Ken Dyck

From the how-the-tables-have-turned files, the CBC is reporting that the opposition questions Harper’s ethics:

Opposition MPs blasted Stephen Harper on Thursday for his refusal to co-operate with the federal ethics commissioner, with one MP threatening to hold the prime minister in contempt.

Jack Layton sums up the situation nicely:

On an election that was supposed to be about ethical behaviour, the first thing we have is an effort to try and fire somebody who is looking into the ethical behaviour of the prime minister

I’m always amazed that voters are so eager to fall for promises of accountability from politicians on the campaign trail. It’s a promise that they just can’t keep; not because politicians are in any way more evil than the rest of us, but merely because they are under far more scrutiny than most of us.

Of course, Harper should be smarter than to get into the hole that he’s now dug himself into. Not co-operating with an ethics commisioners investigation is just plain stupid.

Kevin Kelly has a nice round up of consensus web filters:

Like a lot of people, I find that the web is becoming my main source of news. Some of the sites I read are published by individuals, but I find the most informative sites are those published by groups of writers/editors/correspondents, including those put out by Main Steam Media (MSM). However for the past three months my main source of “what’s new” has been a new breed of website that collaboratively votes on the best links.

According to an article by Bob Holmes for New Scientist, a new study by Terry Hunt finds that humans decimated Easter Island on arrival:

Archaeologists had thought that humans first arrived at the island around 800 AD, based on radiocarbon dating of kitchen scraps and cooking fires. Since the first signs of severe deforestation do not appear until the 13th century, this suggests the Easter Islanders lived several centuries without serious impact on their environment.

Not so, says Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Hunt and Carl Lipo of California State University at Long Beach, US, radiocarbon-dated charcoal from the earliest human traces in a new excavation on the island. The site, Anakena, is Easter Island’s only sandy beach and has long been regarded as the likeliest spot for first colonists to settle. To their surprise, the wood dated no earlier than 1200 AD – several hundred years more recent than they had expected.

David L Chandler reports for New Scientist that there is no future for fusion power:

Nuclear fusion will never be a practical source of electrical power, argues a prominent scientist in the journal Science.

Even nuclear fusion’s staunchest advocates admit a power-producing fusion plant is still decades away at best, despite forty years of hard work and well over $20 billion spent on the research. But the new paper, personally backed by the journal’s editor, issues a strong challenge to the entire fusion programme, arguing that the whole massive endeavour is never likely to lead to anything practical or useful.

Now that that’s settled, we can get all those nuclear physicists working on some of the really important problems, like creating a variety of broccoli that tastes like chocolate.

Benji Smith explains why he hate frameworks in a wonderfully entertaining rant:

I’m currently in the planning stages of building a hosted Java web application (yes, it has to be Java, for a variety of reasons that I don’t feel like going into right now). In the process, I’m evaluating a bunch of J2EE portlet-enabled JSR-compliant MVC role-based CMS web service application container frameworks.

And after spending dozens of hours reading through feature lists and documentation, I’m ready to gouge out my eyes.

Physics Today reports that nuclear energy is making a comeback:

Some two dozen power plants are scheduled to be built or refurbished during the next five years in Canada, China, several European Union countries, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and South Africa. In the US and the UK, governmental preparations are under way that may lead to 15 new reactor orders by 2007.

Megan Quinn writes of how Cuba survived peak oil:

At the Organipónico de Alamar, a neighborhood agriculture project, a workers’ collective runs a large urban farm, a produce market and a restaurant. Hand tools and human labor replace oil-driven machinery. Worm cultivation and composting create productive soil. Drip irrigation conserves water, and the diverse, multi-hued produce provides the community with a rainbow of healthy foods.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s oil supply was cut in half, but contrary to the predictions of many peak oil theorists, Cubans have been able to cope.

It hasn’t been easy for them — the average Cuban, for example, has lost 30 pounds since the sudden decline in their oil supply — but it has been survivable, with all the nation’s social and political structures remaining intact.

I’ve been using PBwiki since shortly after they first made it available. It’s one of the few Web2.0 applications that I’ve found valuable enough to use regularly.

They offer a free, personal, password-protected wiki. A wiki is about the easiest way to create and edit a collection of web pages. Anybody who has used a wiki before has some idea of how versatile they can be. I use mine to collect my thoughts and store valuable information, like gift ideas for my wife and family, my favourite quotes from the books that I read, and maintenance logs on our lawn mower.

Anyways, I think it’s wonderful service and well worth looking at if you are at all interested in capturing your thoughts for later.

Disclosure: PBwiki is running a promotion where they will double the amount of storage space allotted to any of their users who post a link to their service. That I find the offer appealing should, I hope, indicate what I think of their service.

Kenneth S. Deffeyes claims that we’ve hit peak oil production:

In the January 2004 Current Events on this web site, I predicted that world oil production would peak on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 2005. In hindsight, that prediction was in error by three weeks. An update using the 2005 data shows that we passed the peak on December 16, 2005.

Among his other claims:

Since we have passed the peak without initiating major corrective measures, we now have to rely primarily on methods that we have already engineered. Long-term research and development projects, no matter how noble their objectives, have to take a back seat while we deal with the short-term problems. Long-term examples in the proposed 2007 US budget (Feb. 9, 2006 New York Times page A-18) include a 65 percent increase in the programs to produce ethanol from corn, a 25.8 percent increase for developing hydrogen fuel cell cars, and a 78.5 percent increase in spending on solar energy research. The Times reports that solar energy today supplies one percent of US electricity; the hope is to double that to 2 percent by the year 2025. By 2025, we’re going to be back in the Stone Age.

Tastes best with a grain of salt. I’m still hopeful for soft landing.

According to the Gematriculator this site is 44% evil.

I’m not sure where I picked up all this evil. It isn’t from Johnnie Moore, or Larry Borsato, or even the new Conservative government. Maybe I picked it up from Work.