If you think the Superfreaks had demonstrated the truth of the Dunning-Kruger effect well enough, especially after this further hammering, and their attempt to gain everyone’s esteem by having NewsCorp send out copyright nastygrams, think again. Here’s some science, via Lou Grinzo’s blog. We’ve been taking very, very thin samples of the leafmould in the…
Read More a reminder that things happen quicklyI have some problems with “10:10”, the latest timebound big media campaign. The first one is symbols and aesthetics. They are handing out tags made of aluminium alloy cut out of a retired B737 down at Hurn. This is meant to be recycling, and wonderfully symbolic. No. A superbly engineered artefact has been reduced to…
Read More No Future in the Cath Kidston FavelaBrilliant post from Dan Lockton on the design problems of making smart meters usable and useful. In a sense, it relates to this post at the RSA’s Social Brain about “the dark side of “nudge””; of course, the downside of all these neat ideas about adjusting people’s decision processes into ones that are more rational,…
Read More tattyOK, time to make the rubble bounce. There’s a nice online visualiser for climate data here, (thanks!) so we can have a lovely little chart. OK, this shows the GISTEMP land-ocean mean for as long as they’ve been measuring, as the red line. As you can see, that sucker’s going up. As you can also…
Read More target for tonight…A magic moment in the history of troll; it may never come again. OK, so you know the climate-change denier talking point about global warming supposedly “stopping” in the last ten years. It’s a classic example of how to lie with numbers; you just choose the bit of the data series that suits you and…
Read More Climate change denier redefines the number 10You thought the Hummer being put on the block was symbolism? This is symbolism: the bloated, militaristic, fuel-guzzling cultural trope itself is being sold to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery. Yes; an unheralded outfit from the deep west, not even Shenzhen or Shanghai. Seeing as its core business is making construction gear, tankers, and off-road…
Read More giant symbol crashes and overturns, killing billions of dollarsGreat post of Dan Lockton‘s about what demand for energy actually is. Amory Lovins’ remark that no-one wants “energy”, they want cold beer, is of course another version of this. Which, once it had got together with this story about financing solar installation and marinated nicely in my del.icio.us queue for a while, made me…
Read More a question of demandRemember cows with blogs? Sure ya do. This week I was talking M2M technology again, but with people who are way more hardcore about it than Scottish farmers wanting to give their cows RSS feeds, or even wind turbine engineers wanting to monitor the state of their bearings and power-control electronics. Putting control logic on…
Read More IP over Mud25 years; the strike was the first political event, indeed one of the first events, I actually remember. At least I remember power cuts and TV news broadcasts with the number of weeks the miners had been out counting up. After that, I recall Chernobyl – they set up a radiation monitor in the car…
Read More alternative YorkshireJames Wimberley has a good post regarding changing the electricity grid to support dynamic demand-response, where things like Dutch cold-stores or your fridge over-cool when electricity is plentiful and cut out when the grid is under strain. It’s hugely important in adapting the electrical system to use stuff like gigawatt-size wind farms; essentially, it’s a…
Read More premature optimisation, the root of all sins