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So, my friend Jamais has this idea about the participatory panopticon, in which the traditional government dream of universal surveillance as a method of control is turned over to the citizenry, in whose hands it is as much a tool for fighting oppression as it is for enabling it.

As recording devices and wireless networks and video sharing sites become pervasive, that idea is rapidly becoming reality, and unsurprisingly, lots of people in authority don’t like the way it makes them accountable, and are doing their very best to ban it.

Dumb, really.

Techdirt: Student Films Principal Fighting Another Student… School Board Bans Mobile Phones

The worlds first privately financed space station could be launched before 2010, a statement by Bigelow Aerospace suggests. The US company is accelerating its schedule to save money.

Is it just me, or does the idea of rushing ahead with an orbital habitat to do it on the cheap sound like a really terrible idea?

Commercial space station to launch before 2010 - space - 14 August 2007 - New Scientist Space

Basically the mirrors focus sunlight on a single point, turning water into steam to power turbines. Currently providing 11 MW, it’s projected to provide enough energy for the whole of Seville when fully operational.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Power station harnesses Suns rays

Epoq have a PMP watch with a 1.5″ OLED screen, 6 hours of playtime, and it doesn’t look like ass. $170 from www.firstoyou.com.

Epoq strike again: the first truly wearable PMP watch » Coolest Gadgets

When the aliens finally invade Earth, you may wish you had listened to Travis Taylor and Bob Boan.

And if the invasion follows the plot of a typical Hollywood blockbuster, they might also be the guys called in at the last minute to save the day.

After all, they have written “An Introduction to Planetary Defense”, a primer on how humanity can defend itself if little green men wielding death rays show up at our cosmic doorstep.

NASA Consultants Tell How to Survive Alien Invasion

I’ve been fascinated by distributed computing since working on it at Intel, and Folding@home is one of the great distributed computing projects. It uses idle computing resources to model protein folding, a process which, when it malfunctions, causes many terrible diseases, including alzheimers, ALS, BSE and many forms of Cancer.
The Beeb has a great story up now about how the project has received a recent huge boost thanks to PS3 owners running the application, providing hundreds of teraflops of extra computational power and allowing the project to perform calculations in a few weeks that would have otherwise taken them over a year.

I have a WII but I’m tempted to buy a PS3 now just to support this excellent project.

BBC NEWS | Technology | PS3 boosts protein research plan

The Bug: Steampunk Computer Mouse - a photoset on Flickr

Modern Mechanix has old science magazine features from the 30s, 40s and 50s. It’s fun seeing what people back then thought the future might look like, and what inventions they thought would take them there. Some of them are remarkably steampunk in flavor, like this, my current favorite, the 50mpg steam-powered motorbike. Thanks to the Make Blog for tipping me off to this.

Modern Mechanix » Motor Cycle Is Driven by Steam

My friend Jamais is really, really smart. The only thing he is not, in fact, really smart about is when to stop matching me Mojito for Mojito. When he’s not out drinking with me though? Total scary genius. He has ideas that take on lives of their own and race around the internet. He also cofounded Worldchanging.

One of his coolest ideas is the idea of measuring the carbon footprint of a cheeseburger, as an example of how carbon transparency can tell us surprising things about our everyday lives and consumption habits.

That idea has turned into the Cheeseburger Steamroller. Such a brilliant idea and with such instant impact that it explains, in one stroke, the value of carbon transparency to everyone who reads it.

Anyway, it had another jump this week and showed up on the BBC. Way to go Jamais.

Oh, about the destroy the planet thing? Totally joking. Maybe.

Open the Future: Cheeseburgers: In Florida; On the BBC

For those hoping to bug out from this rock and head over to the backup location, NASA has an update on the current state of Faster than Light Travel.. what? You were thinking of spending 20,000 years on a slowboat there?

The bad news is that the bulk of scientific knowledge that we have accumulated to date concludes that faster than light travel is impossible. This is an artifact of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Yes, there are some other perspectives; tachyons, wormholes, inflationary universe, spacetime warping, quantum paradoxes…ideas that are in credible scientific literature, but it is still too soon to know if such ideas are viable.

Thanks to Wil Wheaton for pointing me at that story. Mock if you like, but I think it’s remarkably cool that we’re at a point in our development that these stories are worth publishing.

NASA - Status of “Warp Drive”