EEStor announced a patent grant last week. Lots of folks have commented on it but it has the potential to be a significant change. An ultracapacitor that can hold the equivalent Kwh (52) as the Tesla battery pack weighing only 286lbs versus 992lbs for the Tesla. The other two dramatic changes are that the ultracapacitor looks to have a nearly unlimited duty life and more importantly can charge in less than 10 minutes.

Cost is still going to be an interesting question but it should scale down over scale and time, plus unlimited duty life may mean you can move it car to car. The interesting thing is that its relatively easy to build out the home side of the charging kit that uses an ultracapacitor sitting in the garage to quickly charge the car while the stationary one can recharge more slowly on a high voltage line. That system can also be scaled into the gas station infrastructure as well.

Now they only have to make it through the 1000's of other hurdles that can doom a new technology to failure.

I have to agree with a whole lot of folks smarter than me that this essay by Brad Delong is the best writing on this crisis so far. It confronts the key riddle - why did losing $2T of mortgage future payments lead to a destruction of $17T of wealth?

My only beef with Delong's analysis is that he doesn't factor in the behavioral economic response of the managers at loan companies competing with Fannie and Freddie. If Fannie and Freddie start underwriting toxic mortgages to follow the herd in a massively up, bubbling market, the economically rational thing for a prudent manager to do is to stop lending. However that requires making the very difficult call to shut down and lay people off at the peak of apparent profitability. It's very, very hard to see the second derivative of demand when its implications mean laying off everyone in the office during "good" times.

It hit me as I watched the trailer for the new Ghostbusters The Video Game; Ghostbusters was the first time that real nerds, dorks, and geeks became western or war movie style heroes. What an interesting foreshadow of having the techies save the world with technology.

Check it out:

The district court judge in NRA v. Chicago ruled today that the District Court was bound by the circuit precedent of Presser v. Illinois on the matter of incorporating the Second Amendment against the states.

That was not totally unexpected from this judge but likely wrong as a matter of law. On to the Appeals court with a strong potential that we may have a circuit split between the 9th Circuit and the 7th Circuit very quickly which tends to favor Supreme Court review.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals scheduled oral argument in Nordyke v. King for Thursday January 15, 2009. The argument will start at 1:30 PM in Courtroom 1, 3rd floor of the James R. Browning US Courthouse.

The address of the Court is:
United States Court of Appeals - 9th Circuit
95 Seventh Street
San Francisco, California 94103