Ian Pearson has my dream job: he’s a futurologist for British Telecom. IT Wales’ interview with him has got an average of one good SF story idea per sentence (and is pretty scary if you’ve got a fondness for the human race).

Buttons is a camera that takes someone else’s picture. When you click the shutter, it records the exact time you pressed the button and searches Flickr for other photos taken at that same time. Eventually (when a photo with the right time stamp is uploaded) Buttons displays your photo. Random, meaningful links: it’s the future of community.

If, as as some predict, the scarce resource of the future will be fresh water, there’s an awful lot of urban paving that could one day collect and purify rain water.

The United States has always wielded a big stick and a big carrot in the Western hemisphere, but lately Hugo Chavez has been defying the stick and offering bigger carrots. Whether this is anomalous or a sign of realignments in the Americas we’ll have to wait to see.

The Homeland Security Department certainly take their work seriously, but they come up with some strange (and occasionally sinister methodologies). Point in case, a new software package being developed to monitor foreign perceptions of the US by analysing newspaper and magazine articles. It’s hard to tell what the true deployment purpose of the program would be (being as it’s only in the very early development stages so far), but it would seem to be a rather roundabout and paranoid response to the problem of terrorism – how many terrorists write op-ed pieces, after all?