zidouta.com

Financial Times, The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil:

“When he boarded his flight from London to Oslo, Farouk al-Kasim, a young Iraqi geologist, knew his life would never again be the same. Norway was a country about as different as it was possible to imagine from his home, the Iraqi port city of Basra. He had no job to go to, and no idea of how he would make a living in the far north. It was May 1968 and al-Kasim had just resigned from his post at the Iraq Petroleum Company. To do so, he had had to come to the UK, where the consortium of western companies that still controlled most of his country’s oil production had its headquarters.”

Live Science: “Designs for a doomsday vault for seeds of the world, to be carved deep into frozen rock on an island not far from the North Pole, were revealed today by the government of Norway.”

Zie ook Wikipedia: Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

• Record meteorite hit Norway – Aftenposten.no
  “As Wednesday morning dawned, northern Norway was hit with an impact comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.” – Nooit meer slapen.
  (tags: norway space meteorite)
• Dreams and Nightmares of the African Astronauts
  “Italian artist Marco Boggio Sella travelled to Burkina Faso in search of people who had never heard about the moon landing. “
  (tags: art space culture burkinafaso)
• China leads world in rainmaking
  “The rainmaking army uses rockets, artillery and aircraft to sow chemicals and artificially induce rain in times of need, said an official with the bureau’s Department of Forecasting Services and Disaster Mitigation.”
  (tags: china rain weather)
• China says it made rain to wash off sand – Weather – MSNBC.com
  “Rockets launched with chemicals to trigger rain after huge storm”
  (tags: china cloudseeding weather)
• Schneier on Security: Privacy as Contextual Integrity
  “Contextual integrity ties adequate protection for privacy to norms of specific contexts, demanding that information gathering and dissemination be appropriate to that context and obey the governing norms of distribution within it.”
  (tags: privacy)
• New Scientist Technology – Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites
  “New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.”
  (tags: privacy datamining nsa socialnetworks semanticweb)