Burst Attention Span

As a lacto-ovo vegetarian, this story about growing meat in a lab is intriguing.

I'm not sure how I'd view manufactured meat – as animal or synthetic – or indeed whether I'd fancy eating it. Most of the anti-meat arguments are invalidated by this idea; no cruelty; no hormones and additives; no risk of disease. It should also be more consistent, no random bits of gristle in your sausage for example.

Quorn is already quite a popular meat substitute made from mycoprotein (a bit like an underground fungus). It is stretched and formed into numerous chicken-like fillets and chunks, beef-like burgers and mince as well as sausages, slices for sandwiches and specialities like Sunday Roast. I really like it, but although I know it's not meat when I'm eating it, other veggies have told me they don't like it because it reminds them of meat.

So I guess the market is likely to be be driven by non-veggies at first, until the definitive artificial bacon can be developed. It'll be me at the front of the queue then…

These people seem to be leading the field in meat substitutes – but the spooky company name conjours images of Children of the Corn!

These images by Jorn Olsen are absolutely stunning. The one used to illustrate this post reminds me of a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I had no idea clouds formed like this. I also like the way they are etymologically linked to boobies :-)

Have you ever driven along the motorway and watched the behaviour of other vehicles, seeing them bunch up and stretch out, reacting as one to changes in road conditions? Did you ever wonder if there was some pattern there, some kind of emergent intelligence going on?

I've often wished I could watch a birds-eye view of the M1, following groups of cars as they progress together, seeing how they interact – using each other as shields, leaders or sacrificial lambs. Read the rest of this entry »

As I will probably have to visit the US some time in the coming year, I have been looking into the new requirements for people travelling into the country. You'll probably be aware that since 2002 everyone entering US borders needs a machine-readable passport and/or a visa which involves the collection of your fingerprints by the embassy that processes your application. You'll also probably be aware that most of the world – including a large number of Americans – does not trust the US Government and its agents one little bit, especially with such personal or stigmatic information as fingerprints. It makes people feel like criminals for one: Discussing e-Passports for US Citizens, Barry Kevauver formerly of the State Department says of biometric data, "…that's further off because it would require fingerprinting the general public, something that may not go down too well with people because of the criminal taint of being fingerprinted". Yet foreigners won't mind? Read the rest of this entry »

I have a lot of CDs at home. More than a lot. I use some for DJing which I keep in a box ready to go, others are mixes and some CDs are just for playing at home. I also have lots of vinyl in assorted sizes and speeds, as well as a massive selection of MP3s in no particular order and on several different hard disks on my system. I often wish I could browse around my entire collection as easily as I search for tunes in my DJ box, so I was quite intrigued to spot this article about navigation methods for digital music collections and found that I could identify with a lot of the points made. However, being about the challenges and not neccessarily the solutions, the article fell short of defining a usable solution for my situation. Read the rest of this entry »