Taylor Wilson: My radical plan for small nuclear fission reactors
Taylor Wilson, is known as the boy who played with fusion, because at the age of 14 became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction.
Dan Moutal
Climate Scientist Andrew Weaver wins the first ever Green party seat in BC election
Andrew Weaver, Newly elected Green Party MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head The British Columbia Green Party just made history, voters in the riding of Oak Bay-Gordon Head elected Andrew Weaver,…
A right wing defence of pure science funding by governments
Recently the Canadian National Research Council has, unfortunately, drastically changed course and abandoned pure science research unless it has clear economic benefits. Many people have written eloquent criticisms of this…
A Space Oddity
A, sadly, earthbound Commander Chris Hadfield in what is definitely the most awesome and extraordinary version of David Bowie’s classic song:
An ideal replacement for Google Reader: Part 2 Inbox vs Stream
It’s been much longer than I intended when I wrote part 1 of an ideal replacement for Google Reader. But I haven’t forgotten that I promised a part 2 As…
Keep Calm and Carry on
Bruce Schneier on the best response to the Boston bombing: As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel…
An ideal replacement for Google Reader: Part 1 The IMAP of feed readers
The impending death of Google Reader has got me thinking about what an ideal replacement for would look like. The first and most important feature (of an idealized replacement) is…
The 100 Year Starship
Open the pod bay door, HAL. What would it take to develop the capability to send humans to another star system? That is the ambitious challenge taken up by the…
The right way to shut down a service like Google Reader
My internet world came to an end today when Google announced they were shutting down Google Reader (the best RSS reader in existence). The problem is that Google Reader was…
This isn’t the recovery you’re looking for
Simon Donner makes a disturbing point: If you look at the global fossil fuel emissions data, all of the major disruptions to energy and oil use in the past 60…
Climate Change Is the Biggest Threat in the Pacific, Says Top U.S. Admiral
Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III is no smelly hippie. North Korea just annulled the 1953 armistice ending its war with South Korea. China and Japan are locked in a dispute…
A new, longer, hockey stick
There is a new hockey stick in town, one with a shaft extending back all the way back to the end start of the holocene about 12,000 years ago when…
We ought to be outraged!
From Kevin Trenberth: China now emits more carbon dioxide per year than any other country. They are changing our atmosphere, and by doing so they are changing our climate. We…
Quote of the Day
David Appell’s recent article on the Nocera/Hansen dustup sums up how I feel about the pipeline perfectly: I’m not sure how I feel about the pipeline — or rather, I…
You keep using that word…
… I do not think it means what you think it means. Ottawa pitches the oil sands as ‘green’ Relying on Canadian crude imports is the best choice for the…
Canadian government muzzles scientists… again
More information can be found here: The Canadian government is requiring foreign researchers who collaborate with federal scientists to sign agreements that could potentially muzzle them, a U.S. scientist says.
Bury your head in the (tar) sand
from the what-you-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-you-department: One year after plans were announced for a new system to monitor the environmental effects of the Alberta tar sands, there is still no sign of any…
Melting permafrost
Allie Wilkinson writing in ArsTechnica brings us some bad news: Evidence from caves in Siberia indicates that a global temperature increase of 1.5° Celsius may cause substantial thawing of a…
Another pipeline proposal
In my recent post on the Keystone XL pipeline I mentioned that until digging up the bitumen becomes unprofitable there will be an endless parade of proposals to ship the…