Always a good steward of her natural resources and forward-thinking, Norway's petroleum fund which reinvests proceeds from oil profits, and is edging towards a trillion dollars, translating into a tidy $165 000 (en million norsk kronen) pay-out for each of the land's five million inhabitants, seems to be having a bit of a crisis of conscience that I wish might plague other public pensions well.
Sunday 2 March 2014
sovereign wealth or statlig investerings
catagories: ๐ณ๐ด, ๐ฑ, environment
vernacular or pain-compliance
Not to glorify an overly weaponised culture, but did you know that like scuba-diving (a self-contained underwater breathing-apparatus) that a taser electroshock gun is a trade-marked abbreviation for Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle, the NASA researcher who developed the prototype in 1974 naming it in honour of his boyhood hero's daring adventures?
catagories: ๐, technology and innovation
Saturday 1 March 2014
playbill or agnes dei
Recently, I had the chance to see the local community theatre produce an excellent performance of John Pielmeyer's play Agnes of God. I recall there was a 1985 cinematic adaptation of the piece starring Jane Fonda as court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Martha Livingston, and was rather controversial movie, the play itself a dramatization of an actual tragic case.
quitsies, keepsies
The Local (the German daily in English) has an interesting profile of an engineer from Dรผsseldorf who proposes to revolutionize exploiting renewable and passive energy by installing giant spherical collectors mounted on brackets to focus heat generated by sunlight so power can be squeezed out of it.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ก, environment
the dandy warhols or the factory method
telescreens have no off switch or the ballad of max headroom
In more underwhelming news, whose aggressions were probably always buried in some consent boilerplate, comes the revelation (read, natural consequence) that Her Majesty's spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) ran a program under the codename Optic Nerve that captured billions of snapshots from video chat sessions, indiscriminate and warrantless to be sure.