Check out the future of batteries : the metal-air battery.

It could drive your electric vehicle 1800 km (or around 1200 miles for you Americans) on a single charge, and all with a battery that only weighs 100 kg (220 pounds, or the weight of one slightly overweight man).

It does this by one of those acts of genius that seems obvious in hindsight : it gets its oxygen from the air instead of lugging it around in the anode of the battery.

I had no idea until now that batteries carried their own oxygen supply inside. All I know about batteries is that when you have two different kinds of metal in the same acid, the difference between the conductivity in the two metals creates a current.

Or something like that. It’s been a long time since Grade 9 science.

So I am not sure where the oxygen comes in. But the company responsible for this breakthrough, Phinergy, assures us that this is true and that their solution fixes that problem.

I have heard about this kind of thing before, but never in so effective a form and, and this is very important, never in a form that relies on something as cheap and plentiful as aluminum.

The Earth’s crust is loaded with aluminum, until rarer stuff like lithium, and aluminum is cheap, easy to work with, and marvelously recyclable to boot.

With that kind of range, the biggest hurdle for electric vehicles is cleared. A car with the Phinergy system would have two batteries, a small lithium-ion one with a 50 km range (more than enough for urban driving) and the larger aluminum-air battery for longer trips.

To be honest, people’s objection to short operating ranges for electric cars is mostly irrational. Unless you have a very long commute, 50 km is enough whether there’s a bigger battery for longer trips there or not. Most people could commute, run errands, and be back home with range to spare, and just plug their car in overnight.

But if a much longer range than they need is what it takes to get enough people to buy electric cars that it is worth it to invest in the infrastructure to support them, I am all for it.

Imagine a future where your car drives itself and you never have to worry about running out of power because it automatically parks itself on a charging pad when not in use.

Sounds pretty awesome to me.

Moving on, it turns out that Thomas Kinkade was a drunk.

For those of you unfamiliar with the late mister Kinkade, here’s the precis : he painted super happy, warm, life-affirming paintings filled with glowy sunshine and bucolic imagery like cottages and lakes and flowers.

Stuff like this :

And as we wind on down the road/ our shadow’s taller than our soul…

And because his paintings were happy and harmless and easy for anyone to like, the artistic establishment hated him. And not only that, he had the gall to make paintings that the Wrong Kind Of People, namely evangelical Christians, liked, and made a heck of a lot of money doing it. So the artistic establishment hated him with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.

To me, that is entirely wrongheaded. I like his work. There is nothing wrong with making art purely to make people feel good. Art does not have to challenge and perplex.

It can just set out to be pretty and nice to look at. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Do we forget all the revered artists who painted nothing but sunflowers and starry nights?

As for him being a drinker and a tail-chaser, I suppose that would be a shock to people in the self-sealed evangelical Christian movement, but to people like myself who are more versed in the lives of artists and writers, it is not a surprise at all. We artists are a high strung and intense bunch, often with profound personal demons hounding us, and it is no wonder that so many of us end up lost to one form of addiction or another.

Being an artist isn’t easy, and I am not just talking about how hard it is to make the actual art. Just having the necessary combination of sensitivity and imagination can be quite the burden, and some of us turn to substance abuse in order to dull our sensitivity and quiet our demons for a while.

Myself, I have avoided life, and therefore I have avoided the sorts of stresses that turn us high strung artistic types to addiction. I am keenly aware of how easy it would be for me to fall into addiction, and so I am extremely paranoid about opening the door to it even the tiniest bit.

As a result, I have fewer bad habits than a lot of fat dudes my age. My main addiction is food, and even that is not so bad compared to others in my demographic because I am by no means averse to fresh fruit and vegetables and I have never eaten a lot of greasy foods.

If only I could kick this carb addiction, I would practically be a health nut.

Anyhow, I have realized recently that I really am kind of high strung. I don’t think of myself that way, but it’s true. I think of myself as all mellow and laid back, and that’s true to a large extent.

But when I look back over my life and the sheer amount of tension and stress I have felt in fairly normal circumstances,that does not paint the picture of a mellow dude.

So in some ways I am mellow and in other ways I am a tightly wound rubber band ready to snap. I think it is important for me to realize and accept this instead of pretending part of my personality just doesn’t exist.

Well, that’s it for my ramblings for today, folks. I will talk to you again tomorrow.

In the meantime, think happy thoughts.