Lake to South Lake Tahoe on Saturday. The route included everything from bike paths to rolling hills to a LONG climb that led to a screaming fast downhill. Super fun. We stayed in an inexpensive motel in south lake tahoe…. then walked 6 miles roundtrip to get dinner. A great night of rest, and we woke sunday, and got back on the bike. A fun ten miles or so of backpath through the woods led to the challenging climb up to the Emeral Bay overlook. We were working hard, for sure, but I was stoked when we got to the top. A rest, a downhill, and another climb.  Mostling rolling back to the car. 35 miles on Sunday, and we back at the car and on our way home. one of my favorite bike rides ever. Loving the tandem, and love that I have a wonderful wife to share it with.

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"Yesterday it emerged that a farmer in his thirties in Spain who accidentally shot away the lower part of his face has become the first person to receive an entire face transplant. According to yesterday's press conference, he is already recovering well. Previously, he could only breathe and eat through tubes. Now he is expected to begin relearning how to talk, eat, smile and laugh within weeks." This didn't involve simply placing a mask of skin over what was there, which is how I've always imagined such procedures. Keep reading:

"In a 24-hour operation, a team of 30 surgeons at the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain, led by surgeon Joan Pere Barret, started by removing what remained of the man's face - skin, veins and arteries - leaving just his eyeballs and tongue.

"The team then replaced this with practically the entire face of a dead donor, including all the skin, muscles and nerves, the entire nose, the lips, palate, all the teeth, the cheekbones and the entire lower jaw. These were grafted by microsurgery to what remained of the patient's own face, and the blood supply reconnected. In the final part of the operation, the surgeons transplanted bones and connecting nerves to the patient's own face."

In other words, I could be whole again. I have a great deal more remaining bone and tissue than the farmer had, although my mouth droops because of the removal of the mandible during cancer surgery. Both that surgery and two later ones were planned to restore my appearance to something close to normal. At first it was hoped my drinking, speaking and talking would return, for I still have my tongue and the necessary inventory in my throat. All three surgeries failed, leaving me as I am today, damaged but happy and productive. And in fact the surgery was a great success, because I appear to be cancer-free. Why should I complain?

Still...what if I had this big surgery? I'd need to undergo rehabilitation to learn to speak again, but a Cleveland doctor says one of her face transplant patients, after two years, "can say all her vowels and has such normal sensation in her face that she can feel a kiss." This is encouraging. After the day in first grade when Sister Ambroisetta taught us to chant "A, E, I, O, U...and sometimes Y," I never thought the day would come when I couldn't say my vowels. But I can't, and don't bother asking me about my consonants.

What if I could go to Spain and return with a complete face? If you passed me on the street, you might mistake me for a normal man. Small children would no longer stare, and ask their mommies about me.

Actually, the children, I might miss. These days children look at me frankly, with natural curiosity. I smile and wave, and they often smile and wave back. I'm not your everyday face. I provide entertainment value. I believe our society has grown more tolerant of disabilities; never once has a mother snatched the child away from such a sight as me. Usually we adults just nod understandingly.

All the same, I don't have any desire for a face transplant. I knew that even while I was still reading the New Scientist article. I knew it for so many different reasons that it was hard to sort them out. Let's set aside medical reasons, and assume for the sake of argument that the operation would be a success. I still don't want one.

I feel it would be an act of disloyalty to my own face. I have lived with it so long. In adolescence I studied it with fierce concentration in the mirror, convinced my nose was too long, my lips too fat, and my zits would colonize all available facial skin. Later, I saw it idealized in one of those unreal high school graduation pictures. Later still, recorded in states of hilarity during long nights of celebration and days with the friends of a lifetime. I saw my hair grow long and then longer. I saw sideburns appear and retreat. Twice I saw the beginnings of a beard and shaved it off. I saw it fatter and thinner. Siskel told me I had so many double chins I needed a bookmark to find my mouth, but by a gift of nature my chins never got really out of control. I saw my face grow smaller with diet and exercise. I saw it for the last time on the night before surgery, when I looked in a mirror and took this photograph.

For better or worse, that was my face, and today most of it remains. After a face transplant it would be somebody else's face. I fear something within me might recoil at the sight. Oh, I have no squeamishness about wearing another man's face after he has no need of it; I support transplants of all sorts, and when I die I hope my poor organs can be of use to someone. I wish happiness to the farmer in Spain, the woman in Ohio, and Steve Jobs with his new liver. I was tremendously moved to learn Robert Altman had lived for more than 10 years with a transplanted heart. Think of the films he was able to make, the joy he was able to bring. All of that is good. If I should someday need a heart or liver, I will seek one. But this face, however imperfect, is still mine. I own it. I look out of it. I'm rather fond of it.

