Daily archives: October 9, 2008

Tweets today

This entry was posted in Spinneyhead Twitter on by

22:31 Blog: Tweets today tinyurl.com/52owy5 #

00:58 Book idea- Not Quite The End Of The World. Apocalyptic cliches reimagined as positive events. #

14:31 Blog: It’s a Lego zombie apocalypse! tinyurl.com/4s57fa #

15:00 Save the World: Make way for the organic battery tinyurl.com/49jjoq #

18:04 Save the World: British Waterways gets into the energy business tinyurl.com/4eeze5 #

18:24 @SkippyUK The Daily Mail is an awful paper, but occasionally it has an interesting story. And the readers are entertainingly reactionary. #

18:34 Blog: I, for one, welcome our new Stasi overlords tinyurl.com/52efv2 #

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I, for one, welcome our new Stasi overlords

This entry was posted in politics Surveillance society on by

I’ve just started reading Stasiland, so Charles Stross’s post title- The sound of Erich Honnecker, wanking furiously in his grave– was a little bit more immediate. Stross connects the dots on the Government’s misplaced desire for a “panopticon singularity” where they’ll be able to spy on everything and know nothing.

The usual argument is that those who aren’t criminals have nothing to fear from Big Data. The truth is quite the opposite- the innocent have more to fear than the guilty. They run the risk of being harassed and even jailed because of corrupt data, badly input data, incomplete data, maliciously edited data, bad data capture, poorly defined search terms and incompetence at all the levels of data collection and analysis. All the guilty person has to worry about is getting caught.

On the other hand, I may not have to worry about any of this. They may simply lock me up for putting naughty pictures onto the Internet.

It’s a Lego zombie apocalypse!

This entry was posted in Lego zombies on by

BrickCon 2008, a Seattle get together of Lego fans, had one large display dedicated to the coming zombie apocalypse.

See the whole set on Flickr.

via io9

Make way for the organic battery

This entry was posted in battery Fuel cell pollution technology on by

Laccase, an enzyme produced by certain woodland fungi, has been shown to be a potential replacement for catalysts such as platinum in batteries and fuel cells. Deployment is a long way away, but if it happens it could see an end to energy intensive mining operations. Also interesting to note, Laccase breaks down lignin, one of the important steps in preparing cellulose materials for fermentation. So it could have an interim use in the production of ethanol from plant waste.

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