An interesting read: “A life in the day: David de Rothschild“. Yes, he’s one of those famous Rothschilds.

He’s planning to sail a catamaran created from recycled plastic junk to an area in the Pacific Ocean, where all kinds of plastic junk is circulating and destroying the wildlife.

We’ll sail through some of the world’s most ecologically threatened regions, including the Great Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, where currents converge and marine debris — 90% plastic — gathers. As this debris consists of microscopic fragments, it’s getting straight into the food chain.

Thanks to Christophe-Marie, who sent me a link of a very interesting video of a UI concept where the mouse is no longer relevant. Instead, multi-finger touch is used, with quite natural gestures.

Here’s the 10/GUI video by C. Miller.

Why do I like it?
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BBC reports on the self-taught hardware hacker William Kamkwamba, who recycles junk to build electricity-generating windmills in Malawi.

Meanwhile, he installed a solar-powered mechanical pump, donated by well-wishers, above a borehole, adding water storage tanks and bringing the first potable water source to the entire region around his village.

When he ran into bugs, he had to debug and refactor the original design a little:

He upgraded his original windmill to 48-volts and anchored it in concrete after its wooden base was chewed away by termites.

It’s ingenious stuff, check it out.

According to this article, executives travelling to China are advised to buy a separate mobile phone to be used only in China. This is to avoid spying and to work around corporate espionage.

The timing of the article is to create media noise for the upcoming (?) US-China trade war. Howeeeeeever, that’s not the most interesting part of that article. This is:

Mark Bregman, chief technology officer at security firm Symantec said he left his MacBook Pro behind in the US and took his MacBook Air whenever he flew to China. Bregman said he only ever used the Air in China and re-imaged the machine every time he returned home.

Interesting? Very much so: the CTO of one of the biggest providers of anti-virus/security products for Windows doesn’t even use Windows himself! He uses an Apple MacBook. That tells you something, doesn’t it?

Behold the Jackie Chan’s SUPERCOLOR Ping Pong Master, as presented by my friend and old colleague Mr. Elpuri.

We can soon start to detect potentially life-bearing planets, improving our searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Check this out, it’s good news.

An interesting article in the New York Times, about what we try to signal with our consumption habits, and how no-one really cares:

The grand edifice of brand-name consumerism rests on the narcissistic fantasy that everyone else cares about what we buy. (It’s no accident that narcissistic teenagers are the most brand-obsessed consumers.) But who else even notices? Can you remember what your partner or your best friend was wearing the day before yesterday? Or what kind of watch your boss has?

Wikipedia has a nice picture of the mechanism behind the evolution of Pig Flu, the so-called antigenic shift.

An interesting article on BBC about what individual actions actually matter in the fight against climate change/global warming.

Professor David MacKay advocates normalizing energy use into kilowatt-hour (kWh). Using this metric, he then compares the amount of energy saved as a result of various “green” actions. To give you an idea of the kWh-metric: in Great Britain, an average person consumes energy worth 125 kWh per day (for transport, heating, manufacturing, and electricity).

Among the perhaps not-so-surprising findings: turning off your phone charger makes no difference whatsoever, electrical cars are way better than hydrogen cars, heat pumps are a good way to save energy, wind micro-turbines on roofs are basically useless, etc. Check it out.

Update: Thanks to “eagle-eye” Jaska for spotting a bug in the units. Our physics teacher used to rant and rave against falling for that common error and of course I fell for it! “Kilowatt-per-hour” is wrong, it’s “kilowatt-hour”. Duh.

Occasionally I check what my favorite cryptologists are up to. This morning I checked Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen’s page again. Nothing new this time, except eventually I did spot something old which I had not seen before.

Behold, the Krypto-Kekkonen. How cool is that? (Very. But it’s a rhetorical question.)

(Note for foreign readers: Urho Kekkonen was a very photogenic president of Finland back in the days, keeping the Soviet Union at bay by (among other things) outboozing their leaders.)