Kaizar’s posterous

Traffic alone made it hard to get around. This year, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest car market, and much of Beijing is gridlocked every day. (Impossibly, the number of cars in the city is expected to double in seven years.) In desperation, I decided to buy an electric bicycle. China has put a hundred million of them on the road in barely ten years, an unplanned phenomenon that, energy experts point out, happens to be a milestone: the world’s first electric vehicle to go mass market. The 863 Program noticed, and last year it added a program to build a micro-electric car, inspired by bicycle components, for commuters. Researchers at Tsinghua did just that, by attaching four electric-bike motors to a chassis. “We call it the Hali,” Ouyang Minggao, the Tsinghua professor in charge of it, told me. They took the name from the Chinese translation of “Harry Potter.” The car is tiny and bulbous, and is being road-tested near Shanghai.

Hunting for an e-bike, I ended up at a string of shops near the Tsinghua campus, where each storefront offered a competing range of prices and styles to a clientele dominated by students and young families. I settled on a model called the Turtle King—a simple contraption, black and styled like a Vespa, with a five-hundred-watt brushless motor and disk brakes. Built of plastic to save weight, it was more akin to a scooter than to a bicycle, and it ran on a pair of lead-acid batteries, similar to those under the hood of a car. The salesman said that the bike would run for twenty to thirty miles, depending on how fast I went, before I would need to plug its cord into the wall for eight hours or lug the batteries inside to charge. With a top speed of around twenty-five miles per hour, it would do little for the ego, but, at just over five hundred dollars, it was worth a try.

The manager rang up the sale, and I chatted with two buyers who were students at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “You must have tons of these in the U.S., because you’re always talking about environmental consciousness,” one of them, an industrial-design major wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, said. Not really, I told him; American drivers generally use bikes for exercise, not transportation. He looked baffled. Around his campus and others in Beijing, electric bikes are as routine as motorcycles are in the hill towns of Italy.

I was repeatedly reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s remark that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” cern may be the closest thing real life has to Hogwarts, an institution where arcane arts amounting to sorcery are pursued by a cultish guild of masters and their young protégés.

The article is worth reading in its entirety.

Friends of the Earth said in a statement, "Obama has deeply disappointed not only those listening to his speech at the UN talks, he has disappointed the whole world."

"It's time for the president to get his hands dirty," Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, said in a statement this week. "Some of us have compromised our compromised compromise. We need the president to stand up for the values our party shares."

1. "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." Speaker at health care reform town hall meeting in Simpsonville, S.C., commenting on the government-created Medicare program, quoted by The Washington Post on July 28.

2. "We're going to be in the Hudson." Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, responding to air traffic controllers asking on which runway he preferred to land US Airways Flight 1549 on Jan. 15 before he landed in the Hudson River.

3. "There's an app for that." Apple's advertising slogan for the iPhone.

4. "You lie!" Wilson's shouted retort to Obama's address before a joint session of Congress on Sept. 9.

5. "The Cambridge police acted stupidly." Obama, commenting on a white police officer's arrest of black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Mass., at a news conference July 22.

6. "I'm going to let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!" Kanye West, interrupting Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sept. 13.

7. "Um, you guys said that we, um, did this for the show." Falcon Heene, during an interview on CNN about his parents' balloon hoax on Oct. 15.

8. "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel.'" Palin, posting on her Facebook page on Aug. 7.

9. "The governor is hiking the Appalachian Trail." Spokesman for South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford regarding Sanford's disappearance on June 22.

10. "You give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders." Jesse Ventura, during a CNN interview May 11.

An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work.

At least 1 million bats in the past three years have been wiped out by a puzzling, widespread disease dubbed “white-nose syndrome” in what preeminent US scientists are calling the most precipitous decline of North American wildlife in human history. If it isn’t slowed or stopped, they believe bats will continue disappearing from the landscape in huge numbers and that entire species could become extinct within a decade. It’s enough to make some wonder: Is the bat in the cave the new canary in the coal mine?

This news bothers me in a way the mass death of the bees and the frogs doesn't. I think it's because a Reading Rainbow episode from 1986 planted a seed of sympathy for bats that still lingers. Damn you Levar Burton for making me care.