On Yer Bike
You’ve got to love the Green Prarty. Today’s bicycling launch of their election campaign is both as eccentric as you’d expect and a very good way of showing up the waste of the main parties.
Technorati tag: Cycling, Politics, Green Party
Daily archives: April 7, 2005
Solar Campus
A new building on Napier University’s Merchiston Campus is to have solar panels installed on one wall that will power 80 of the building’s 500 PCs and sell electricity to the grid on the days the building is empty.The University is also going to be using the array to research the efficiency and effectiveness of the panels.
Technorati tag: Solar Power, Green Building
Pub Heaven
On the lookout for affiliate schemes that fit with Spinneyhead’s outlook, I found this-
It’s quite a new site, whilst a lot of pubs are listed (187 for Manchester, far from comprehensive, but still a healthy number) many haven’t been reviewed. If you find your local and want to have your say, they’ll put you in the monthly prize draw.
Technorati tag: Affiliates, Pubs
Click Through
Most popular Amazon products in the first quarter, with clicks.
Heathers 39
Gran Turismo 4 (PS2) 34
9 Songs 2004 29
Sony PSP Handheld Console 19
Sure Thing Special Edition (REGION 1) (NTSC) 17
Stargate S.G -1: Season 1 1997 16
Catwoman 14
Sony DCR-VX2100E Professional Digital Camcorder 13
Lone Wolf And Cub 13
In the Beginning…Was the Command Line 13
Items purchased from Amazon
Books
AS Accounting for AQA
Advanced Accounting for A2
Dark Moon
Earth, Air, Fire and Custard
Introducing Accounting for AS
Ironhand’s Daughter (The Hawk Queen)
Last Sword of Power (The Stones of Power Sequence)
Licensed to Sell: The History and Heritage of the Public House
Rambling and Youth Hostelling (Know the Game S)
Computer & Video Games
Medieval: Total War
DVD
Complete Superman Collection [4 Discs] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
Dr. Feelgood – Going Back Home [1975]
Fred Dibnah – Built In Britain
Music
Absolution
Technorati tag: Amazon
Fixie
The strange allure of the fixed gear bike. I’m half tempted by a single-speed, but I’d have to have a freewheel on it.
Technorati tag: Cycling
Smarter than Smart
The G-Wiz promises to be the greenest car to run in the UK. Charge it up overnight for daily running costs as low as £1.64. You don’t even need to worry that the electricity used is unsound, the company promises to carbon balance the production, shipping and first 16,000 miles of running. Whilst being carbon neutral in your daily transport you can campaign for more green electricity to charge it in its twilight years.
I might even forgive the school run if this is what the mums were turning up in.
via Treehugger
Technorati tag: Electric car, Transport
Compost
Casa Spinneyhead still throws away a lot of perfectly good composting material, so I’m looking at ways to utilise it.
Hippyshopper recommends wormeries, but I’m working on a budget. Recyclemore.co.uk has cheaper options. The Community Composting Network has resources if I wanted to get my neighbours to muck in. Allegedly the council has a scheme where I can get cheap compost boxes, but the number on the website has been disconnected, so that’s not much use. They do run the Kerb it green waste recycling service, but we’re obviously not in any of the chosen pilot areas.
To conclude- it’s off to B&Q I go!
UpdateJeff pointed me to this easy DIY wormery, and I found the Green Cone, designed to speed up the composting through solar heating and insulation and feed the nutrients direct into your soil.
Technorati tag: Compost
Toward the Carnot limit
The Carnot Limit is the maximum efficiency possible for a heat engine. Until now thermoelectric devices have only had an efficiency of 15% of the Carnot limit. However, research with nanostructured materials will allow a new generation of thermoelectric devices to operate nearer to the limit, opening up a whole range potential uses from silent computer cooling to geothermal power.
Technorati tag: Heat Engine
CCL
The Climate Change Levy (Fuel Use and Recycling Processes) Regulations 2005. I’m going to go back and digest this later.
Technorati tag: Climate Change
Solar Campus
A new building on Napier University’s Merchiston Campus is to have solar panels installed on one wall that will power 80 of the building’s 500 PCs and sell electricity to the grid on the days the building is empty.The University is also going to be using the array to research the efficiency and effectiveness of the panels.
Technorati tag: Solar Power, Green Building
Police State
Cambridge, UK (PRWEB) April 7, 2005 — Much of the evidence cited in the report was never supposed to have seen the light of day. Documents from the Soviet archives reveal that prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, members of the Trilateral Commission � Rockefeller, Kissinger, Nakasone, and Giscard d’Estaing – met secretly with Gorbachev to propose a European superstate that would stretch from the Atlantic to the Urals.
In 2003, Congressman Dave Weldon obtained via a freedom of information request, the minutes of a secret Centers for Disease Control conference. They revealed that in February 2000, Dr. Thomas Verstraeten produced an analysis of the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink that showed a risk of autism 2.48 times greater for infants who were injected with the largest amount of thimerosal, a mercury based vaccine preservative. The delegates agreed that the findings should be kept secret and debated how they could manipulate the data to conceal the association.
Thankfully, it is becoming much easier to demonstrate and communicate both the existence of this international cartel and the cumulative toxicity of its various activities. With links to hundreds of reputable online sources, The Police State Road Map is a user-friendly navigational aid that connects little known facts and apparently disparate trends.
-Policestateplanning.com
Technorati tag: Terror, Police State
You got an ology? You're a scientist!
Scientists on the most important things people should know about science.
Richard Dawkins Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at the University of Oxford, and a science writer and broadcaster
I wish everyone understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of “design”. The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. Darwinian natural selection, although it involves no true design at all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.
…
Antony Hoare Senior researcher at Microsoft Corporation
I would teach the world that scientists start by trying very hard to disprove what they hope is true. When they fail, they have a good reason for believing what they hope is true, and can even convince others of its truth. A scientist always acknowledges the possibility of error, and is less likely to be mistaken than one who always claims to be right.
Technorati tag: Science
Waterworld
CLIMSystems of New Zealand have released SimCLIM, a program that will simulate sea level changes at various scales. From the press release-
CLIMsystems Ltd., Hamilton, New Zealand (PRWEB) April 7, 2005 — A new software package has just been released on the World Wide Web that enables coastal zone managers, coastal zone property owners and any other people or organisations interested in coastal zone issues to create scenarios of future sea-level change at global, regional and local scales. The SimCLIM Sea-Level Scenario Generator software, found at http://www.climsystems.com/site/home/, provides an easy-to-navigate windows platform for creating a wide range of sea-level change scenarios using the latest scientific knowledge. The software is unique as it is the first of its type to provide users with the capacity to create scenarios of future sea-level anywhere in the world that take into account global, regional and local components of change.
I’m going to use it to see what conditions would result in a beach on my doorstep, but it will have serioususes for coastal inhabitants and the people who manage our coastlines.
Technorati tag: Sea Levels, Global Warming
Discontinuous Infill
Wanda Lust has linked to Discontinuous Infill, which is cool. If you don’t know what DI is then pop over to the page dedicated to it and check it out. The e-zine can be downloaded for $2.50 using BitPass or you can buy the CD for �2.50 and get the added bonus of free Creative Commons licenced high res copies of the images to use in your own projects.
Technorati tag: Discontinuous Infill