The Internet is the perfect tool for spreading memes, good and appalling. This one not only saved its users a fortune, but improved the traffic-jam experience, contributed to fighting global warming and supported the farming industry. Pity it was illegal and cost some of its perpetrators a bomb.

Some of the Welsh have been running their diesel cars on cooking oil from the local supermarket for some months, partly because its cheaper than petrol station fuel which is taxed till it hurts. But the whole thing started during the blockades of British Petrol stations a couple of years ago when fuel suddenly dried up. John Nicholson decided to try cooking oil to fuel his car because his wife, a nurse, needed to be mobile. Not only did it work at the time, but it worked better than proprietary brands and was much cheaper. So he setup a bio fuels website and Welsh drivers started getting the idea.

Now the cover has been blown and the swingeing fines are being handed out. In Germany you get a tax rebate and a pat on the head for using renewable fuels, in Britain you get a boot up the exhaust pipe and a massive fine. Looks like the Anglo rhetoric about environmental responsibility continues to be just that, smoke blowing.

However, if you pay the tax, about 26p a litre, the fuel becomes legal again and as the Guardian Says
But there is something appealingly anti-establishment about all this; something subversive about how, largely on individual initiative, undertaken without flourish or fanfare, it is possible to sidestep the multinationals and the government and power your car in a natural, clean and efficient way. Today. All you need is a bit of cooking oil, new or second-hand, and the relevant tax return form, available to download from Nicholson's biopower website. </blockquote>

The revolution will be quite small and very quiet, downloadable from the Internet, and smell like dinner.

It turns out that Pakistan and North Korea, both suffering from economics that are going round and round and about to vanish down the toilet, came up with a novel approach to trade. The Koreans supplied Pakistan with rocket technology and Pakistan supplied the technology for building warheads. Both countries have well educated scientists and technicians perfectly capable of doing the physical work so all that had to be traded was the knowledge and you can do that in half a dozen emails, with attachments. The rest of the story is at The New Yorker

A former senior Pakistani official told me that his government's contacts with North Korea increased dramatically in 1997; the Pakistani economy had foundered, and there was "no more money" to pay for North Korean missile support, so the Pakistani government began paying for missiles by providing "some of the know-how and the specifics." Pakistan helped North Korea conduct a series of "cold tests," simulated nuclear explosions, using natural uranium, which are necessary to determine whether a nuclear device will detonate properly. Pakistan also gave the North Korean intelligence service advice on "how to fly under the radar," as the former official put it—that is, how to hide nuclear research from American satellites and U.S. and South Korean intelligence agents.

• Yemen is now an ally in the War on terror
• The missiles weren't going to Iran or Iraq.

A couple of mathematicians have done some analysis of Language and come up with a reason there are either extremely primitive languages, (Orangutan, Gibbon, 16 Year Old male) or complete, coherent and highly complex ones.

The secret is that language is mathematically an emergent phenomenon that exists in a crucial, and very limited zone where the benefits to the listener and speaker are optimized. Outside that range there is no language at all, when it happens, it happens very suddenly and without transitional phases.

According to this article in Nature

Ferrer i Cancho and Solé have devised a mathematical model in which the cost of using a language depends on the balance between these conflicting preferences. They calculate the properties of the lexicon that requires minimal effort for different degrees of compromise, from exhaustive vocabularies to one-word languages.

They find that the change from one extreme to the other does not happen smoothly. There is a jump in the amount of communication, from very little to near-perfect, at a certain value of the relative weightings of speaker and hearer preferences.

This will slam the brakes on all those who have the weird idea that cloning themselves might be a clever idea. In an experiment funded by Genetic Savings & Clone (gotta hate that) Texas A&M University has cloned a cat, only to discover that, despite being genetically identical, parent? and clone have different coloured coats and different markings.

The process from conception, in any mode, to birth is an unfolding and it can be modified and interrupted, diverted and switched at any number of points. Clones, twins, grafts etc are ONLY genetically identical, and we are all "sensitive to initial conditions" plus all the other conditions in which the development occurs.

Cloning mayt be a valuable tool for lots ofthings, but the only nightmares to come from it will be the damaged and arrested clones themselves, not the parade ground full of Hitlers.

Ming TV is a great blog and this item gets my points for the day. (Having just done my moderator thing on /. I'm completely seized with the red haze of power. 5 Points to burn trying to push up the standards despite the fact that most of my submissions get flicked.) Anyway, he quotes Fuller:

"I look for what needs to be done.... After all, that’s how the universe designs itself."

Life might seem meaningless unless you realize that you have an important role in co-designing the continued evolution of the universe. There are lots of things to do, so it would be silly to have a meaningless life.