Cool Playhouses

Every year, there is a competition at the Stanford Mall showing off some cool playhouses. SFGate has a couple of picts of them. Also on that note, here's some other insane playhouses:

• Barbara Butler: Great hand made kids houses
• Lilliput Play Homes: Very high quality prefab, large playhouses
• Web Urbanist: List of 10 Amazing Tree Houses: Plans, Pictures, Designs & Building Ideas
• Posh Tots: Nice over priced playhouse
• Treehouse Company: English company that makes great kids houses.
• Wood Manor: Nice wood kids houses
• Daniels Woodland: Theme company that makes cool tree houses on the side.
• Treehouse Design & Construction: A Northern California Tree House Makes Memories
• Treehouse Workshop: For kids and adults

Another good game

Yea! More cool "brain races" this time to the moon!
Here's a history of some of the coolest:

• DoT supported SunRayce (build a solar powered car and race it across the US) and World Solar Challenge, (do the same but race it across the Australian continent).
  
• Then there was the DARPA Grand Challenge: to build a car to race on its own
  
• The Ansari X Prize: Launch a reusable manned spacecraft
• And now the X Prize Foundation is starting the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize.

Got Phat Pipe?

PC Mag's Chloe Albanesius, has a writeup about the new US Gov Broadband Map being posted online.

Also today, the agency released stats from an Internet Usage Survey of 54,000 households, which found that 68 percent of households in the U.S. have broadband access, up from 63.5 percent last year.

The National Broadband Map will go live later today at www.broadbandmap.gov. It's a searchable database with more than 25 million records that show where broadband Internet service is available, the technology used to provide the service, the maximum advertised speeds of the service, and the names of the service providers.

Sterling Engine

I have a very cool toy Sterling Engine that I got from ThinkGeek. Fun to play with, but here’s an interesting write-up in Technology Review (via MIT) about:

A startup company [that] has developed a new type of engine that could generate electricity with the efficiency of a fuel cell, but which costs only about as much as an internal combustion engine. - [Friday, February 4, 2011 By Tyler Hamilton]