I’ve been against wide-spread spy cameras on privacy principles, ever since I heard about plans for them a few years ago. Now it seems that my concerns are unfounded… there’s no incentive to install them in any new cities, and the existing ones will probably scrap them soon, as they discover the same thing.
It will be interesting to see how this develops over time.
By the end of this decade or the next, “regenerative medicine” could well be commonplace. Dr. Who, eat your heart(s) out. 😉
Damned genes and their liberal agenda. For political reasons they refuse to justify the conservatives’ assertion that they’re just better than everybody else.
We space/science/SF geeks have always hoped that something like this would be the case, but we didn’t know what to expect. It looks like a second of the variables in the calculation of the odds of intelligent civilizations in the universe that we could communicate with (the Drake Equation) has been solved… only four more …
Continue reading ‘“Alien Earthlike worlds ‘like grains of sand’, say ‘wobble’ boffins”’ »
I’ve talked about compact fluorescent lights before, and (in the comments) about LED lights. Apparently LEDs are getting really good now… CF lights may turn out to be really short-lived.
(I’m out of the office today, but here’s a bonus post to keep you amused.) A “thrilling tale of how massive Victorian skirts saved a female naturalist from being impaled.” “Thrilling” might be a bit of an overstatement, but it is interesting. Although if “impaled” is taken in an alternate vernacular context, that sentence might …
Continue reading ‘“Ridiculous, constricting clothing — to the rescue!”’ »
I’ve mentioned the problem before, about three years ago: the platinum/iridium cylinder in France that is the official reference for the kilogram is losing weight, for reasons that currently baffle science. Any reference object is useless if it can’t be relied on to stay the same, so the science community is making a determined effort …
Continue reading ‘“Boffins mount campaign against France’s official kilogramme”’ »
A delightfully contradictory juxtaposition. GoddessJ is a science wonk who collects Tarot decks, one of these would make a perfect Christmas gift for her.
On the twelfth of October, I received a very odd phone call. When I picked up, an obviously robotic voice said: ATTENTION: BECAUSE YOU ARE A PREFERRED WESTJET CUSTOMER YOU WILL RECEIVE A SPECIAL GIFT. TO ACCEPT PRESS ONE. Um… in the first place, I’m not a preferred WestJet customer. So far as I can …