Slashdotted  

Ken Deffeyes' prediction we'll be back in the stone age by 2025 was dramatic enough to get lots of attention, including at Slashdot, which no doubt changed the status of any of the remaining nerds who weren't PO aware.

WorldChanging has an interesting post on "The Wave Hub", which looks at an offshore facility for the testing wave energy generation devices in South West England, which gives "manufacturers a "plug-and-play" system to demonstrate how well their hydrokinetic energy generators work".

WorldChanging also has a post on a selection of plans to mitigate global warming (and avoid dangerous changes to the climate) from the Pew Center, the UK government and Dr Peter Flynn of the University of Alberta (Whose suggestions they note "starts to look awfully close to [their own] Terraforming the Earth").



Deltoid has a good set of links on the "Greenhouse Mafia" story - which is still reverberating in the press a little.

The Energy Blog has an interesting post on "Titania Nanotubes for Solar Cells" which looks at a non-silicon based solar technology that can make hydrogen while also generating electricity.

The BBC has a post called " Why oil will hit $100 a barrel" (part of their Fuelling the Future special), with Cairn Energy's Chairman (a friend of both Tony Blair and George W Bush - shades of Richard Rainwater) predicting we will likely see US$100 a barrel oil in the near future.

Oil is certainly heading in the other direction at the moment (along with many other commodities) as any suffering energy investor will tell you. I've heard a number of reasons for this - one explanation (heard at the pub a week ago) was that the Chinese have announced they will deliberatley slow their economy, another (TV news one morning) is that the Saudi's have announced they will double production over the next five years (which I laughed out loud at - though there are quite a few reports saying that they are going to increase production to 12.5 million barrels per day - a 35% increase - which is something to watch closely). Most reports also blame higher than expected US inventories and hedge funds bailing out of their positions (now the trend is downwards).

The Daily Reckoning doesn't reckon the downtrend will be in place for long though.

STC WA reports there will be a gas-to-liquids and coal-to-liquids conference in Perth in late March. They also have an interesting piece on the problems caused to farmers in the US by high natural gas prices.

Financial Sense has a piece that suggests that natural gas prices in the US are being manipulated by the government and that the supply picture has been obfuscated. I'm never quite sure if some of their stuff is simply conspiracy theories about economics but in the absence of access to the underlying data it sounds sort of credible.

The Guardian has an interesting piece for those interested in the mechanics of our propaganda system (in this case, the British one), taking a look at "British Satellite News".

Past Peak points to an article in the Washington Post that says the US list of terrorist suspects now has 325,000 people on it - pointing out that this can't be a good thing - "Either the list is bogus, including a lot of people who shouldn't be on it, in which case US counterterrorism efforts are unfocused, flailing, and clueless, or the list isn't bogus, in which case the pool of prospective adversaries has achieved critical mass and then some. Or maybe it's all of the above: they've got a garbage list that manages to mostly miss what is by now a very large pool of adversaries".

The whole Big Brother thing has really got a lot of momentum up lately - some US firms are trialling RFID implants in their employees (which should have some people ticking off "number of the beast" in the rapture index), the US government is practicing shutting down bloggers and other non-offical information sources and Britain has just passed a law to make a national identity card including biometric information compulsory (Australia has floated plans to create a national id card and to use smart cards for Medicare, though neither proposal has been acted upon yet). Australian police are also getting new wire-tapping powers, which has civil libertarians outraged. I feel sorry for the poor buggers who have to listen to all this stuff - one friend commented recently that his friends in the AFP regard listening to bugged phone calls as the most boring task they can get lumbered with...

One last piece of black humour on this subject - The Herald reports that "Australia has banned a new video game about a tyrannical government suppressing freedom of expression".

For people who enjoy comparisons to 1984, this piece "The Fear Factor" ("America’s war on terror in an Orwellian perspective") might be of interest too - it looks at the neoconservative "politics of fear". On a related topic, this article from OpenDemocracy (an interview with Shadia Drury on "Noble lies and perpetual war") is quite old, but is interesting if you are interested in understanding the philosophy of Leo Strauss and the neoconservative movement (if thats the right word for it - maybe cult is better ?).

I came across a book called "Conspiracies" in the bookshop today that looked at about 50 different conspiracy theories and came up with a rough estimate of how likely each one was to be true - which is a bit of a shame as I was thinking of doing something similar myself. On the whole they were skeptical about most of them (some I'd never even heard of - like the sinking of the Titanic being an insurance dodge) but a few passed the credibility test.

Talking of conspiracy theories, RI has come back from its prolonged journey into high weirdness to a more normal plane - some of the comments on this post about Robert Heinlein and Philip K Dick are interesting (if you were an SF buff when you were younger anyway), with one of the more prolific commenters noting that some of Heinlein's more authoritarian stuff (such as Starship Troopers) echoed the Straussian view of the world to a certain extent (but didn't quite sink to their level).

Syriana has finally opened here today, and is getting good reviews. I also saw an ad on TV this morning for the new Wachowski (The Matrix) brothers movie called "V for Vendetta" which looks pretty weird but I guess is a sign of the times. The movie is based on Alan Moore's typically paranoid graphic novel from 1988 - he was worried about Britain becoming a totalitarian state then - I wonder what he makes of the current state of affairs...