Links for 22-11-2007
Personalisation = surveillance, Richard Morgan interview, peak oil evidence, monster sea scorpion …
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1 – Do you have any idea who last looked at your data? – Finkelstein
We cannot expect that having large warehouses of data on individuals will be free from unintended consequences, especially when there are incentives to try to build highly detailed models of everyone’s lives.
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2 – Politics Is What Humans Do – Richard Morgan interviewed by Martin Lewis
“It would appear that there are readers out there who just want the same thing duplicated over and over again, like a baking tray full of Big Macs. I really can’t help those people — they need to go back to reading tie-in novels.” Zing!
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3 – More Evidence We’ve Entered the End of Oil
“In other words [...] we may be approaching a plateau beyond which production will not climb. According to the Journal, that ceiling could be 100 million barrels a day, and said we could hit it as early as 2012.”
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4 – ‘Doomsday Vault’ Prepares to Open
“The site on the Svalbard archipelago can hold up to 4.5 million seed samples, meaning almost every variety of food crops on the planet can find a home there.”
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5 – Moons like Earth’s are few and far between
“… a survey of 400 stars suggests collisions big enough to produce something like Earth’s Moon happen in only one out of every 10 to 20 solar systems.”
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6 – Giant claw points to monster sea scorpion
“The fossilised remains of a giant claw that once belonged to a sea scorpion roughly 2.5 metres long have been found in Germany.” Eeek – that’s one big critter.
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7 – Nothing Says “Early Earth Was Cool” Like World’s Oldest Diamonds
“No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so if life does emerge readily under terrestrial conditions, then perhaps it formed many times on our home planet.”
