The province of Alberta in Canada has a problem that we should all have: too much wind power. Technically the problem is not too much wind, but too high a proportion of the province’s power coming from wind. The variability of wind power means that if too high a percentage of an area’s power comes from wind, when the wind stops the lights go out. Seems like a good opportunity to expand solar power. [digg]

I’ve had terrible trouble explaining to people how Creative Commons licences might enable new forms of collaborative art – I just don’t have that sort of imagination. Luckily, other people do have it, as the CC blog reports. So, you get an open-licensed picture from one website, draw or remix a random doodle on another, then combine and mess around with the result on a third site which creates a unique URL at which the final product can be viewed. Print that picture on a T-shirt along with a barcode that can transfer the URL into a suitable mobile device, and all of a sudden there’s something very cool and very weird going on…

I’ve posted a fair few items about Second Life recently, mostly concerning facets of it that intersect closely with meatspace. So to get some balance, I thought I’d share an example of how distant from consensus reality that place can get – ladies and gents, it’s service time at the Church of Elvis! I can’t imagine there’s anywhere quite like that in reality – except perhaps in Vegas.

Hey, how do you fancy sending your name on a mission to Mars, and getting a certificate to prove it? No, seriously – just go sign up and, while spaces remain, your name will be added to a list that will be included on a DVD and carried to the Red Planet by the Phoenix probe, along with ‘messages to the future’ by various luminaries of space exploration and advocacy for the edification of future inhabitants. Let’s hope their playback device isn’t region-locked, eh?

Chalk one up for American particle physics. The boffins at Fermilab have discovered two new subatomic particles, the ‘sigma-b baryons’, which are apparently the heaviest ever measured. We’re another step closer to uncovering the way the universe works.