I generally don’t get very excited about technology, but every once in a while I read a technology article that captures my imagination. That happened twice this week, so I thought I’d share them. The first was li-fi – transmitting data using light bulbs. Because LEDs can switch on and off faster than the human [...]
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Build your own industrial civilization
Question: Can you guess what these are? Answer: they are the 50 industrial machines necessary to create a small civilization with all the comforts of modern life. They include a tractor, a cement mixer, a welding machine, a bakery oven and a heat exchanger. And you can build them all yourself. Or at least, that’s [...]
Appropriate technology of the week? The Unicef brick
I’m not sure this is a product that will ever be manufactured and used, but it’s an interesting idea. Product design house Psychic Factory have developed a food and water container that doubles as a building material. The container would be filled with water or food – perhaps rice – and shipped as disaster relief. [...]
Work begins on the world’s largest solar bridge
On my way into London I cross Blackfriars Bridge, which is undergoing something of a transformation at the moment. It’s a Victorian rail bridge adjacent to Blackfriars station, and it dates back to the age of steam. When work on it is finished, it will have been brought decisively into the 21st century and will [...]
How to generate solar power at night
If we’re going to reduce carbon emissions in the Western world and maintain a decent standard of living, there needs to be a renewable energy revolution. If the poorer countries of the world are going to share in the benefits of energy without destabilising the climate, it has to turn to renewable first time round [...]
Overconnected, by William H Davidow
Books about the dangers of the internet aren’t likely to get much of an audience right now, and some might be tempted to dismiss them as neo-Luddite scare-mongering. But a book about the downsides of online connectivity written by an insider, a venture capitalist and former VP of Intel, well, that might just get a [...]
Book review: The God Species, by Mark Lynas
This is a book I’ve been looking forward to. A couple of years ago an article in Nature explained a new way of looking at sustainability, as a series of planetary boundaries. The earth has a number of systems that need to be held in balance, and human activity can overshoot them. Climate change is [...]
Political debate in the age of television
I was struck by this comment about TV in the Guardian today. Charlie Brooker writes about this bizarre interview with Britain’s leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband, where he repeats the same answer to every question. “The modern world suffers from a cavernous reality deficit. You know it, I know it. Even “they” know it” [...]
Bitcoins: the peer to peer currency
A couple of years ago I read a book called The End of Money, by Thomas Greco. In it, the author predicted that at some point, some internet application would do for money what Skype has done for the telecommunications industry. It’s only a matter of time before someone blows the whole thing open, re-writes [...]
An Optimist’s Tour of the Future, by Mark Stevenson
From the machine-dominated prison of The Matrix to the environmentally devastated world of Cormac Mcarthy’s The Road, popular culture’s visions of the future tend to come in any colour so long as it’s black. Even Disney of all people served up Wall-E, with a trashed planet and an exiled humanity. Optimism is in rather short [...]
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