I’ve been having an interesting discussion over the past couple of days with my buddy Alex, an historian of considerable merit here in Melbourne. Alex has come to my rescue in this election period. Nobody else I know outside  the US has a decent handle on the race to the White House, but it turns out that Al has been keeping pace in his quiet fashion. Great news for me, so I thought I’d pop this video up to celebrate the fact that someone I know will now get the joke…I hope! So Al, this clip goes out to you.

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You may have heard that a new material has been produced, made of carbon nanotubes, that is blacker than anything ever, ever. It’s really, really dark. Here’s a photo of it with two other very dark things taken with a flash.

Nanotubes are so fucking sweet.

Reuters revealed today that Canada has added the USA and Israel to a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured. I like Canada, and most of the Canadians I’ve met, both online and in meatspace, have been very cool indeed. There’s a short list of countries that my partner and I have been talking over for a while; we will probably leave Australia for one of them as soon as we’ve both completed our current degrees.

Canada made a big move up the list a couple of days ago when I was lazily clicking around on the World Freedom Atlas, which is a single world map with various overlays rating countries by such variables as freedom of speech; political, social and economic equality of women; free elections; workers’ rights, and so on. After looking at dozens of different overlays, I started to notice that Canada was almost always at the extreme of the good end of the scale, more often than Sweden or Denmark, which seemed to be the runners-up.

All of these countries have serious weather issues; coming from Australia, I think Northern Europe would be pretty hard to get used to - but from what I can tell by reading the poor suffering laments of Canadians, they deal with temperature ranges of 70-80 degrees celsius. Summers hitting 40c, winters hitting -35c. I wonder if the brutal weather brings out the best in people somehow. Maybe we’ll try Spain.

Macworld is over, I think. I’m pretty sure, because my newsfeeds have started displaying non-Apple stories again. While I’ve never been a huge fan of Apple products, I am impressed by how much free advertising they manage to generate, how many people they can convince that purchasing an overpriced product will make them part of a “community”, and they do make some pretty things, if you like white.

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When the time came recently to get back into the job market, I was forced to part with some beloved facial hair; my bushy grey beard, and more importantly, my stunning chinnytails. The end result is bleak, but very presentable.

The New York Times is hosting a very stark graphic, showing the casualties suffered by US, coalition, and local troops and police in Iraq last year.  While this is a sobering image of the reported human toll, consider that the US has lost a little of 3,900 troops as of early January 2008. At the same time the civilian death toll is confirmed at over 80,000 by British research group Iraq Body Count, which only counts documented deaths by violence.  It’s disappointing to see how little news we get in our news these days.

Gizmodo has video and a bunch of pics showcasing Alienware’s new behemoth 2880×900 curved monitor, which will be ready by the second half of the year.  If you’re not much of a gaming enthusiast, perhaps you’ll prefer gawking at Panasonic’s new 150 inch plasma TV, just unveiled at CES 2008.

From the rootkit scandal to the news that Sony BMG is dropping DRM for some digital music sales only took a couple of years. Not a very steep learning curve, compared to the four seconds it takes a normal person to realise that DRM is bad for everyone, but hey, at least it’s starting to sink in.

I got very excited for a moment when I saw this. It’s an Asus eeePC being demonstrated at CES 2008 with WiMAX support. Then I realised that by the time anyone actually offers WiMAX, Asus will be up to the hhhPC at the very least.