inkbluesky

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Sorry about that size, flickr automatically downsizes all the 1600s to 1024.

Lucy Liu (Lucy Alexis Liu,born December 2, 1968) personal info from Wikipedia,

Although Liu is not married, rumour has linked her with George Clooney. Recently, there was news that she is engaged to a New York playwright, Zach Helm. The engagement has been cancelled and she is single. Regarding this relationship status, she told the Telegraph, “It’s kind of sad because it gets lonely, but I have too much else going on.”

With her parents’ work ethic, Liu continued, “I’m always multitasking, doing 10 things at once.” She is fluent in Mandarin and Italian, studies French and Japanese, rock climbs, practices martial arts, skis, plays the accordian, and makes collages, having done several gallery exhibitions.

In 2005, Liu was appointed a U.S. Fund for UNICEF Ambassador.

Early in 2006, Liu received an Asian Excellence Award for Visibilty, since she is the most well-known and visible Asian American in the media today.

In 2001, Liu was the spokesperson for the Lee National Denim Day fundraiser which raises millions of dollars for breast cancer research and education.

lucy liu portrait by c. smith

Ethanol war brewing

I’m all for innovation and the idea struck me years ago before ethanol’s current popular culture wave riding, was that it is difficult to imagine ethanol’s energy effectiveness considering all the energy that goes into producing it, from the article

First of all, consider corn - which, thanks to the farm lobby and the importance of Iowa in presidential politics, is the source of nearly all the ethanol in the US. It has the most government subsidies, and is the form of the fuel that Richard Branson says he will invest in, and market, to the tune of $400 million. Last month, Kleiner Perkins – the VC firm where Doerr and Khosla are partners, and which brought us Amazon.com and Google - invested in Altra, a Los Angeles-based corn ethanol company.

Corn has the advantage of being planted in the ground now. But it has one vast economical disadvantage: Corn, according to a much-cited Cornell study, takes more energy to grow, harvest, transport and refine than you get out of it at the pump. The Department of Energy is more generous, putting the ratio of energy in to energy out at 1 to 1.4. Whatever the exact numbers, the costs grow considerably for those of us living in coastal states, so far away from the amber waves of grain in the heartland.

So we have 1.4 units of energy to produce 1 unit of energy. Energy straight from corn isn’t going to cut it, especially if you live outside the mid-america farm belt.

So where is the better corn alternative? Step forward, cellulosic ethanol. This is the kind of ethanol that’s produced from any part of a plant that you don’t eat - straw, stalks, corn husks. All of that waste is rich in cellulose, which, in theory, can be converted into sugar, and then ethanol.

Cellulosic ethanol has more than its fair share of eager investors. Last month Goldman Sachs put $27 million into a Canadian company called Iogen, which wants to produce ethanol from switchgrass, a perennial grass that’s cheap to grow. Iogen is building the world’s first cellulose-to-ethanol factory.

Still not there yet as this process depends on some research that will be a few more years in the pipeline. Enzymes are needed to help with the processing. Once all that is worked out guess who is at the end of the pipe waiting for the payout.

So keep your eye on Craig Venter, the scientist who helped map the human genome. His latest venture, Synthetic Genomics, is using $31 million in venture-capital funding to make genetically modified plants and plant-eating enzymes. Such an ambitious, DNA-level project will take a lot longer than three years.

And by then, Bill Gates’ bet may prove to be the smartest of all. Microsoft’s chairman, who will step down from his day-to-day role at the company in a couple of years, has bought 25 percent of Pacific Ethanol, a Fresno, Calif. company that is planning to build dozens of ethanol refineries in the U.S.

Those refineries will be easy to adapt to whichever ethanol production method ultimately wins out. That could put Gates in a familiar spot – as the gatekeeper to a must-have product.

Will we then have to buy a firewall for our cars and run a virus scan everyday. Good luck to Bill, new fuels, new technologies, less dependence on foreign oil all sounds like a winner.

Its not much of a secret that once you make that first million that unless you’re a total moron it is relatively easy to eventually invest your way into another million. Multiply that rule of thumb by a hundred if you’re a billionaire. What is most interesting to me is how somebody starts with what seems like a wacky idea and turns it into gold, What a Croc! How three guys are turning an outrageous shoe fad into something that just might last.

Lyndon “Duke” Hanson knew he and his partners had hit on something big when the fire marshal at the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, boat show started yelling that the crowd gathered around their Crocs’ shoe booth was blocking the aisles. Hanson was tossing pairs of his company’s colorful boating shoes at passersby, asking them to slip them on: “People would say, ‘Man, those are ugly,’ and we would say, ‘You just got to try them on.’ “

They did, and Hanson sold 1,000 pairs in three days.

That was in late 2002. Last year, Crocs sold 6 million pairs of their spectacularly, well, different-looking casual shoes to teenagers, grandmothers, anyone. The company, based in Niwot, Colorado, outside of Boulder, earned $17 million on sales of $108.6 million. And this February, it raised $239 million in the largest footwear initial public offering ever, suddenly realizing a market value of $1.09 billion.