JULY 13th, 2010
We mentioned Copenhagen recently on this blog, as they have laudably decreed that all new buildings built in the city will have to have green roofs. Now retired architect William Baldrick wants to go one better and design a green canopy for the new Columbia River Crossing bridge being built between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. As well as mitigating the bridges carbon footprint, the canopy will also create a pleasant park for local residents and will serve as an attraction for tourists (hopefully tourists travelling by foot!)
Source: Inhabitat
JULY 13th, 2010
Yesterday the brilliantly named Carne Ross, spoke to the Chilcot Inquiry and for a few glorious hours the old boys club actually resembled a commission that was trying to learn the causes and lessons of the Iraq invasion. Carne Ross worked at the foreign office before resigning in the wake of the invasion. His position involved him reading all the UK and US intelligence every working day for the four and a half years of his posting as well as talking at length with international experts concerning Iraq’s WMD situation. The full post is available on the website, and I wholeheartedly recommend reading it in full here. For those of you that are too busy here are some germane quotes from the transcript:
“During my posting, at no time did HMG assess that Iraq’s WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests. On the contrary, it was the commonly-held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained.”
“This process of exaggeration (of the dossier) was gradual, and proceeded by accretion and editing from document to document, in a way that allowed those participating to convince themselves that they were not engaged in blatant dishonesty. But this process led to highly misleading statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in their totality, lies.”
“The UN charter states that only the Security Council can authorise the use of force (except in cases of self-defence). Reviewing these points, it is clear that in terms of the resolutions presented by the UK itself, the subsequent invasion was not authorised by the Security Council and was thus illegal. The clearest evidence of this is the fact that the UK sought an authorising resolution and failed to get it.”
Source: Iraq Inquiry
JULY 13th, 2010
One of the great things about technology is that it constantly forces us to change the way we think about reacting with our environment. Intel are designing a motion sensor remote control that will be able to detect the user by the movements that they make. So in the future when children want to watch films their parents have deemed unsuitable, instead of trawling through relatives birthdays to guess a passkey, they will have to try and ape their parents remote control techniques. Nothing ever really changes, it just occasionally gets updated for a new generation.
Source: PSFK
