The other night, while tuned in to the BBC World Service, I happened upon a fascinating interview with Nicholas Dunlop, co-founder of the Climate Parliament. He was saying that the answer to the climate problem would be the creation of a Renewable energy supergrid. Here is a transcript of part of the interview:

“This is a really key idea for finding our way out of the climate problem. If we share our clean energy resources, our solar and wind and hydroelectric power and geothermal and the others, over a wide area, over a whole region or a whole continent, then we can actually switch the whole world economy to clean energy much more quickly than most governments currently imagine.

The way you do this is you use high-voltage direct current cables to link up the region, and these can can transmit energy over long distances – thousands of kilometers – with very little loss of energy along the way. They work well under water. You can bury them so they are out of sight.

And what that would enable us to do is to draw essentially unlimited solar energy from the world’s deserts and dry lands, where you’ve got the sun shining all day everyday, and you can harness that energy through photovoltaic panels, but also through solar-thermal power stations which use mirrors to concentrate the sun’s heat and boil water and drive a steam turbine.

Secondly, you can make wind energy a much more reliable resource. We all know that if you are in just one location the wind comes and goes, but over a wide area the wind’s always blowing in some places, so if you harness wind over a wide area you get a very steady supply.

And thirdly, we could link everybody to the big hydro-electric dams in the mountain ranges so that we could use hydro power as back-up to solar and wind energy to enable us to get a hundred percent reliability and make it a hundred percent reliable.

In the process, many parts of the world are going to make a lot of money.  For example Scotland, which is the Saudi Arabia of wind and rain, could actually become a major exporter of wind power. Or Rajasthan and India, which has wall-to-wall sunshine year round in the Rajasthan desert, could be a solar power house for the India sub-continent, and so on …”

For more info on these ideas check out the Eparliament web site.

When your mind is full of distracting thoughts and worries, why not try using this technique to stop thinking, calm down, and bring everything back into focus…

“To understand how you might be thinking
thoughts without realizing it, stop right now,
close your eyes, and do not think a single
thought for ten seconds.

If thoughts came even though you decided to
stop them, you know thoughts are happening
in your life without your knowledge of them.
If your mind will not obey you and stop for
ten seconds, can you imagine the amount of
thoughts that are being produced in one day?

You can change this and master your mind. All
it takes is practicing the process of not thinking
a thought for ten seconds. In a short amount
of time you will be able to stop all thoughts for
ten seconds, fifteen seconds, thirty seconds,
and so on, until you are the one who decides
whether you will think a thought or not. The
peace that comes when you are the master of
your mind is indescribable, and along with
that you will also be a master of the law of
attraction. Imagine that!”

~ From The Secret Daily Teachings by Rhonda Byrne

I’ve just been reading how Rhondda Byrne used this “secret” technique to rid herself of reading glasses:

“I asked, and then I visualized myself without reading glasses in every situation.

My eyesight became clear in three days. I didn’t notice the three days that it took because I KNEW it was done in the moment I asked. If I had noticed the three days that it took, then I would have been noticing that it was not already done.

I totally believed and KNEW it was done. I had absolute faith. I can just as easily say that it took me three days to realize that my eyes were seeing clearly or that it took me three days to adjust to my clear eyes. That would be true, because I knew the moment I asked that it had been given to me, and I had absolutely no doubt whatsoever. From that state of knowing, my eyesight became clear in three days.”

Extracted from The Secret Daily Teachings by Rhonda Byrne.
Another good read: Improve Your Eyesight: A Guide to the Bates Method for Better Eyesight Without Glasses by Jonathan Barnes.

Tired of keeping a list of passwords up to date, or can’t remember which password goes with which site? Fed up remembering numerous log-in details, identities, and filling in forms with the same details over and over again?

Well, I’ve been testing out this cool new password manager and form-filler called MyVidoop. It’s free, very easy to use, and offers all these advantages:

* Never enter another username and password or answer another challenge question.
* Eliminate hassles and frustration.
* Use just one click to access all websites.
* Simplify and organize your online activities – and your life.
* Keeps track of all of your login details.
* Automatically fills in your information when you enter a site.
* Completes online forms.

MyVidoop uses a new system called OpenID, an easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet, which is fast catching on as a new Web standard.

After registration, you download a plugin for either Internet Explorer or Firefox. You can then begin visiting your favorite sites. MyVidoop’s password manager does the rest.

Conclusion: I think it’s the best password manager I’ve ever tried!

Traffic to the popular micro-blogging site Twitter has already more than trebled just this year, according to web analysts HitWise. Twitter now ranks as 7th within the Social Networking category, up from 23rd just 3 weeks ago!

The amazing increase follows the media attention generated by the likes of Stephen Fry (owner of the world’s second favourite Twitter feed after Barack Obama) and Jonathon Ross. However, Twitter still has a long way to catch up with FaceBook and YouTube, which together account for nearly 60% of social networking visits.

Twitter hasn’t quite achieved world domination yet, with less than one per cent of all social networking traffic, but it’s growing at an exponential rate: Over the last 12 months traffic to Twitter.com has increased 27 fold. However, the service is probably even more popular than the numbers imply – If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterrific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers would be even higher.

You can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/wisecat2

Click is a fascinating new book about the Internet’s influence on our lives. Here’s the official book description:

“In one short decade, the internet has become a critical part of our everyday lives. In this timely new book, internet data analysis expert Bill Tancer makes sense of why this is, and reveals what our internet usage says about us and our future – because asking people what they do is never as reliable as watching what they do.

Did the online community really “create” the Arctic Monkeys? Can we really predict the next winner of Strictly Come Dancing? Who are the new winners and losers in the world of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and online poker?

In Click, Bill Tancer takes us behind the scenes into the massive database of online intelligence to reveal the naked truth about how we use the web, navigate to sites and search for information; he describes in unmatched detail explanations about our lives, our interests, our thoughts, our fears and our dreams.

As online directories replace the yellow pages, search engines replace traditional research and news sites replace newsprint, we live in an age in which we’ve come to rely tremendously on the internet for many purposes.Through our usage, we leave behind an amazing trail of information about ourselves – our “clickstream” – and the direction in which we are headed that Click exposes and explains here for the first time.”

See what’s happening – right now – on Twitter, with Twitter Search
#UKSnow is the hot topic of the moment.
It’s also interesting that Stephen Fry is the 3rd most followed Twitter user in the world! The top 10.000 most followed Twitter users
Twitter has increased its traffic 10-fold over the last year and is now the 18th most visited social site.

According to Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret, we should look for the good in every single thing even if it appears to be negative:

“If we can know that good is all there is, then we will see a negative situation transform into all good. Most people keep the good away from themselves because they label something as bad, and then, of course, that becomes their reality. But there is no bad in the Universe; it is just our inablity to see things clearly from a bigger perspective.”

Here’s an example of how this bit of advice helped me: I’ve had a lot of computer problems just recently, with endless “blue screen of death” crashes. This lead to me experimenting with lots of free system management programs in an attempt to fix the problem.

In the process I’ve come across such little gems as WinPatrol which not only takes up little resources, but will do a whole bunch of things including monitor your PC for unexpected changes, check for spyware, and get your machine up and running a lot faster by delaying non-essential startup programs by up to an hour.

Other useful stuff I found included FixIt Utilities 7, easy-to-use diagnostic and maintenance tools, FCleaner, an all-in-one optimization tool, Quick Startup, which will give you more information and control over processes running in the background, and AlertThingy2, a really useful application for displaying the latest updates from all your social networks.

So, even though I may not of got to the root of my problem yet, the negative situation has led me on a fantastic voyage of discovery, and I now have some great new software installed.