I forgot to post about this a couple of weeks back but it's worth going back to as it's quite important apropos my previous posts about energy displays and how we can relate to the resources we use. Google's remit to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" is now being extended to electricity use with their announcement of Google PowerMeter. They are hanging this on the proposed installation of smart meters in the US and the need to be able to see the data these meters collect and compare it to what other people use.

"But deploying smart meters alone isn't enough. This needs to be coupled with a strategy to provide customers with easy access to energy information. That's why we believe that open protocols and standards should serve as the cornerstone of smart grid projects.... We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in an open standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see your data, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it."
Power to the People, Official Google Blog, 2nd February 2009

All very interesting. I wonder whether there is a fit here for companies working on energy displays, an intermediary step towards smart metering and smart grids? There are a number of devices out there that work on the basis of clipping a sensor to the cable coming into your home that then sends information wirelessly to a display you can easily see as well as saving this data for viewing on your computer. Presumably if these sensors could be made cheaply I could clip them to all the electrical devices in my home, skip the display and have them feeding directly to a website that collated that information, such as Google PowerMeter. This would be very attractive as the resulting data could be anonymised for comparison purposes, adding value to the service and allow for the collection of data regarding the average power consumption of individual devices. Rather than a separate display this data could just be viewed through an iPhone app or equivalent with some fancy animations to better visualise how much power you're pulling. I wonder if a powerstrip with these sensors built-in could be made that would also be remotely addressable? You could then cycle the power on devices that were plugged into the strip directly from the app.

Update: great quote in the video from Google explaining PowerMeter:

"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it."
Lord Kelvin

... which applies to so many aspects of the way we live our lives: if you cannot measure it you also tend to ignore it or not value it.

A British and a French nuclear powered submarine collide beneath the Atlantic. Both are nuclear armed. A near catastrophe, but also a reminder that, to quote The Abyss, we tolerate "World War Three in a can" tooling round the world's oceans.

They are part of a nuclear deterrent, a second-strike capability, though those waters have been muddied by idiots, that says no state would annihilate another state that could then annihilate them in return. These submarines give a state that capability as they are hard to find and terrifyingly heavily armed, pretty much assuring the complete destruction of an aggressor. So essential is this capability to the UK's 'defence' that it is proposed the current Trident system will be replaced at a cost of £20 billion.

But how essential is this Cold War anachronism?

As far as I'm aware only China and Russia have strategic ballistic missiles in the numbers that pose a serious threat of first-strike annihilation that would make one contemplate needing a revenging deterrence of the sort that this class of submarine represents. The likelihood of nuclear war with either of these states is, at this point in time and for the forseeable future, vanishingly small and, given the UK's membership of a nuclear armed military alliance, not retaliation that the UK need participate in.

With final approval of a renewal of Trident not until 2012 perhaps the prevailing economic climate will stall spending on more of these terrible weapons of mass destruction rather than logical reasoning. Not the best result, but a better result than the situation as it stands now when the risk of serious accident is the biggest threat we face.

Two amazing things available through the magic of the web that are cheering me up at the moment are Spotify and Quake Live.

Spotify is a cross-platform music player that streams tunes to your computer from its own servers. You type in an artist's name and back comes a list of all the tracks they have in their system. A double-click later and you're listening to a track of your choosing. You can create and share playlists and share links to tracks provided the person you're sharing with has signed up too. The free version is punctuated by advertising messages but paid accounts are available. I'd be happy to hand Spotify details of my entire iTunes library and, provided they achieved an 80% plus match to tunes I already had then I'd sign up. One day we'll have consistently fast data connections everywhere and local file storage will be a quaint relic of a bygone era.

Quake Live is essentially Quake 3 but accessible through your web browser. It's only available on Windows / Explorer / Firefox setups at the moment. I cannot believe the original game came out in 1999. Given I remember Wolfenstein and Doom when they first came out I feel old. Still, mulitplayer Quake is fantastic and I like this pure pick up and play version with persistent statistics.

Isn't it great that these things are essentially free?

While re-reading an article about green electricity over on Head Heritage I noticed a call they'd put out to hit E.ON with a Google bomb by posting links to nonewcoal.org.uk while using eon as the linktext. According to the post as of 13th November 2008 nonewcoal.org.uk had reached position 13 within a couple of weeks from being nowhere in the top 50 for this search term prior to this time. As of writing this it is advanced to position 5 for a search for eon in Google's results pages. Good going! Another collective action problem solved through the social power of the web.

I was playing the beautiful looking Mirror's Edge the other day and was struck by the way in which the first person perspective was very similar to that used in the Kathryn Bigelow directed Strange Days. I haven't seen this film since it came out so don't clearly recall it. Has anyone else made that link?

While on the subject of Kathryn Bigelow I notice, having been quiet for a few years, she has a new film coming out called 'The Hurt Locker'. I think this gives credence to the theory that Hollywood is running out of film titles. Hmm.

Thinking about Directors I haven't heard from for a while but whose films I liked I noticed on the credits of the last Battlestar Galactica episode The Oath that John Dahl took the credit. Surely not the Director of The Last Seduction and other contemporary noir films?