helpful link to help keep your house cool without needing to buy expensive air conditioning

It's been a while, but I'm back!

I thought I'd share an interesting site for those of you whose kids need reverse pull headgear or braces.

My daughter was prescribed reverse pull headgear a while back. When we looked it up online ("what the heck is it, anyways?"), she was pretty devastated.

Quite the obvious thing to wear. The dentist told us that she should wear it 24 hours a day to ensure it was successful. She's already 10, so he was worried that we'd missed the window of opportunity. If her skull bones started to fuse after her last growth spurt, it would no longer be effective. If it didn't take, the alternative to reverse pull headgear is to break the jaw, wire it shut, and eat through a straw for 6 months. Clearly, we were motivated to make sure the headgear was a success!

So how do you convince a kid to wear her headgear 24 hours a day (to school, to the park, etc.)? Well, we found a website that sells shirts specifically for this. She's a huge fan of Star Wars, and they have a Princess Leia shirt where Leia is wearing the reverse pull headgear. Brilliant! The shirt helped her and her friends feel that it was "normal"… "If Princess Leia can wear headgear, so can I". She wears that shirt a lot, and although she still gets funny looks, she doesn't get teased. A huge help and encouragement!

Anyways, I thought I'd share it. If your child ever needs RPHG, check them out. I'd recommend them.

http://redpenguinshirts.com

Flywheels to capture brake energy

Interesting idea. I've often wondered if there was some simple kinetic way of storing brake energy, rather than electric. I had been thinking more along the lines of a spring or similar, but it looks like Volvo is considering ways of accomplishing this with a flywheel.

From here:

Is your commute killing your marriage?

I suppose it's intuitive, but a recent Swedish study shows that longer commutes correlate to higher divorce rates.
If you think about it, it's not hard to think of reasons why this might be true: guilt of being away from each other, compromises in career, increased stress, etc.
It's just interesting to see a study that highlights this.

I often joke that my commute kills a little bit of my soul each time. Perhaps it's also killing my marriage...

From here.

Humor: Google Car's downfall

I've posted my love for the Google Car before...

Without further commentary:

From here.

Dodge doesn't like robot drivers

... although, as pointed out many times before, I DO like robot drivers.

Yeah, yeah. I know that just the other week, I enthusiastically posted another Dodge commercial that I liked. However, the difference is recreational driving vs. utility driving (i.e. commuting). When it comes to utility driving for the daily commute, put a robot in the driving seat any day.

Drive greener and save money

Part of the frustration of vehicle-based commuting is the costs: cost of the vehicle, cost of maintenance, cost of insurance, and of course, the cost of fuel. Minimizing fuel usage is of benefit financially, environmentally, and socially (costs of maintaining peace in increasingly-hostile foreign areas).

Well, our friends at Eco Driving USA have a series of excellent tips that help minimize fuel consumption. While some of these are well-known to me, others I hadn't thought about (for example, I drove around for a couple of weeks with 100 lbs of gardening lime in the trunk).

Read on at Eco Driving USA.