ewt | Link round-up

It's way time for a link round-up.

PacWind make a Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine that appears solid to birds even at higher rotation speeds - too bad it's a little too large for domestic urban use...

These felt bags made from factory wool waste unzip entirely to fold flat. Pretty!

Eco-Village in Craik, Saskatchewan. I'll be watching this to see how it turns out.

Falk Sleeping Bag - possibly a good addition to emergency kit?

The Internet is for Meta-Analysis, by

gnimmel. I really, really want to see this as a poster.

Research finds music training 'tunes' human auditory system; I'm really glad that they're showing support for my profession, but I question the quality of the research. Maybe people who have good auditory wossname are more likely to have continued with music lessons for more than two years? Bah.

Simuze appears to be some sort of creative-commons music site. There goes the Mammoth Project. Only, it's in Dutch, and I don't see an 'English' button anywhere. I guess that's okay for something in beta...

Depressed mothers can still be good moms. Again, I don't like the way the science is being presented here; it seems to have a lot more to do with knowledge and experience than depression, and really to make the research valid they'd have to compare depressed and normal mothers both from some sort of starting point and after undergoing the same training. I'm not saying that some training can't help some people, or that depressed mothers can't be good moms - just that they've not set up a control, and the study appears to be about education in those who are, incidentally, depressed, rather than comparing skills of depressed to 'normal' (whatever that is) mothers. The title is pretty misleading.

How to build your own ECG machine. Brilliant. See also OpenEEG.

Thumb drives get bigger and bigger. I wonder about the applications for tiny computers... I know there are mp3 players out there that have significant storage and can act as USB hosts for cameras and other devices. I'm wondering about things that are basically terminals with net access and so on, running off of a USB drive you plug in.

Bayonet fitting 2W lightbulbs, each as bright as a 25W incandescent. Still cheaper on eBay, I suspect... but it's nice to see these actually entering the market here. They make very nice little work lights, and a few of them light up a room quite happily. They also last aaaaages.

Little old granny puts up fight to be able to use cannabis for pain relief.

Interview with Rosamond Naylor on Global Food Security. Complex stuff, and important.

Why so important? Well, if you thought the world was crowded now...World population to hit 9.2 billion by 2050.

Physical and psychological torture has similar impact. Poor grammar aside, I've been saying this for years as regards abuse.

Top 5 Things that should be taught in every school - this is rather US-centric, but the basic concepts are quite valid. I guess I did alright - "communication skills" sounds an awful lot like English class to me, although learning French as a second language probably helped a lot. We had health classes too. Thing is, I know my parents taught me at least some of that stuff, or tried to... why is it the responsibility of the school to teach these things? I mean, I agree it makes good sense to educate citizens to not be crap, but all of these things are also beneficial to the actual student. What should be the job of parents, and what of schools?

It's worth telling you again about the Geek Scrapheap Challenge II, Saturday 24th March. I posted about this way back in February and then didn't say anything for a while - oops! But, um, please come.

Photography by

lynnyn. Some of this makes me pretty nostalgic for God's Country...

Sack Patsy - I admit I haven't read all the details, but Dr Crippen advertised it so it must be good, right? Um.

Right. Now I don't have to use a scroll button to get through all my tabs...