Projo Subterranean Homepage News

WFMU, best known for its Beware of the Blog blog, has announced that it will be launching a Free Music Archive funded by a grant from the New York State Music Fund:

Coming soon: an online digital library of music that will allow music fans, webcasters and podcasters to listen, download, and stream for free, with no restrictions, registration or fees. And it will all be legal.

Other partners include Creative Commons and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society;

FAQs and FACTS says they'll launch with 30,000 tunes in November.

There's a prelaunch blog that's dribbling out ands and tunes, and a preview CD: Selected Sounds from the Free Music Archive vol. 1. I've never heard of any of the bands, but there's no reason this archive couldn't give a huge boost to unknown bands and their soon-to-be-fans.

Energy news: BlackLight's physics-defying promise: Cheap power from water "An entrepreneur with $60 million in venture funding says he's found an endless source of cheap energy. Trouble is, it violates the laws of quantum physics." CNN Money.

Dyeing to Boost Solar Efficiency by 50% "MIT has perfected a dye technology that could change the solar world as we know it," writes Clean Technica:

Concentrated sunlight can melt silicon solar panels unless you include specialized cooling systems. Cooling technology costs money, and the panels require expensive tracking mechanisms to follow the sun through the day. MIT's new solar system bypasses the heat and tracking problems all together.

Thin coatings of organic dyes absorb sunlight and redirect favored wavelengths into a pane of glass. The light is aimed and concentrated towards the edge of the pane where small solar panels are located. The concentrated light allows the panels to produce the maximum possible amount of energy all day, every day without cooling systems or complex tracking mechanisms.

Last night, my husband and I were discussing how far along we'd be now if the original alt-energy impulses of the '70s had been central to energy policy since. If nothing else, the dependence on foreign oil might have been reduced, and consequently different foreign policy imperatives.

Not mincing words: What it's like to be 5'6" and weigh 530 lbs. A September post updated this week.

 Tags  energy music

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