Covalent Solar Idea

MIT spin out, covalent solar have a great product that can turn sheets of glass into solar collectors. A special dye on the surface captures light within a glass sheet. The light travels through the glass untill it reaches the edges and can be fed into long thin photovoltaic cells built into a frame. This allows a large area of sun light to be focused on a much smaller area of photovoltaics (which are expensive).

The improvement idea is simple, to reduce the area of photovoltaics further, mirror all but 1 edge of the glass sheet.

China Launches Stock Exchange to Superman Theme Tune

This news video shows china’s leaders opening a new nasdaq-style stock exchange.

Love the choice of background tune – the epic superman intro!

Syringe reuse designed out

Marc koska shows off his single use syringe design.

The syringe is designed to break after it’s used, making patient to patient blood transfer impossible.

“Simple” innovations to big problems like these are inspirational.

Feeling Conned by GoDaddy

Should’ve known they would charge for vital services like email forwarding.

GoDaddy has the classic over busy presentation that accompanies hidden fee syndrome.

What will the Hermaphrodites think?

With approximately one in a hundred people being born with no obvious gender identity,  news about security scanners producing ghostly nude portraits is going down poorly. Even the other 99% of people seem to hate this innovation.

The weak safeguards that are being put in place are just laughable.

Angry at UK file-sharing policy

The audio and video industry are acting like a baby that has had one of it’s toys taken away. Our government is playing mummy and trying to get the toy back for little precious. They need to grow up and deal with their failing business model like adults.

Each download should be considered a free advert for the artist’s next concert or free advert for the films cuddly character or whatever.

The rest of the economy could only dream of such a deep and all pervasive advertising campaign!

Cutting peoples access to a human right, to information, to the internet is not a mature response.

DNA Fighting Illegal Logging

It’s good to see progress on the illegal logging issue.

By creating a database of DNA samples from legitmate timber sources it should be easy to check if any peice of wood has come from a destructive operation.

Take Back Your Brain!

Fight the corporations with their own weapons! Lynn from takebackyourbrain.com suggests running your own personalised campaigns to compete for your own attention and money!

I left this comment:

Hiya Lynn, great blog concept! I just read it all, every post! This idea of carrying a conversation starter is inspired! Your best.

My only quarrel would be with the posts where you talk about buying things as personal advertising successes. They may be successes for you but for the reader they blemish the TakeBackYourBrian.com offering.

But posts about overcoming injury and motivation are superb.

Keep up the good work! Mat

Don’t Abolish all Interest

Both Robert and the 7th signatory argue valid points but this issue is more complex.

If you were to lend say $1000, you would want some kind of reward for risking the loan and hopefully your borrower would want to pay you back in full and reward you with a little something to say thanks.

So interest is no bad thing because no-one wants to borrow all the money in the world, only some of it.

The problem is that all the money in the world has been created (printed) and then lent to us through our governments.

So it turns out that collectively, we have borrowed all the money in the world and we have to pay interest to the creators that is impossible to pay because the money to pay was not created.

So only interest added when money is created should be abolished?

Robotic Waste Collector

Dustbot – What a great concept! A fleet of automated units that run around town collecting waste on demand.