Solar-Power-Augmented Prius Takes the Grid Out of 'Plug-in': At Green Car Congress,

A Canadian engineer has prototyped a Photovoltaic Prius -- a 2001 Prius augmented with roof-top solar panels and an additional battery system to supplement the charge in the original equipment NiMH batteries.

Steve Lapp’s PV Prius is still a rough prototype—a demonstration of concept—but even with the limitations of the systems, he has achieved an initial 10% fuel efficiency improvement from 52 mpg to 59 mpg....

The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection

is an archive of almost 1600 Ozark Mountain folk songs, recorded between 1956 and 1976. A traveling salesman from Springfield, Missouri, Hunter took his reel-to-reel tape recorder into the hills and backwoods of the Ozarks, preserving the heritage of the region by recording the songs and stories of many generations of Ozark history. As important as the songs themselves are the voices of the Missouri and Arkansas folks who shared their talents and recollections with Hunter. Designed to give increased public access to this unique and invaluable resource, this site is a joint project of the Southwest Missouri State University Department of Music and the Springfield-Greene County Library in Springfield, Missouri, where the permanent collection is housed.

You may browse titles and singers and search the collection, which includes songs such as A Lensman, A Tinsman, A Tinker, A Tailor - As sung by Mrs. Olive Coberley in Wheatland, Missouri on September 9, 1959.

Each song's page includes lyrics and a choice of listening to the song in RealAudio format or as a CD-quality AIFF file.

Insta-ratings: Romenesko, J.D. Lasica and others point to Akamai Technologies' new Web traffic report (link added), which ZDNet seems way too happy about:

Now, finally, Akamai has created a way for measuring where web surfers are focused en masse at any given time among 100 major online news sites. The Akamai Net News Index offers a near real-time zeitgeist meter on what news is attracting the most interest, broken out by major regions of the world.

This is really cool. It amounts to a "most read" attention gauge that is constantly refreshed and can be localized. No more guessing about what people are really interested in, and how they invest their attention. ...

I commented over at J.D.'s, "It's straight out of Max Headroom," the short-lived TV show that was "20 minutes into the future." The satirical cyberpunk series about a TV reporter whose consciousness has been uploaded to an electronic alter-ego (a "Max Headroom" sign is the last thing he saw before the accident he unexpectedly recovered from) -- featured instant ratings, too:

Network 23 board member executive, watching a real-time graphic of viewership: "...Demographics are eroding."

Cheviot (Network 23 Director): "How are they eroding, exactly?"

"We're losing the five- to eleven-year-olds."

Other executive: "Might I suggest that the story lines are becoming a bit too complex?"

Loner poet emerges: Kay Ryan, 2004 winner of a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship and the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Prize for an extraordinary body of work, attended her first writers' conference in Vancouver, and writes about it in Poetry magazine with a candor that fellow recluse Emily Dickinson would understand: I Go to AWP: A Lifetime Of Preferring Not To. Here's a bit of it:

I was invited to attend (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Vancouver) as an outsider, and to write a piece for Poetry. I could go but retain my alienation. This was so doable. Of course, in truth I could only do this now, when I am quite old. If I were young and hadn’t published anything, it would be different. Now, even if my sense of self is threatened, shouldn’t I already have used most of it up? How much more can there be left? Maybe I would never have been influenced, as I feared I would, but to this day I believe I needed to guard against something, even if that something was imaginary. I needed to protect something valuable. The most important thing a beginning writer may have going for her is her bone-deep impulse to defend a self that at the time might not look all that worth getting worked up about....

Sensitive Light: Coloured Smoke. One of many: