Bruce Schneier says have your cake and eat it too. As Armchair Anarchist pointed out in a recent post, paper is a mature voting technology. I countered in the comments that electronic voting machines have a lot going for them (although they’re not perfect). Schneier suggests in a column for Forbes that you get the best of both worlds by using machines to generate paper ballots.

If Baghdad is an indication, failed states will see macabre innovation in the bureaucracy of death. Mobile morgues and tattooed dog tags. [digg]

William McDonough’s proposed green skyscraper deliberately emulates a tree: it, “makes oxygen, distills water, produces energy and changes with the seasons.” Nothing in this design is impossible, it’s “state of the shelf,” (in other words, the technology exists but might be too expensive for practicality).

The Technology Review reports that systems for concentrating and harnessing solar power are becoming cheaper. Fresnel lenses and mirrors allow a solar plant to take up less real estate, and more efficient silicon wafers turn more of the captured sunlight into power. [slashdot]

Lilt looks like a righteous application: it uses output from the ambient light and sudden motion sensors on recent Apple laptops to trigger user-defined scripts. With something like Lilt, interacting with your laptop can be a lot more physically demonstrative than typing. Tilt, shake and roll. Makes me want to upgrade this aging PowerBook G4. [lifehacker]