For some time after taking that "final photo" of myself, I avoided looking in mirrors. I knew the first operation had gotten the cancer but the reconstruction had failed. I vaguely knew what I must look like, but I didn't want to know. I was still inside, right here, in my head looking out, and in my mind I still had the same face. I could even feel sensations in places I no longer possessed--the "ghost limb" phenomenon.

How did I know I'm in my head? How do any of us know? That's where my brain lives, and where my eyes sit. I am not in my chest, my hand, or my foot. I live in here, and operate all the rest like Iron Man. And in here, I still imagine the same face, no matter what you see.

Of course eventually I looked in mirrors, and grew to accept my new appearance. After the first surgery it looked...well, better than it does now. After the second surgery, Chaz said I looked pretty good. There was a vein running beneath my chin that carried a blood supply from one side of the jaw to the other. The surgeon showed my nurses a simple way to listen to the vein. If it was thrumming, it was working. It thrummed for several days. I could listen. Then it thrummed no more. The transplant broke down and was removed.

For the third surgery, I went to a famous man at a famous hospital in Houston. He labored for hours. My memory was cloudy after my surgeries, but a few days later I clearly remember Chaz holding up a mirror so I could see what looked like an acceptable version of myself. A specialist at the hospital had studied my tongue, professed herself satisfied with its motion, and told me I might even talk again. Things were looking up.

That surgery failed, too. They all failed, I believe, because of radiation damage before the first one. I sensed that my surgeons on all three procedures were personally saddened by the outcomes. I was not just a case for them. Microsurgery is painstaking, long and unimaginably difficult. I imagine the surgeon invests so much of his skill in the process that when a procedure fails, he mourns. I never thought it was their fault.

I've written before about how I've come to terms with my appearance. The best thing that happened to me was a full-page photo in Esquire, showing exactly how I look today. No point in denying it. No way to hide it. Better for it to be out there. You don't like it, that's your problem. I'm happy I don't look worse. I made a simple decision to just get on with life. I was a writer, so I was lucky. There was no question I would continue reviewing movies. And when I started writing this blog, it gave me even more focus, feedback, satisfaction. I plunged into it with sometimes desperate concentration. I wrote, therefore I lived. Another surgical attempt was proposed, but I said no. Enough is enough. I would look the way I looked, and express myself in print, and I would be content.

But then something came up. After the end of my involvement with "At the Movies," Chaz and I began planning to produce a new movie review program, true to the original values of Siskel and Ebert. We are more deeply involved in that than ever, which is all I want to say about it. Obviously I couldn't be a regular in the balcony. The show will feature other critics. Yet I wanted to be associated in some way. Cereproc, the software company in Edinburgh, is creating a computer voice out of original voice recordings of mine. That's coming along nicely. I began thinking I could perhaps do a segment on the show, a commentary or a DVD review. Maybe a film festival report. Maybe podcasts.

Sure I could, but how would I look? Being realistic, I believe TV viewers have a limited eagerness to gaze upon my face. One day Good Doctor Pelzer introduced me to Dr. David J. Reisberg, a professor of craniofacial medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He proposed a prosthesis that would improve the appearance of my face. I told him, "Hell, Doc, everybody knows it's messed up. I could just wear a false beard." He smiled, said he recommended moving in another direction, and took a 3D photograph of my face. This was a rare case where 2D would not have been preferable.

Then he introduced me to David Rotter, orthotic and prosthetic director of Scheck & Siress, a company specializing in prostheses. David designed a device intended to compensate for my missing parts, and called in Julie Jordan Brown, a Milwaukee anaplastologist. I learned some new words during this adventure. They made a mold of my face and she began work as a sculptor, shaping a prosthesis which eventually came in two versions, firmer silicone and softer silicone. The two of them spent hours, working from old photos and a bust of myself an art student once made as a class project. Julie and David were working together as artists. They both had great skill and empathy. In the middle of this period, David flew to Haiti to fit some prosthetic limbs for children who had lost theirs.

In theory their prosthesis will blend with my face, and people won't easily detect it. I won't wear it all the time, but it will be useful for the television show. I'd rather viewers were thinking about my opinions than my chin. &nbsp &nbsp

&nbsp &nbsp

Here is the New Scientist article.

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Quickly looking at my home town of Charlotte, NC, this morning, you can see a few different colored lines.  The dark lines seem to be the bike paths or greenways in the area and the dotted lines are what I think to be bike friendly roads. Anyone who has ever tried to bike across San Francisco knows the value of a good bike map in helping to avoid 200-foot hills and city streets that behave more like freeways. Google Maps users have created their own bike maps for cities like New York and Minneapolis, but Google itself hadn’t taken that step until now. Google obtained much of its data from the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy in putting together the maps, and will have detailed information on bike routes in 150 U.S. cities as of Tuesday night’s launch, said Shannon Guymon, Google Maps product manager. Bikers will be able to find bike-only paths, bike lanes on city streets, and bike-friendly streets when searching for directions using the tool. Google will also include an estimated travel time alongside the results that factor in hills and fatigue. Source : CNet.com Learn more at http://maps.google.com/biking and Google Maps “Bike There.”

