Last Straw

I’ve been think­ing about get­ting one of these Zepii elec­tric scoot­ers from The Lon­don Elec­tric Scooter Com­pany (they’ve just launched their web­site). You can watch a hands-on review here by Jason Brad­bury of the UK’s Gad­get Show, when they were first released a year ago. Rel­at­ively low car­bon foot­print. No emis­sions (if you’re elec­trical sup­ply is renew­able). No road tax. No con­ges­tion charges. Costs about £60 in elec­tri­city to run a year.

Great chart by Inform­a­tion is Beau­ti­ful:

It’s a “bal­loon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evid­ence for its effect­ive­ness. But the sup­ple­ments are only effect­ive for the con­di­tions lis­ted inside the bubble. You might also see mul­tiple bubbles for cer­tain sup­ple­ments. These is because some sup­ple­ments affect a range of con­di­tions, but the evid­ence qual­ity var­ies from con­di­tion to con­di­tion. For example, there’s strong evid­ence that Green Tea is good for cho­les­terol levels. But evid­ence for its anti-cancer effects is conflicting.

Sharp decline in public’s belief in cli­mate threat, Brit­ish poll reveals:

The pro­por­tion of adults who believe cli­mate change is “def­in­itely” a real­ity dropped by 30% over the last year, from 44% to 31%, in the latest sur­vey by Ipsos Mori.

What I don’t under­stand is that we’ve been here so often before. Why do people listen to the pro­pa­ganda of oil com­pan­ies and the like over sci­entific evid­ence? How many times do you have to have the wool pulled over your eyes by pro­pa­gand­ists deny­ing that smoking causes can­cer, deny­ing that CFCs lead to ozone deple­tion, deny­ing that cer­tain pol­lut­ants cause acid rain or deny­ing that cli­mate change is man­made (or, ori­gin­ally, that it even existed)?

This is a great time to be born, a great time to be alive. This gen­er­a­tion gets to com­pletely change the world we live in. We have a chance here to reima­gine every single thing we do. But, no, per­haps we’d rather go down with the ship and listen to rich old men try­ing to squeeze every last dol­lar, euro and yen from their invest­ments in out­dated industries.

While cor­rel­a­tion doesn’t neces­sar­ily prove caus­a­tion the study doesn’t need to. It only needs to prove cor­rel­a­tion to chal­lenge the claim that “reli­gion leads to bet­ter soci­et­ies.” Click through for the video.

How to defend the Enlight­en­ment:

On the pub­lic­a­tion of his new book In Defence of the Enlight­en­ment, Tzvetan Todorov tells Brit­ish philo­sopher AC Grayling why the Enlight­en­ment must be sep­ar­ated from sci­ent­ism and cul­tural chauvinism.

Demon­stra­tion by Blaise Aguera at TED of the impress­ive work they’ve been doing behind the scenes on Bing Maps. (click through for the video)

Chat­roul­ette (chat roul­ette). A new web­site that ran­domly con­nects you to other people via web­cam doing the same the thing. I just watched a couple hav­ing sex on their couch, amongst other things…

Free­dom of speech is on the offensive.

What an idea, a new busi­ness model for Ice­land:

On Tues­day, the Icelandic par­lia­ment is expec­ted to intro­duce a meas­ure aimed at mak­ing the coun­try an inter­na­tional cen­ter for invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ism pub­lish­ing, by passing the strongest com­bin­a­tion of source pro­tec­tion, free­dom of speech, and libel-tourism pre­ven­tion laws in the world.

Sup­port­ers of the pro­posal say the move would make Ice­land an “off­shore pub­lish­ing cen­ter” for free speech, ana­log­ous to the off­shore fin­an­cial havens that allow cor­por­a­tions to hide cap­ital from author­it­ies. Could global news organ­iz­a­tions with a home office in Reyk­javík soon be as com­mon as Delaware cor­por­a­tions or Cay­man Islands assets?

“This is a legis­lat­ive pack­age to cre­ate a haven for free­dom of expres­sion,” Icelandic mem­ber of par­lia­ment Birgitta Jóns­dót­tir con­firmed to me, say­ing that a pro­posal for com­pre­hens­ive media law reform will be filed in par­lia­ment on Tues­day, and that whistle-blowing spe­cial­ists Wikileaks has been involved in draft­ing it.

Read­WriteWeb, a pop­u­lar tech­no­logy web­site, has a page that ranks highly in Google’s search res­ults for “Face­book login”.

Check out the com­ments on the page. They’re filled with com­plaints from con­fused Face­book users who think that this is the new Face­book login page.

Quite clearly many people do not use book­marks, or simply type “facebook.com” in the address bar but instead they Google for what they’re after and click on the first res­ult assum­ing it is correct.

Pro­fessor Colin Blakemore assesses the intriguing implic­a­tions of advances in neur­os­cience that have made it pos­sible to com­mu­nic­ate with those in a veget­at­ive state:

Astro­nomy, from Coper­ni­cus on, has trans­formed our view of the place of the earth in the heav­ens. Dar­win changed forever our view of the status of human­ity. Neur­os­cience is likely to chal­lenge our very under­stand­ing of what it is to be a person.