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 [...]

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.

A company called Bloom Energy and founded by K.R. Sridhar is set to launch a new energy device tomorrow that he says is a breakthrough in fuel cell technology—namely making it affordable (the Holy Grail of fuel cell research) and thus providing a localised and comparatively cleaner and cheaper form of electricity than that which we currently get from the grid.

There was a segment covering the topic on CBS’s 60 minutes Sunday night, including an interview with K.R. Sridhar, which can watch online here.

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…

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.

I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly the other night, a film based on real events about a man that is totally paralysed and can only communicate by blinking his eye.

But this is something else, amazing:

For seven years the man lay in a hospital bed, showing no signs of consciousness since sustaining a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. His doctors were convinced he was in a vegetative state. Until now.

To the astonishment of his medical team, the patient has been able to ­communicate with the outside world after scientists worked out, in effect, a way to read his thoughts.

They devised a technique to enable the man, now 29, to answer yes and no to simple questions through the use of a hi-tech scanner, monitoring his brain activity.

To answer yes, he was told to think of playing tennis, a motor activity. To answer no, he was told to think of wandering from room to room in his home, visualising everything he would expect to see there, creating activity in the part of the brain governing spatial awareness.

His doctors were amazed when the patient gave the correct answers to a series of questions about his family.

Press TV:

Iraq’s Ministry for Human Rights will file a lawsuit against Britain and the US over their use of depleted uranium bombs in Iraq, an Iraqi minister says.

According to Iraqi experts, the U.S. and Britain, being the lovers of freedom and democracy that they are:

… bombed the country with nearly 2,000 tons of depleted uranium bombs during the early years of the Iraq war. Atomic radiation has increased the number of babies born with defects in the southern provinces of Iraq.

While I’m a big fan of the iPad’s ease of use, this aspect worries me.