Catch More Light, Faster, Faster Okay, so that's easy enough: As an axiom, larger photodiodes result in more light sensitivity. (So with the 1D Mark IV, Canon kept the same photodiode size, but the shrunk the rest of the pixel to fit more of them on the same-size chip as its predecessor). There's more to an image sensor than simply photosites, though, which is why I called up Dr. Peter B. Catrysse from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. The "ideal pixel," he says, is flat—just an area that collects light—nearly bare silicon. But even at a basic level, a photodiode sits below layers of other stuff: a micro lens (which directs light onto the photodiode), a color filter (necessary, 'cause image sensors are in fact color blind) and then a layer of gunk, like wiring. So one way manufacturers are improving sensors is by trying to make all of that as thin as possible—we're talking hundreds of nanometers—so more light gets through. One major way that's happening, he says, is with back-illuminated sensors, which move the wiring to the back-side of the silicon substrate, as illustrated in this diagram by Sony. It's currently still more expensive to make sensors this way, but since more light's getting through, you can use smaller pixels (and have more of them). In your basic image sensor construction, there's an array of microlenses sitting above the photosites to direct light into them. Previously, you had gaps between the microlenses, which meant you had light falling through that wasn't being directed onto the actually light-sensitive parts of the sensor. Canon and Nikon have created gapless microlenses, so more of the light falling onto the sensor is directed into the diode, and not wasted. If you must persist with the bucket metaphor, think of it as putting a larger funnel over the bucket, one that can grab more because it has a wider mouth. Here's a shot of gapless microlens architecture: A chief reason to gather as much light as possible is to bring up your signal-to-noise ratio, which is the province of true digital imaging nerds. Anyways, there are several different sources and kinds of noise. Worth knowing is "photon shot" or just "shot" noise, which occurs because the stream of photons hitting the image sensor aren't perfectly consistent in their timing; there's "read" noise, which is inherent to image sensors; and "dark current" noise, which is basically stray electrons striking the sensor that aren't generated by visible light—they're often caused by heat. Taken with a Nikon D3s at ISO 102,400 Back in the day, when people shot photographs on this stuff called film, they actually bought it according to its light sensitivity, expressed as an ISO speed. (A standard set by the International Organization for Standardization, confusingly aka ISO. The film speed standard is ISO 5800:1987.) With digital cameras, you also can tell your camera how sensitive to light it should be using ISO, which is supposed to be equivalent to the film standard. The thing is, whether you're shooting at ISO 100 or ISO 1600, the same number of photons hit your sensor—you're just boosting the signal from the sensor, and along with it, all the noise that was picked up on the way. If you've got more signal to work with—like in a camera whose sensor has some fat photon-collecting pixels, you get a higher signal-to-noise ratio when you crank it up, which is one reason a photo taken D3 at ISO 6400 looks way better than one from a teeny point-and-shoot, and why a 1D Mark IV or D3s can even think about shooting at an ISO of over 100,000, like the photo above. (Another reason is that a 1D Mark IV-level camera possesses vastly superior image processing, with faster processors that can crunch complex algorithms to help reduce noise.) Sensor Shake and Bake There are two kinds of image sensors that most digital cameras use today: CCD (charged-couple device) sensors and CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) sensors, which are actually a kind of active-pixel sensor, but the way they're made have become a shorthand name. "Fundamentally, at least physics-wise, they work exactly the same," says Dr. Catrysse, so one's not intrinsically more awesome than the other. CCD sensors are the more mature imaging tech, so for a long time, they tended to be better, but now CMOS sensors are taking over, having almost completely crowded them out of cellphones and high-end DSLRs (Leica's M9 is an exception)—and Dr. Catrysse suspects the last place for CCD sensors is going to be in niche scientific applications. A "CMOS sensor" is one that's made using the CMOS process, the way you make all kinds of integrated circuits—you know, stuff like CPUs, GPUs and RAM—so they're actually cheaper to make than CCD sensors. (The cheap-to-make aspect is why they've been the sensor of choice in cameraphones, and conversely, DSLRs with huge chips.) And, unlike a CCD sensor, which has to move all of the electrons off of the chip to run them through an analog-to-digital converter, with a CMOS sensor, all of that happens on the same integrated chip. So they're faster, and they use less power. Something to think about as well: Because they're made pretty much the same way as any other semiconductor, CMOS sensors progress along with advances in semiconductor manufacturing. Smaller transistors allow for more circuits in a pixel and the potential to remove more noise at the source, says Dr. Catrysse, bringing us closer to fundamental physical limits, like photon noise. And then we're talking about controlling light at the nanoscale. The Point We've reached, in many ways, a point of megapixel fatigue: They're not as valuable, or even as buzzy as they used to be. Not many of us print billboard-sized images. But the technology continues to progress—more refined sensors, smarter image processors, sharper glass—and the camera industry needs something to sell us every year. But that's not entirely a bad thing. Our friend and badass war photographer Teru Kuwayama says that while "increasing megapixel counts are mostly just a pain in the ass, unless you happen to be in the hard drive or memory card business, skyrocketing ISOs on the other hand, are a quantum leap, opening up a time-space dimension that didn't exist for previous generations of photographers. I'd happily trade half the megapixels for twice the light sensitivity." Better images, not just bigger images. That's the promise of this massive shift. The clouds to this silver lining are that by next year, ISO speeds will likely be the headline, easy-to-digest spec for consumers. And like any other spec, just because the ISO ratings go higher doesn't mean low-light performance will be better. Remember, "more" isn't more better. Still something you wanna know? Send questions about ISO, isometric exercise or isolation here with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

