Friday, February 24, 2012

London's no safer with Big Brother watching every minute

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2012/0222/Report-London-no-safer-for-all-its-CCTV-cameras

In a recent report, London, which probably has the most closed circuit television of any city, has not shown a drop in crime since the 1980's, when cameras started to be installed. It is estimated that the average Londoner passes through the view of 300 cameras a day.

Privacy activists worry that Britain will soon become an Orwellian state.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

We, the Web Kids

There is an interesting manifesto from Piotr Czerski about growing up in the web generation. Here is a short excerpt.
There is probably no other word that would be as overused in the media discourse as ‘generation’. I once tried to count the ‘generations’ that have been proclaimed in the past ten years, since the well-known article about the so-called ‘Generation Nothing’; I believe there were as many as twelve. They all had one thing in common: they only existed on paper. Reality never provided us with a single tangible, meaningful, unforgettable impulse, the common experience of which would forever distinguish us from the previous generations. We had been looking for it, but instead the groundbreaking change came unnoticed, along with cable TV, mobile phones, and, most of all, Internet access. It is only today that we can fully comprehend how much has changed during the past fifteen years.
We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the Internet, are a generation who meet the criteria for the term in a somewhat subversive way. We did not experience an impulse from reality, but rather a metamorphosis of the reality itself. What unites us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the context is self-defined and an effect of free choice.
Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun ‘we’, as our ‘we’ is fluctuating, discontinuous, blurred, according to old categories: temporary. When I say ‘we’, it means ‘many of us’ or ‘some of us’. When I say ‘we are’, it means ‘we often are’. I say ‘we’ only so as to be able to talk about us at all.

It in itself is interesting. Not everything translates well, but still fairly interseting
http://pastebin.com/0xXV8k7k

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

a fossilized forest was found in China

In a turn of events, mining for coal actually produced some good when a fossilized forest was found in Inner Mongolia. The forest, at almost 300 million years old, was preserved from volcanic ash, similar to the old Roman city of Pompeii.
The researchers dubbed the forest the “Pompeii of the Permian period, since the manner in which it was preserved bared a striking resemblance to the famous Roman namesake event. The volcanic ash covered a large expanse of forest over the course of only a few days, ultimately sealing it away from time until present day.
http://www.zmescience.com/research/studies/300-million-year-old-fossil-forest-china-906854/

Monday, February 20, 2012

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Last World War I Vet Dies

Florence Green, the last veteran from World War I passed away on February 4, 2012. Although she only served as a waitress, she was still part of the Women's Royal Air Force. She was 110 years old, and was close to turning 111. So ends our final link to the Great War