I’ve had this conversation so many times it’s painful. A friend calls me up from “you name it” city: Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and says, “I’m thinking about moving to Los Angeles (or SF, NY, etc) and I’d love to start interviewing. Let me know if you hear of anything interesting.”

I guess when I hear things like this I revert back to my shock jock instincts and say, “Don’t bother. If you’re committed to living in New York then move there. Otherwise you’re not serious and you’ll never get the right job so don’t bother.” Definitely gets shock value. At least I have their attention.

Why do I give this blunt advice?

As you explore the Green Economy Map and consider your green career options, keep the following points in mind.

1)The green economy is made up of over 50 industries and sectors. Each one is making concerted efforts to make their business practices greener, cleaner, and more sustainable.

The takeaway for you: To get a sense of where your skills may fit within the green economy, click on each segment of the Green Economy Map to discover which industries fall into which sector. Pay attention to the industries that look interesting to you.

Yesterday, the Air Force announced that its Waverider aircraft set the rec rd for hypersonic flight -- it reached Mach 6. Which is impressive.

But some other world records were also broken yesterday: Fastest Time to Name All James Bond Movies in Chronological Order (9.9 seconds). And Most Beer Bottles Balanced on Chi (12 bottles).

These records were featured on one of my favorite websites, the Universal Record Database . If you're not familiar, it's a Youtube-like version of world records, where anyone can upload their feats of human achievement -- no matter whether they're inspiring or absurd, athletic or intellectual.

Either you lead or follow and Chinese manufacturing houses have been chasing Apple’s designs for years. The iPad is just their latest victim. You can’t blame them, really. It’s the hottest device since the rotary phone.

We’ve seen a steady stream of clones flowing onto the web for months. Here’s the seven best starting with the just-found iPed.

Entrepreneurs’ quest for capital is never ending. Capturing this capital is part of the challenge of building a sustainably profitable company. So even after you pitched your business plan and outlined all the reasons why angel investors should invest in your company, obtaining angel financing isn't easy. So then, what is the best way to secure angel investment?

Start by networking. Seek out the right connections to potential investors by attending investment forums, small-business education programs, business-plan competitions, social gatherings and other events where individuals interested in inventing congregate. Most of these activities and events are in your backyard, so you’ll find them by staying local. It is appealing to go elsewhere where the grass (i.e., “money”) is perceived to be greener and more plentiful. With some exceptions, angel investors tend to invest close to home. They do so because they want to provide guidance, provide help when and where they can, and keep tabs on their investment.

The passengers at a station embarks onto to a connector cabin way before the train even arrives at the station. When the train arrives, it will not stop at all. It just slows down to pick up the connector cabin which will move with the train on the roof of the train.

While the train is still moving away from the station, those passengers will board the train from the connector cabin mounted on the train's roof. After fully unloading all its passengers, the cabin connector cabin will be moved to the back of the train so that the next batch of outgoing passengers who want to alight at the next station will board the connector cabin at the rear of the train roof.

What's the biggest problem facing battery startups?

It might be ambition.

To break into the battery business, startups have focused on designing, manufacturing and selling their own lithium-ion or rechargeable zinc batteries. Unfortunately, it's a high-risk, capital-intensive endeavor that requires scientific creativity and engineering breakthroughs. Most companies fail in the early stages.

And the ones that succeed face even a more daunting task: competing against giants like LG and Toshiba that have extensive R&D teams, worldwide sales channels, strong links with government officials, friends at car companies (they sell chips to automakers already), and factory capacity that could cover several football fields. Plus, they've got the financial resources to allow them to lose billions during temporary downturns.

Can people learn or be taught to be more creative? Creativity is valued in many areas of human activity, including scientific discovery, technological invention, artistic imagination, and social innovation. I know of no studies that show that creativity is teachable, but history provides some interesting suggestions about the habits of highly creative scientists.

In an article called "How to be a Successful Scientist", I compiled a set of suggestions about what contributed to the great success of leading scientific researchers. (The article can be found on the Web, and is reprinted in my book Hot Thought.) My sources were a group of psychologists, philosophers and historians at a conference on scientific thinking, as well as writings by three important scientists: Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Peter Medawar, and James Watson. Here is the resulting list, organized into 6 categories.

One of my blog readers – Boaz Fletcher – sent me an awesome video this morning from RSA Animate. It’s 11 minutes long and is a fascinating lecture by Dan Pink about The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I love the RSA Animate format – an artist animates the talk on a giant whiteboard in real time.

In this case Pink takes on the question of “Does More Money Motivate Higher Performance?” In the first few minutes he shows that while this works for tasks requiring mechanical skill, this does not work for tasks that require even rudimentary cognitive skill. In fact, in these cases there is an negative correlation between greater monetary reward and increased performance. It’s counterintuitive, but the talk illustrates it beautifully with several examples that will appeal to any technology entrepreneur.

The Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO), celebrated the funding of its 200th company. American Dynamics Flight Systems (ADFS) in Jessup, Md., which received $75,000 from TEDCO's NAVAIR Technology Insertion (NAVTI) program was lucky No. 200. Over the course of TEDCO's 12-year history, the organization has provided more than $8.5 million in funding to Maryland businesses through its signature Maryland Technology Transfer and Commercialization Fund (MTTCF), which makes up over 75 percent of TEDCO's portfolio.

"TEDCO's has done an outstanding job in making Maryland one of the premier locations for technology-based economic development, bringing high-skilled, high-paying jobs to Maryland," says Senator Benjamin L. Cardin. "Today, I join TEDCO as it features its 10 most innovative companies and celebrates the funding of its 200th company, American Dynamic Flight Systems. TEDCO understands the importance of nurturing high-tech companies with the capital they need to succeed so that we can ensure good paying jobs for Marylanders."

Whales are remarkably diverse, with 84 living species of dramatically different sizes and more than 400 other species that have gone extinct, including some that lived partly on land. Why are there so many whale species, with so much diversity in body size?

To answer that, UCLA evolutionary biologists and a colleague used molecular and computational techniques to look back 35 million years, when the ancestor of all living whales appeared, to analyze the evolutionary tempo of modern whale species and probe how fast whales changed their shape and body size. They have provided the first test of an old idea about why whales show such rich diversity.

Cities cover only 3% of the world's land mass, but they house 50% of the world's population, consume 75% of the world's resources and emit a corresponding proportion of greenhouse gases.

Statistics like that make a convincing case for green innovation.

But can planners, engineers, politicians and bureaucrats create a culture of learning and innovation focused on sustainability? There are daunting barriers to overcome - lack of time, funding, human resources, clarity, passion and cooperation, to name a few.