8080.com/

Added 2014/05/13:

• Victory Motorcycles – http://www.victorymotorcycles.com/en-us/electric/empulse-tt-titanium-silver-havasu-red
• Alta Motors – http://www.altamotors.co/machine/redshift-sm/
• Johammer – http://www.johammer.com/en/
• Lito Sora – http://soraelectricsuperbike.com/

Added 2016/10/25:

• Zvexx – http://zvexx.com/