Much of the talk over the past few days in the UK has been about the Liberal Democrats and also their potential new leader, Menzies Campbell; his name is pronounced 'Mingis' or, simply, 'Ming', for short. This has inevitably led to depictions in various newspapers (particularly with the politicking / machinations of the Lib Dems infighting) of him as Ming the Merciless. The BBC News website was even speculating on what his followers should be called (Mingers? Mingons? Mingites? Mingles?)
Anyway, all this Ming-related malarkey reminded me of another Ming: FlemMING Funch, an early supporter/designer/hoster/IT guru on the Global Ideas Bank. So I went back to his own Ming blog and found a few gems. In particular:
- a great round-up of Web 2.0 software applications
and
- the Edge's annual question; this year's is "What's Your Dangerous Idea?" and there are lots of interesting people giving interesting responses, including Kevin Kelly, Martin Seligman, Martin Rees, Craig Venter, Matt Ridley, Jared Diamond, Douglas Rushkoff, and Stewart Brand. My personal favourite? Susan Blackmore: "Everything is pointless", which cheered me up no end.
Feel free to add your dangerous idea below....
Stewart Brand also posited a number of "dangerous" (if not new) ideas for environmentalists in a May 2005 Technology Review article. This included a re-consideration of nuclear power. He has also recently endorsed a novel about the American nuclear power industry written by a longtime nuclear engineer that's designed to give the general public a clear picture of how a US nuclear plant is operated (warts and all) and how an accident might be handled. This book is available at no cost on the net. See http://RadDecision.blogspot.com
Posted by: James Aach | January 10, 2006 at 06:41 PM