[image credit: Kickstarter, evidently] Sent from the office on my last day of work in 2015. To a much, much younger cohort of coworkers. (And man, that’s depressing!) This is my last day in the office before the New Year (barring any work from home, which I might do to get ahead of the curve) […]
Author: EclecticLip
Eclectic Lip: Dieseldammerüng
image taken from despair.com’s latest t-shirt Before we get to this message’s main event, I’ll throw another brief shoutout to Pope Francis. Sure, he leads one of the world’s socially most regressive organizations, but he seems to be pulling in the right direction, and ultimately, he’s not in fact that powerful — his
Continue readingEclectic Lip: …on the Entrepreneurial State
With the next Canadian federal election less than a year away – and undesirables like Wayne Gretzky soon to be purged from the voter lists – I’ve been getting a lot more fundraising emails lately. As of mid-December I’d received nineteen in eighteen days. It was like a Christmas advent
Continue readingEclectic Lip: Unity in Diversity
Polycarp of Smyrna Former Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, or LBP – not to be confused with U.S. President LBJ, dominant Japanese political party the LDP, or women’s wardrobe staple the LBD – once obscurely remarked that Canada needed to maintain a “unity in diversity”. (I’d’ve written “famously remarked”,
Continue readingEclectic Lip: A mini blog re: Mega Fauna
Productivity gurus occasionally say that to make time for the most important things (e.g. promoting your next book) you need to cut back the time you spend on less-critical stuff (such as, writing it yourself) by making priority calls (translation: hire a ghostwriter). Sadly, I haven’t met any ghostwriters comfortable
Continue readingEclectic Lip: How Trinity Western University (unintentionally) promotes divorce
Trinity Western University has been in the news recently, as law societies in Ontario and Nova Scotia voted to not recognize lawyers trained at the religious university’s soon-to-open law school. These two law societies – like your blogger and the vast majority of Canadians – recoiled in horror at the
Continue readingEclectic Lip: Pondering a palatable pipeline…
I guest-hosted TWiE podcast episode 137 a few days ago, an episode devoted to the Alberta oil sands / tar sands. If you ask me (and I realize none of you have 🙂 ) it’s well worth a listen! The week’s guest was US energy analyst Robert Rapier, who had
Continue readingEclectic Lip: British Columbia hits 1,000 EV’s (and gov’t drops support)
image of Tesla Model S’s at a rally, from Consumer Reports British Columbians have now purchased more than 1,000 plug-in electric vehicles. Add in low-speed neighbourhood electric vehicles and owner conversions, and the number will be a bit higher. As of Jan 31, 2014 Polk research (now a division
Continue readingEclectic Lip: Back from Happy Hawaii
Synchronized phoning, coming soon to a summer Olympics near you… Trivia note: Swedish supergroup Abba’s “Why did it have to be me” was originally titled (and lyricized) as “Happy Hawaii”. But those of you who also secretly bought the 4-CD ABBA box set without admitting it to your friends, already
Continue readingEclectic Lip: The losers of Superbowl XLVIII will be…
Religious moderates. Here’s my reasoning. After the game, someone on the winning team, exulting ecstatically, will say “God was on our side” or words to that effect. It’s as sure as a post-touchdown two-point conversion attempt late in the fourth quarter, if the team is still down by a pair.
Continue readingEclectic Lip: The 1-2-3′s of EV market share in the US
My article on the 1-2-3′s of electric vehicle adoption in the U.S. went up on GreenCarReports on the weekend. The commentary went through a title change – a procedure familiar to many famous writers, and many more of us unknown mediocrities. 🙂 About fifteen years after a publisher’s first impression
Continue readingEclectic Lip: December: a podcast premiere
The nice folks at http://www.thisweekinenergy.tv/ (TWiE) invited me to guest on their podcast on their late November episode, Good News, Bad News, Ugly News. While most of their guests are leading experts in their fields, and I’m just a talkative and reasonably-knowledgeable former fuel cell engineer, I heeded Gore Vidal’s
Continue readingEclectic Lip: November EV (and FCV) musings
It’s been a busy month — busy enough that though one in seven Canadians crossed the border for Black Friday, I wasn’t one of them. (Like a further one in three Canadians, I did my shopping online. Bought me some books — and by books, I mean books so nerdy
Continue readingEclectic Lip: Putting the “X” back in Xmas
Xtians began using “Xmas” 500 years ago, since in Greek, X is the “Ch” in Christ Around the holidays, some people (not to name names or anything) urge modern society to put the “Christ” back in Christmas. There’s much to criticize about the hollow vacuousness of consumer culture, after all.
Continue readingEclectic Lip: The quest for the golden meme
Golden mean image sourced here. It’s been a pretty good month, in terms of writing. Over at GreenCarReports, I had my piece on September EV sales in Canada, a Canadian Thanksgiving-centric story riffing on the country’s nationwide EV charging network, and discussed what our EV drivers do, to get through
Continue readingEclectic Lip: Paging Dr. Freud…
Logged on to desktop-Facebook recently. Was greeted by these ads. They were… disturbing. I don’t even want to know what photos they used for the female or gay audience! Perhaps this is some sort of bizarre homage to Renaissance painter Guiseppe Arcimbolo, colloquially known as “that crazy artist who painted
Continue readingEclectic Lip: Wiki-immortality!
My August Canadian EV car sales stats update went up recently. Which was cool. Cooler still, I had a chance to wax poetic about sustainability, and my new-found optimism that we’ll avoid the worst of our dystopian horrors. I was invited to be a guest lecturer for an engineering course
Continue readingEclectic Lip: Passing Gas – EV’s now outnumber gas stations, in America
My latest piece is up on GreenCarReports, here. It’s where I sourced the photo from. 🙂 And yes, putting “Passing Gas” in the title was deliberate. Hey, it’s catchy! From what I can tell, electric vehicles also outnumber gas stations in Japan as well. Alas, Canadians are somewhat behind our
Continue readingEclectic Lip: The Innovator’s Dilemma, Toyota edition
This car — yes, this car — has impeded Toyota’s electric efforts My post on how The Innovator’s Dilemma explains why Toyota lags in electric vehicles — and how Kleiber’s Law explains there’s nothing for them to worry about (yet), is now up on GreenCarReports. While the Tesla stats were
Continue readingEclectic Lip: The witless wisdom of Shai Agassi
Dunning-Kruger effect graphed by AddAttack on DeviantArt. LinkedIn has an “opinion leader” piece from Shai Agassi, founder of bankrupt car-battery-switcher Better Place, telling carmakers how they need to respond to Tesla’s success. Who better to give them advice than a guy who raised $850 million for an ignorant, impractical, impossible
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