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UK makes massive step towards wind power

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Britain should see over 7000 offshore wind turbines by 2020The Secretary of State for Business, John Hutton is announcing a huge sea-change in the UK’s approach towards future power plants, with a massive 25Gw of offshore wind proposed to add to an existing 8GW of planned construction. This vast increase in wind power, in addition to the wave and tidal projects being tested in the Orkney islands, could power all of the UK’s homes by 2020.

It’s interesting to see this being portrayed not only as an environment issue but as a security issue, with Hutton saying:

“I do not want in 20 years’ time to find that whether the lights go on in the morning is down to some foreign government or someone else.”

With the North Sea oil and gas fields decreasing rapidly in production, the UK is losing its resource power. By investing in new renewable technology it can continue to be an important world power. Denmark invested in wind over the last decade and now has a £2billion industry. If only more nations would have this level of foresight.

[story and picture via European Tribune]

UPDATE: As requested in the comments, here is a more up to date (and more detailed) analysis of Danish wind power and their plans up to 2030.

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Doris Lessing’s Nobel speech: is the internet destroying reading?

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Doris LessingDoris Lessing was unable to attend the ceremony where she was to be awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, but her editor delivered a speech on her behalf, which The Guardian has published in full (and is well worth the time to read). [Image from Wikipedia]

Nicholas Carr highlights the following passage, among others:

“What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?” “

Mrs Lessing is hardly the first to raise this argument (or something similar), but her current position in the spotlight means that it once again becomes the topic du jour of bookish folk.

I think it’s reasonable of me to assume that Futurismic’s readership is fairly bookish, but it is also plain that they engage closely with the web as well. So what do you think of Lessing’s speech? I think we can all agree that the internet is a revolution, but is it the sort of revolution that burns the fields behind it?

[tags]literature, reading, internet, education, Doris Lessing[/tags]
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Wish Sir Arthur C Clarke a happy birthday

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The title says it all; Sir Arthur C Clarke, living legend of science fiction, turns 90 on 16th December 2007 – that’s this coming Sunday. The Astronomical Association of Sri Lanka (where Clarke has been resident for many years) have set up a special blog where you can leave a message for the man himself. [Via SpaceElevatorBlog]

[tags]science fiction, writers, Arthur C Clarke, birthday[/tags]
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Im in ur game, watchin u play

So I likee my video games.  A lot.  Enough that I’ve had to mail them to another country to save myself.  And I like stats.  Graphs and numbers and stuff that make pretty lines are cool.  Combining the two?  Heaven.

Via the very funny gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun we see that Valve, creators of that wonderful trio of games in The Orange Box, have been watching you, and the stats are something fun to see.  They’ve published info for Half-Life 2: Episode 2, including completion times, hours played, how often people died, etc.  Probably the coolest feature is the ‘death map,’ a kind of infrared map showing areas where players have died.  Thought you were the only one who fell off that cliff in the very beginning?  Not according to the red dot in the picture above.

They’ve also got data on TeamFortress 2, including the tidbit that BLU have a slight edge over RED.  Privacy issues aside (I guess some people object to being watched while they pathetically die over and over in the same place…), this is an interesting method for designing games and hopefully the data will be incorporated into how to make future games more fun.

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Contest to design a new e-reader

Michael DiTullo’s ‘Nubook’ designAmazon’s Kindle ereader received a rather lukewarm reception. Although some of the concerns related to the high price of both the gadget and the ebooks ($299 for the Kindle plus prices for books not much cheaper than the hard copies they replaced), a lot of vitriol was directed towards the rather clunky design, which resembled something out of the 70s version of Battlestar Galactica.

Over at ‘Industrial Design Supersite’ Core77, they are having a competition to design sketches of e-readers that might live up to the kind of design standard mp3 players have led us to expect. The competition is open to both computer and hand-drawn designs and is open until Tuesday. If you are interested in an ebook revolution, maybe you should enter your own idea. If not, you can still check out some of the interesting sketches so far.

[via Treehugger, image from the contest]

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