Saturday, August 27, 2005

Flower power?

20050814_thomasplassardReturning from Brest, Britany, France on 14 August last, I spent a little bit more than an hour with a hitchhiker, who turned out to be an extremely interesting and multifaceted person.
When I saw him waiting for someone to give him a ride, with his monocycle lying at his feet, I had a positive intuition... Go figure! So we started talking about his monocylce because I have a good friend who is painstakingly learning to ride one. So Thomas told me he was going back home after spending a few weeks with a Gypsy circus which happens to give shows that fully exploit the power of metaphors and of the subconscious (that's an interesting point too, because I am now working on a new type of training programme based on metaphors...) Anyway, Thomas is not an artist or at least not exclusively an artist. He is a physicist. He is also one of the people behind a French organization called "Roule ma fleur", which trains people around France on how to use vegetal oil instead of diesel to power their engines. It seems one needs only very limited changes to the engine of a car or other vehicle to be able to use sunflower oil (but it also works with other types of oil) as fuel. Given the rising price of crude oil these days, it might be interesting to examine more closely this type of options, especially since they also seem to provide solutions to the green-house effect that some developed and developing nations don't give a dime about.



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