Ed Dowding

Category: Science & Technology

3D printing using nothing but solar power and sand.

Watch the video. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow! Enough said.

Great data, beautifully used – Snake oil?

People doing wonderful things with data always gives me a little excitement. The Snake Oil? graphic from Information is Beautiful made me very happy indeed. Useful and beautiful.

Radiation Dosage Chart

Link round-up

£3m Community energy fund divesting funds British Gas is committed to distributing £3m via the energyshare fund to community renewable projects over the next 3 years. energyshare really wants to hear from all types of communities across Britain. A registered community group can apply for up to £100,000, and all they ask is that projects: ...

My MP strives for growth

My MP strives for growth, quite possibly by selling your medical data to the pharmaceutical industry: The Department of Health should examine how to unlock the value of the UK’s goldmine of patient data – the holy grail of modern biomedical research worth billions to the Pharma industry. He’s also keen to invest in road ...

Kings Lynn incinerator & Zero Waste

Today’s letter to my MP, George Freeman, PPS for Climate Science. George I know this lies slightly outside your realm, but the arguments in favour of the Kings Lynn incinerator seem to be quite simplistic. I fully understand the need to handle out waste, but burning it seems only to remove useful and hard-won resources ...

Vision 2050. From here to there.

Zoom.it – Image foTF.

Is this evidence that we can see the future?

Extraordinary claims don’t come much more extraordinary than this: events that haven’t yet happened can influence our behaviour. It describes a series of experiments involving more than 1000 student volunteers. In most of the tests, Bem took well-studied psychological phenomena and simply reversed the sequence, so that the event generally interpreted via Is this evidence ...

Transparent, conductive, energy-generating plastic film

UPTON, NY — Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory have fabricated transparent thin films capable of absorbing light and generating electric charge over a relatively large area. The material, described in the journal Chemistry of Materials, could be used to develop transparent solar panels or ...

Change your search engine, save the world

You’re still using Google, but results are piped via Ecosia, who use the money from the adverts (same amount as Google) to fund rainforest protection. Brilliant, easy, simple. Takes about 2 minutes to make it your default search engine. “Each web search saves about 2 m² of rainforest for free. We already protected 186,443,380 m².” Take ...

Turn off your unused mobile phone charger and save equivalent energy for 3 weeks of TV.

Charging a mobile for 1 hour uses 2 watts. Leaving the mobile connected to the charger after the battery is full for 7 hours uses 14 watts. Leaving the charger plugged in and turned on, but not connected to the mobile for 16 hours uses 24 watts. Over 1 year you use 14.6KWh. Turning the ...

Google Transparency Report

Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products. This map shows the number of requests that we received in six-month blocks Google Transparency Report: Government Requests.

More of the most amazing thing you might see this week

Well it seems I spoke slightly too soon, since Babs has sent me some videos from The Darkroom Start with the  Darkroom event reel, and be sure, too, to check out their Projections at Kimberley.

Probably the most awesome thing you will see this week

We were fortunate enough to welcome Nell and Robin to stay with us for a few days whilst they were down in the Pyrenees a few weeks back. Robin creates some of the most awesome visual I’ve ever seen. Check these out, and then if you have the means, hire them. Epic. Battle of Branchage ...

Two great new London Maps

TFL have eventually decided to release their data. (We were trying to get them to do this five years ago…) Already there are a few great examples of what this data can do: Stefan Wehrmeyer (who is looking for a job, if you have one going) has made a few great examples showing CCTV footage ...

iPad = Tom Cruise

The iPad is the Tom Cruise of technology. It looks good, does some things well, but is overpriced, unnecessary, and tries to lock you in to an unbelievably crass belief system.

Man invents life

One hell of a headline.

How fast is Google Chrome? (Includes explosions)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0

Good.is' most popular infographics of 2009

http://www.good.is/post/transparency-good-s-most-popular-infographics-of-2009/

The Postcode Paper – welcome to your neighbourhood

What a great idea, and fantastic use of liberated data: [The Postcode Paper] gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics. It’s a prototype of a service for people moving into a new area. In our exercise we imagined you might receive it after paying your council tax for ...