A place where "power generation, water management, transportation, and urban planning all come together"

Check out a fun but somewhat tiny snippet about MIT and the United Arab Emirates working together to create the first carbon-neutral city. Interesting little article with fun discussions of "transportation pods" powered by the city's photovoltaic panels, and other fun and interesting stuff.

Andrew Sullivan had a link to Boozhy's post about the story that pointed out (astutely) that the future of environmentalism appears to be heading in a direction where change is driven more and more by the economic realities (and incentives) for shifting to green. The folks in Abu Dhabi clearly state their motivation as economic (the potential for a project like this as a magnet for business and investment).

Weekends and Sunshine

Heller's and Pfeiffer's and Sky oh my, originally uploaded by Chambo25.

Well, folks, I think it's been a pretty remarkable week... don't you? ABC is the first news outlet to tally recent announcments (and defections from Camp Clinton) and say Obama now leads in super delegates... perhaps another sign of the wave that is forming to come tidy up any unresolved questions in the Democratic primary. Not sure if it's a bigger piece of the wave or not, but the Time magazine cover is pretty darn cool. Also amazing, the website Hillary is Mom Jeans (a response to the brilliant Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle). I've got too many favorites from their all-caps little quips, but a new favorite of mine today is, "HILLARY YELLED FREEBIRD AT YOUR CONCERT" brilliant stuff.

Meanwhile, outside the world of primaries there's a whole mess of other stuff going on, right?

• On Ebay you can pick up JFK's air guitar... sweet (hat tip: Wonkette).
• Sadly, probably the biggest story in the world is still the mess in Myanmar, where somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 people were killed by a cyclone that has supposedly impacted over a million lives, yet the military leaders are balking at letting outside aid workers inside the borders of their tightly-controlled nation. Hopefully progress on this mess will be swift (at least there are some signs of hope), but so far there's a lot to feel bummed out about here.
• The oldest gorilla in captivity celebrated his 55th birthday with a frozen fruit cake. I take it they mean a cake made of frozen fruit, not an unwanted Christmas gift retrieved from the depths of somebody's freezer.
  
• When bong-making creativity goes horribly wrong: In Texas some kids dug up a secluded grave, removing a skull that they then crafted into a bong. Wow.
  
• Finally, on a lighter note, researchers say some sexy orchids may reap the benefit from the way their forms attract certain insects, but they may also hurt the insects that pollinate them since they decrease their chances for reproduction. See, the confusion over their appearance causes the bees to, "frequently ejaculate and waste copious sperm." Wait... did I say that last story was on a lighter note... well, if you hate bees I guess this is good news.
  

Anyway... there's your Friday dose of randomness, have a wonderful weekend!

Oh, and the photo above is another from my March visit to Washington DC... taken along Mt. Pleasant Ave. in downtown Mount Pleasant. I'm not sure why I didn't post this sooner, but it's one of my favorites from that trip.