Archive for June 2009
Dear Malcolm: Why So Threatened? 30 Jun 2009
Chris Anderson responds to Malcolm Gladwell’s column from yesterday. His example may work, but I agree with calcutt’s comment (I would link to it but I can’t), the example Anderson mentions is fine for some topics, but I’m not sure a by-day civil engineer could knock up an article on war crimes in Sudan that [...]
Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson 29 Jun 2009
I tend to agree with Gladwell here, free simply isn’t an option. To get quality you need paid professionals, just look at the lapses we’ve seen of late with people relying on Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia, instead of checking a professionally vetted (and therefore costed) alternative. As a society we became more successful when we [...]
Trans-Atlantic MagLev 20 Jun 2009
A nice idea, but costs and the small matter of the mid-Atlantic ridge would be fairly sizeable problems I imagine.
Who goes to a creationist museum? 14 Jun 2009
I’m slightly concerned about this quote: The retired businessman dismisses Darwin’s theory as “not even a low grade hypothesis” and said it had “no substantial science” in it. Sorry, Darwin’s theory of evolution has no substantial science in it? Well at least it’s backed up by some scientific evidence, and has survived every attempt to [...]
Oil Eating Bacteria Found 12 Jun 2009
Potential for terrorism against oil fields there, which would bring the western world to a halt or just drive the price of oil up.
England 6 – Andora 0 11 Jun 2009
I used to be a supporter of letting all of the teams in FIFA’s world rankings compete for a place in the World Cup, but I am now coming round to the argument that teams like Andora should go through a pre-qualification phase before they’re allowed to play against the bigger teams. One of Andora’s [...]
Power Consumption 6 Jun 2009
I borrowed an energy monitor plug this week to check what my home entertainment devices were pulling down. Some surprising numbers: Wii (Standby) 1w Wii (On) 16w Wii (Max) 18w TV (Standby) 0w TV (On) 118w TV (Max) 119w Laptop (Charging) 24w Laptop (Boot) 58w Laptop (Idle) 46w Mac Pro (Standby) 5w Mac Pro (Idle, [...]
PC futures shown off at Computex 5 Jun 2009
I have to say that I tend to agree with Nvidia’s idea of the future being PCs everywhere if we can get the power consumption and cost down sufficiently. (Obviously this won’t be the only PCs in the future, but I think we’ll start to see more and more things coming with computers in)