A New Kind of Internal Combustion Engine...

Reader Dr. Simi L. passes along this video of an OPOC (Opposed Piston, Opposed Cylinder) internal combustion engine.  The video makes clear the advantages of such a design, and they are indeed interesting.  I'd love to see one of these in action!  A word of caution to the viewer: the person narrating the video is the entrepreneur behind its development – so you can fully expect the benefits to be exaggerated and the challenges understated...

Voting With Their Feet...

Americans who are desperate for jobs will move from one state to another to get a job.  Studying the relative movements of Americans between the states is a wonderful summary of the relative economic health of the various states.  Certain businesses are marvelously sensitive to these relative people flows.  One such business is one-way rentals of U-Haul trailers – if more people are traveling from state A to state B than vice versa, U-Haul will charge more for the former in order to cover their cost of returning the trailer.

Reader Doug W. passes along an article that looks at exactly this statistic.  A teaser for fellow Californians:

Good indicators of the outward migration are the prices of U-Haul vehicles. To rent a 26-foot truck one-way from San Francisco to Austin costs $3236, and yet the one-way charge for that same truck from Austin to San Francisco is just $399. Even so, U-Haul has to pay its employees to drive the empty trucks back from Texas.

“Ouch!” says Doug. Ouch, indeed...

Here's another article that looks at the same metric more broadly.  And you can't help but notice that in general, the states that are attracting workers (because they're economically healthy) are the least liberal/progressive...

The Secret Life of the Pilcrow...

Do you know what a pilcrow is?