The Luddite, Wired’s resident contrarian, is getting all hot under the collar about the new Street View function from Google. He’s usually got a pretty sharp angle in his columns, but this one just comes across as grouching for the sake of grouching. Personally, as much as I’m opposed to increased private and governmental surveillance, I’m inclined to side with Brian Dunbar’s recent take on the all-seeing GOOG – I’d rather they were taking photos of me and letting the whole world see them than my government doing it and keeping them to themselves.

At 114 times the mass of our own Sun, a star at the centre of nebula NGC 3603 is the fattest ball of fusion ever measured by astronomy types. In related star news, the recently-feted Gleise 581 has failed to show any transits to telescopes, which means that we haven’t learned any more about the potentially-habitable planet that orbits it – but we do know that Gleise itself is stable in output, which is a positive sign. If you need to cheer yourself up after that minor downer, why not browse through the fresh high-resolution images of Mars that have been collected by the HiRISE orbiter?

OK, so when I said yesterday that human ingenuity is a wonderful thing, I should have qualified it by pointing out that ingenuity doesn’t always get used for making nice helpful things, as these pictures of hand-made weapons seized by the military and police of Chechnya prove. [StreetUse]

Never underestimate the power of urban expansion – the growth of cities in China is producing alarmingly measurable reductions in the levels of local rainfall. Yet another factor in the incredibly complex climate change calculations … speaking of which, Seed Magazine has an article that describes how climate modelling is tested for accuracy by attempting to simulate the climate histories of other bodies in our solar system.

If there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that good ideas have a tendency of occuring to more than one person at around the same time … which is what patenting was created to deal with, but I’ll leave that can of worms for smarter people than I to open. But, to illustrate my point – remember the guy who made himself a solar furnace with old aluminium drinks cans? Well, out in some remote part of China, a farmer has made a solar water heater out of empty glass bottles which provides enough hot water that his whole family can shower every day. Human ingenuity is a wonderful thing.