Simon Fairlie, quoted on Transition culture, makes a good point.  We are aspiring to triple glazed, passively heated homes where air is circulated via a heat exchanger.  This is to sustain our current love of indoor environments at 19degC (an increase by 5 degrees over 10 years).  Which is good for old people, but is…

Cranes loom on Paradise street Train follows train Sandwiches cold in plastic Clothes cling thickly on skin The sound of my own thoughts is loud in my head I'm away from home without you Silent messages go back and forth From another boardroom, another pen i turn moments into memories Like sea glass to show…

Which is the database associated with the ID card system.  Have just read a lengthy, pretty technical document pointing out problems with the system.  To summarize: The Data protection act is all very well, but it didn't envisage one big database – it assumes lots of different databases for different purposes. In any case, Government…

What to do? I don't have a local Green candidate, and I'm pretty unhappy about detention of asylum seekers, ID cards, Trident, nuclear power, the M74 extension, megacasinos… Labour says they will invest in Life Sciences and other key industries. They will raise the school leaving age to 18yr, unless someone goes into a recognized…

So what's the deal? We have a nuclear missile system that is designed by, manufactured by the US. Aldermaston, which produces the warheads, is co-managed by Lockheed. The submarine maintenance base at Plymouth is 51% owned by Halliburton. So we're hardly talking an independent deterrent here. The capital cost for replacing trident will be £20…

The idea that in the next 50 years we will hit the maximum oil production rate, and after that it's all downhill.  Calculations (guesses) about total oil resources vary from 1-2 trillion barrels.  That's a big difference if you consider that an extra trillion barrels would keep the world economy ticking over for another few…

I'm not shy to admit when my intellectual influences derive from TV.  JB wrote Simulacra and Simulation, the book that appears in the Matrix (hiding place for Neo's minidiscs), about "hyperreality" -  the world of media driven images and symbols that actually drowns out reality.  The film also quoted him: "Welcome to the desert of…

  There were never strawberrieslike the ones we hadthat sultry afternoonsitting on the stepof the open french windowfacing each otheryour knees held in minethe blue plates in our lapsthe strawberries glisteningin the hot sunlightwe dipped them in sugarlooking at each othernot hurrying the feastfor one to comethe empty plateslaid on the stone togetherwith the two…

A weird story, kind of topical. Easter is the first weekend after the first full moon after the spring equinox.  In the early days of Christianity, deciding which was the right weekend was tricky and contentious.  So it was eventually agreed on by the Synod at Whitby in the 7th century. This was the time…

OK, so I didn't who this guy was but interesting (courtesy of Pa) – Born in Glasgow, trained as a chemist, during the war intercepted German communication about a chemical toxic to insects but not to humans – he called it DDT, and distributed it to the armed forces to kill mosquitoes and lice.Then helped…