I’ve spent most of the last week going through some sort of nail-biting home IT hell centred around a gradually failing system disk in my PC. Its only about a year and a half old but suddenly it started failing to boot on a regular basis, only saveable by chkdsk. Clearly on its last legs [...]
I’ve been spending a few minutes wondering why Yahoo turned down the Microsoft offer, on the face of it it seems like a foolish move considering their current market position. Then I saw this and realised they may be still in with a chance to make it on their own given that the next internet [...]
The iPhone has finally hit the UK in a fanfare of marketing blitz however its rather high price is putting-off a lot of penny-pinching Brits. I had a little play with one in my local O2 shop on the first day that it was out and I’ll admit that for the first thirty seconds I [...]
For decades theoretical physicists have been looking for a unified field theory, a “theory of everything” which will map the relationships between the strong and weak atomic forces and allow us to predict the nature of yet undetected subatomic particles. Einstein dedicated most of his life to this quest and ended in failure.
This quest took [...]
When I first watched Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” I will admit that I was a bit concerned by its structure and some of its content. Principally that Gore himself had used climate change as a naked self-promotional tool, but also that he had used Hurricane Katrina as an example of climate change; an assertion [...]
The current thinking in cosmology is putting a lot of weight behind the theory that the Universe is in fact shaped like a trumpet, known as a Picard topology. (yes, named after the fictional Star Trek character).
So I was interested to read this week that observations of the CMB using the VLA radio telescope, also [...]
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been hearing a lot of accusations and assertions about the causes and responses to the floods which have deluged our little island. What I find most interesting is the continual references to Climate Change which has replaced the 19th century caveat of Act of God which broadly translates [...]
I am a self-confessed news-junkie, consistently fascinated by what’s going-on around the globe. So with the rise of RSS news feeds this seems like an ideal panacea for my kind of addiction however I was unable to find the sort of thing I was looking for. Yes there’s Google desktop and Yahoo widgets but most [...]
Agricultural societies have the unique ability to arbitrarily raise their food supply, simply by intensifying their cultivation. By bringing more land under cultivation, or by cultivating what land they have more intensively, or by the occasional technological innovation, agriculturalists can increase their output. By raising the food supply, agriculturalists can arbitrarily raise their population. Thus [...]
In case you are getting depressed over climate change I thought I might mention that there is a glimmer of hope in the shape of Dublin based technology company Steorn that claims to have developed a perpetual motion machine using a configuration of magnetic motors which runs with an efficiency of more than 100%. Thus [...]
