All posts by Tomas Martin

Writer and particle physics student from Bristol, England. My story 'A Shogun's Welcome' featured in Aberrant Dreams #7 and 'The Shogun and The Scientist' will be published in the anthology 'The Awakening' in January 2008. I review at SFCrowsnest and wrote the fictional blog miawithoutoil for the world without oil project.
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Smaller, safer, cleaner cars

Artist’s impression of the VentureOneDevilstower on Daily Kos wrote an excellent piece yesterday about how quickly cars in the US have changed. Following the Oil Crisis in the seventies lower speed limits encouraged smaller, more efficient cars. Over the last twenty years what had been a massive increase in MPG by the eighties has slowed and stalled with the advent of the SUV and bigger vehicles all round. Now a few manufacturers are producing incredibly efficient small city cars and hypercar such as the VentureOne and the Aptera. Having had a break from the trend towards smaller cars, is public thinking returning to the idea again?

[via Daily Kos, photo from the VentureOne website]

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Burmese government turns off internet to stop citizen journalists

A new way to report what’s going on but is it already under threat?Following on from Stephen’s post on Friday about satellite images of the crisis in Burma, I thought I’d talk about another thing that this incident is telling us about our future. As the troubles in Myanmar are continuing, Burmese have been uploading pictures, video and text relating the violence and atrocities to the web. Those outside the country are then spreading these documents to world news and blogs.

Last week, to combat this documentation of their transgressions, the Burmese government shut down many of their internet servers, closing off the pipeline for information to escape the country’s borders. Phones and cameras were smashed on the streets by the military. Although some internet functionality has returned, it’s becoming harder for people to get information out to us looking in, with most journalists refused entry to Burma. One enterprising ABC reporter snuck in to use his mobile phone for reports.

This for me is one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century. The internet has made information and news freer than ever before. For some governments, companies and services this trends towards too much free information, presenting us with a classic conflict of interest between the user that wants content and those that do not. This week for example, AT&T changed its policy to allow users who criticise the company to be banned. The debate over Network Neutrality is a vital one to keep channels of communication open and help prevent future internet users having less functionality than we do today.

[ photo by Film Colourist ]

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Follow up – Satellite pictures of the ice-free North West Passage

Ice-free Northwest PassageLast week I wrote about the Northwest Passage, the ocean channel across the top of Canada connecting the Atlantic and Pacific, being free of ice for the first time in modern history. Now thanks to Nasa’s satellite imagery, you can see the ice-less water in all its scary glory. Here is the high definition image. A smaller image and article is here. It really is stunningly beautiful, despite the implications.

[via Daily Kos’ excellent weekly round up of environmental posts, picture via NASA Earth Observatory]

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UK Government announces feasibility study on Severn tidal barrage

how a tidal turbine worksFor 150 years there have been plans to build a barrage across the Severn Estuary, close to where I live in Bristol, England. Yesterday the government revealed a new detailed study into the possibility of such a construction in the near future. The barrier would cross the Bristol Channel from near the Welsh capital of Cardiff across to Weston Super Mare, south of Bristol. The 16km-long barrage could provide as much as 40,000 jobs and provide a rail link between England and Wales.

This is an exciting development. The distance between Bristol and the corresponding coasts on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean causes a resonant frequency in the tides, causing one of the biggest tidal shifts in the world. If this plan were to go ahead it could provide 5% of all of the UK’s electricity demands. There are environmental concerns about wildlife but the formation of a cleanwater lake beyond the barrage may also create new habitats. Another option is a series of tidal pools such as the one being proposed as a test site near my hometown of Swansea.

{image from the bbc article}

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Amazon creates new DRM-free music site – the beginning of a new economic model?

Are physical copies of music on the way out? There are a lot of things in this world being changed by the internet. News is more immediate, more available and more impartial with the vast amount of sites and blogs reporting in a host of different ways. People sell their old stuff on ebay, or advertise rooms on craigslist. More and more the internet is bringing the service closer to the customer, cutting a lot of the middlemen out of the equation. After Amazon.com released its new DRM-free music download site to rival Apple Itunes, we could start seeing the beginning of a new purely-digital economy for some people.

The music industry is an interesting example of a business model rapidly changed by the internet’s influence. Just ten years ago, music was far more rigid – managers and scouts discovered talent, put an album out and promoted it. With Myspace pages, music blogs, internet radio and the 21st century digitalized version of word of mouth, it’s becoming easier for people to get their material out there themselves. Now, with music download sites becoming more and more accessible it’s easier for artists to skip the whole major label, CD store approach. Selling mp3s has far less overheads than red-brick stores that need to pay for manufacturing and transport of the CDs, the salaries of the managers, shop assistants and factory workers and all the many levels of bureaucracy that all take a cut of the profit, leaving the original artist with barely a few percent of the money spent on their work.

In the future, even in the near future, we could see artists that produce, promote and sell their work entirely online, making a greater percentage of the profits and passing that down to the consumer. If an artist gets 80% of the money for a song instead of 5%, they can afford to sell the mp3 for 30c instead of 99c and still make more money. The internet may give us the strange future of a place where we pay less for our products and end up giving the artist more. The advantages to such a lifestyle are numerous, especially in a society trying to cut down on its emissions.

[via guardian technology, image by Lord Cuauhtli]