While people, of course, do care about price, they care even more about how products give meaning to their lives. Even when they are pressed financially, they do not want to feel poor. So the challenge for companies is to cut costs without cutting meaning.

One of the most successful products to do this was the Panda, a three-door hatchback city car that Fiat created in response to the oil shocks of the 1970s and the economic downturn that followed. The Panda was conceived as a "no frills, big thrills" rugged car. Its backseat was a cloth rectangle stretched between two tubes that could be folded to hold a baby or fragile parcels, unfolded flat to make a bed-sized mattress, or removed, rolled up, and stored in a slot carved out of the floor behind the front seats to create a cargo bay.

The Panda's design not only allowed it to be assembled rapidly and inexpensively but also gave it a distinctive personality: According to Fiat's market analyses, only 38% of customers considered price a significant reason for buying a Panda. Most wanted a rugged, all-terrain, lighthearted car; being cheap was just an essential part of its "no frills, big thrills" concept.

Its meaning and identity allowed the Panda to remain popular long after the economy recovered. While competing cars lasted an average of 8.5 years, the Panda endured for 23. During that time, Fiat made only minor changes to the model and sold 4.5 million worldwide, with only minor changes. It was one of the most profitable cars ever produced.

Some other companies are masters at creating products that are good-enough value price-wise, but don't daily remind their owners that they couldn't afford to buy more expensive alternatives. For example, people love to buy IKEA furniture because of its modern, clever design, and Swatch watches because they can be used as fashion accessories. They use Skype not only because it provides a a free alternative to traditional phone calls but also because its multimedia tools, which include video calls, chats, and file sharing, allow them to stay intimately connected with friends in faraway places.

In these hard times, remember that people still love meaningful things. Do not just design to cost. Design to mean.

Roberto Verganti is the author of Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating what Things Mean. Professor of the management of innovation at Politecnico di Milano and a member of the board of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, he has served as an executive advisor, coach, and educator at a variety of firms, including Ferrari, Ducati, Whirlpool, Xerox, Samsung, Hewlett-Packard, Barilla, Nestlè, STMicroelectronics, and Intuit.

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Funding incentives range from $10,000 to $45,000 and each vehicle purchaser, regardless of the size of their fleet, is limited to a maximum of 100 vouchers. The program, which cuts about half the cost of purchasing road-ready hybrid trucks and buses, is expected to put up to 800 vehicles on the road on a first-come, first-served basis. ARB created the financial incentive program from AB 118 funding to help Californians purchase cleaner, but more costly hybrid vehicles.

Hybrid vehicle technology can reduce truck and bus emissions by 20 to 50 percent, including gases that contribute to global warming. Hybrid vehicles also reduce smog-forming emissions while saving vehicle owners money in reduced fuel costs.

ARB has partnered with CALSTART to administer the program. Eligibility is based on the purchase of selected hybrid vehicles and fleet owners must agree to register and operate the vehicle in California for three years. Dealers, manufactures and fleet owners can learn more about the program at californiahvip.org.

The program will also help achieve the goals of the state’s Climate Change Scoping Plan that requires California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020 with clean alternative fuels. Transportation accounts for 40% of the total emissions of climate changing gases.

Smog has been known to exacerbate a variety of cardiovascular and respiratory conditions such as heart disease and asthma, and diesel particulate matter was listed as toxic in 1998. Diesel particulate matter contains a variety of harmful gases and over 40 other known cancer-causing substances, linking it to premature death, cancer and other health problems.