Rants ‘n’ Raves
Rave: Diver invents artifical “Gills”
An interesting article on the Beeb’s website today.
Inventor and diving enthusiast Alon Bodner from Israel, has developed a prototype underwater breathing system that extracts oxygen directly from seawater, potentially doing away with the need for compressed air tanks in the future.
The battery-powered artificial gill system, utilises a high-speed centrifuge to lower the pressure of seawater in a small sealed chamber in order to extract the small amount of dissolved air that already exists in water and supply breathable oxygen to scuba divers.
+21Rant: Exxon and Shell – taking greed to a new level
Not content with the already obscene level of profit made in recent years, oil Leviathans Shell and Exxon have both reported record profits – Shell’s profits setting a new all-time corporate profit record in the UK and Exxons in the WORLD!
And all this in a week where scientists around the world have issued a Stark warning about climate change and NASA notes that 2005 was the hottest year on record for our warming planet.
+28Rant: Dumb and Dubya
Dubya’s state of the union address this year was pretty much as expected and enough to make most of us roll our eyes skyward at least once…
His description of a country that “is being held hostage by a small elite that is isolating and repressing it’s people” seemed at last like an admission of the failings of his administration…until we realised he was talking about Iran. I’m no advocate of Iran as a nuclear power, but after the whole Iraq fiasco, it must be clear to the governments of other middle eastern countries that the best way to avoid a US-led invasion is to point a couple of warheads down the most likely invasion route!
+20Rave: Habib Koite
Photo Credit: by Tom Beetz (Habib Koit) (CC-BY-2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
A couple of weeks ago, I popped over to see two of my best friends and to attend my Godson’s birthday party.
After all the little darlings had run out of the energy they obtained from ingesting copious quantities of processed sugar all day, we finally packed them off to bed and gratefully collapsed in the conservatory. Around midnight, we flicked on the radio and over a large coffee, listened to Bob Harris on BBC Radio2.
+17Rant: Christian Coalition?
Oops! Another US blunder, highlighted today on the BBC website which should serve to remind us that religious extremism is by no means restricted to the Islam faith.
Right wing “christian” nutcase (and FAR more worrying – ex presidential candidate) Pat Robertson has publicly urged the US to assassinate the new thorn in their side – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
+16Rant: Why does everything have to be child friendly?
A recent story on the BBC website has got me thinking about an aspect of modern parenthood that has been a niggle of mine for awhile.
Why do parents seem to expect that every place has to be child-friendly?
Don’t get me wrong…I like kids and although I don’t have any of my own (I can almost hear all the parents out there dismissing my standpoint already with that matronising little limp-wristed wave that is in popular use these days). I appreciate the fact that for a long time, many places frequented by parents with young children had an appalling lack of facilities and this situation needed to be redressed.
+21Rant: African Dictatorship for Dummies
(An excerpt from Robert Mugabe’s autobiography “My boyfriend’s back and there’s going to be trouble…”)
Are you having trouble with your peasant population? Are they starting to grumble about not having all the expected luxuries like enough food, decent housing and clean water?
+22