Each week the Magazine picks out snippets from the news, and compiles them into 10 Things We Didn’t Know This Time Last Week. Here’s an end of year almanac.
6: WD-40 dissolves cocaine.
Monthly Archives: December 2005
Icons
Need icons for your new website or web application, at the best price there is (free!)?
I find churning out little web icons fairly relaxing. Other people do icons better, but I love free stuff, and I’m sure you do too.
Hippocamp Ruins…
A group of electronic artists have worked on a “ruined” version of the Beatles’ classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Designed to accompany and contrast with the “…Ruins Pet Sounds” release from earlier in the year, this ruined release exists to be compared and contrasted to the original album and its artistic competitor Pet Sounds. The original classic is recontextualised through the humour and vision of these artists whose approaches to the tracks aims to re-examine Pepper’s through a filter of 2005 technology.
Worse Than Fossil Fuel
Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic.
In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44 x 10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota.”(1) In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.