Not All Gloom And Doom

Ignore the headlines in today’s papers and there are some damn good reads out there, perfectly sized for your coffee break. Grab a nice cup of tea and a sit down and take your mind off it all…

Goth weddings – cool or just horribly tacky? I think we can all agree on which this is:

Click image for more hideous gothery, camo weddings and the ugliest cakes on the planet.

Could the sea solve our power problems?

Saltwater Power Could Supply Energy for Most Dutch Homes

A new proposal to improve a 75-year-old dike, the Afsluitdijk, in The Netherlands could make it the world’s leading site for generating saltwater power— a clean, renewable energy source which is 30-40% more efficient than burning coal.

The breakthrough process, which is called reverse electrodialysis, captures the energy created when freshwater becomes saltier by mixing with seawater. Although scientists in the 1950s discovered that electricity could be generated this way, no one knew just how efficient the process could be until a recent study proved that a remarkable 80% of the energy could be recovered.

Now this is just begging to be LOL’d. From Animal pics of the week in the Telegraph:

Unexpected French blogging literary success and supermarket worker Anna Sam speaks up for women checkout operators all over Europe in The Times:

“Something like 400 students graduate with literature degrees every year in Rennes and they pretty much all want to become teachers,” says Sam. “But there just aren’t that many teaching jobs.” Some become postmen, others live off welfare benefit. Many – mainly women – join France’s 170,000 checkout workers.

“Are you in prison?” a six-year-old girl, peering over the till, asked Sam one day.

Not quite. On Mondays Sam would work from 9am to 2.30pm with a 16-minute break. A typical Wednesday shift would be from 3pm to 8.45pm with a 17-minute break. On Saturdays she would work from 9am to 1pm and from 3.30pm to 9.15pm, with 12 minutes off in the morning and 17 minutes in the afternoon. She would scan up to 21,000 products a week, lift 800kg an hour and ask customers for their loyalty cards 200 times a day. At night the beeping of her till filled her dreams.

“There are a lot of health problems in this job – tendonitis, lumbago, that sort of thing. There is a lot of depression as well because you’re completely ignored by everyone: by your managers and by the customers. After a while you become convinced that you’re less than nothing.”

Sam’s no anticapitalist firebrand – her book’s not Nickel and Dimed, from the extract, but the article’s a great read. I hope the book’s translated into English. I’ll read it.

I’ve been fascinated by ants ever since reading a science fiction short story about an ant-like creature in a despoiled colony desperately trying to write the history of his civilisation in pheromones – I wish I could remember the title – and subsequently discovering Edmund O Wilson’s books in the natural history section of my local library. He explained so much about biodiversity and how the planet actually works; it’s run by and for ants. (This of course was before the hundred-odd years worth of books were sold to finance a ‘learning centre’, or was it an ‘access hub’?) For those who have yet to discover Wilson’s work, there’s an excellent article on ants in today’s Guardian:

What makes ants far more than a scientific curiosity is that this extraordinary collective behaviour from what are, at heart, chemical-sensing automatons, hints at lessons for similar systems in humans too. Neurons are individually relatively dumb but, with billions of them working together in our brains reacting to levels of neurotransmitter chemicals, something creative and remarkable emerges. “Maybe our own brains are using these thresholds,” says Franks. “When you model ants and when you model the brain, there are some great similarities. When our brains are deciding, from visual input, whether to move our eyes to the right or the left, populations of neurons and thresholds are obviously involved.”

Well, that puts a new slant on free will.

Ooooh, pretty. Snowflakes as you’ve never seen them before by photographer Kenneth Libbrecht of CalTech in the New Scientist, using a specially-designed snowflake photomicroscope :

More frozen beauty here.

Funny tale of an online romance and its real-world conclusion, from Boing Boing (has video).

So anyway — in 2003, I met a woman online. She was from Western Australia, I was living in Richmond, VA. I ended up selling all my stuff and flying over there to meet her in person. Here’s the story.