So, this week I'll be combining my "good news" feature with some appropriate music, killing two birds with one stone, if you will.
First, for the good news, how about this, the development of a new, more improved method of harvesting the sun's energy:
Solar panels are becoming passé. Why put solar panels on top of building construction materials when you could just tap the power of the sun directly through the construction materials themselves?
Bloomberg reports on the rapid growth in building-integrated photovoltaics, or BIPV. These are solar power–harvesting cells that are incorporated into the walls, roofs, and windows of buildings — integrated seamlessly instead of being bolted onto a finished building as an apparent afterthought.
So, that's good, and it would be churlish of me, and totally in character, to wonder if the powers that be will find a way to make sure that it will be a very hot day in December (coming soon to a location near you) before these products are widely used.
And this is good too. I wrote before about a woman named Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, who ran the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ms Berlowitz ran into trouble not because the treated her underlings like dirt (which she did) but because she faked her Ph.D. The Boston Globe found her out, and we now have the good news that she's resigned. No doubt the staff is celebrating today, so we can celebrate with them. A source who should know tells me that while she's been out on leave (paid, of course) the formerly traumatized staff members have begun to do things like talk to each other. Okay, the cloud within this silver lining is that she's walking out with almost half a million dollars of benefits after having been overpaid for years, but still, let's look on the bright side, shall we?
Finally, for your musical edification, a song which tells us all to "smile". This song is apparently based on music that was played in the Chaplin movie Modern Times, so a lot of the youtube videos feature images of Charlie, along with this great rendition by Nat King Cole:
Good advice, but the music seems to be working at cross purposes to the lyrics, doesn't it? Still, a great song and fully in keeping with this feature's mission of finding some good out there at least once a week. I couldn’t, by the way, find a good version of this song with an actual video of the artist; not even Elvis’s (Costello, that is) version.
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