The trial of the Pirate Bay operators in Sweden has generated huge amounts of media coverage. But one of the most interesting things about Pirate Bay hasn’t got a mention.

In his daily dispatches for WiReD, court correspondent Oscar Schwartz swoons over the boyish charm of “likeable” and “winning” Pirate Bay PR guy Peter Sunde. But there seems to be something about Pirate Bay that no one wants you to read: its debt to one of the most notorious fascists in Europe.

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Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission.

Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN’s IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.

One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.

The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure, and a vote of confidence in Japan’s native marine and astronomical research. Publicly-funded science in the West uniformly backs the hypothesis that industrial influence is primarily responsible for climate change, although fissures have appeared recently. Only one of the five top Japanese scientists commissioned here concurs with the man-made global warming hypothesis.

JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields, and acts as a government advisory panel. The report appeared last month but has received curiously little attention. So The Register commissioned a translation of the document – the first to appear in the West in any form. Below you’ll find some of the key findings – but first, a summary.

see the Translation at The Register.

Don’t judge a book by the title. Especially if the title is something like Cyburbia. James Harkin, who worked with Adam Curtis on The Trap, has produced the first proper full-length critique of Web 2.0 – tracing the daftness back to the cybernetics pioneers of the 1940s.

It’s odd that something with so much hype as Web 2.0 has received so little intelligent criticism. Half of Nick Carr’s The Big Switch, looked at the social and psychological implications, and he’s following up at length in The Shallows.

But Cyburbia takes a different approach. By looking at the mania for feedback in a historical context, Harkin finds a common thread in subjects as diverse as military strategy, TV shows like Lost, as well as the interwebs.

Q. We’re used to cyber-everything but can you define cybernetics for us?

Harkin: There are a lot of definitions but the simple idea I use is this idea that what distinguishes human beings, or what’ smost important about humans, is that they exist on a continuous information loop defined by a constant stream of messages we’re sending or receiving.

Now you can interpret the world in that way – me picking up a glass, say – but it is just a metaphor. The story of my book is how this metaphor, created by Norbert Wiener, because of its beauty, became the inspiration for a new medium and influencing how we live. It’s given rise to all this incredible technology, but the idea of fitting ourselves into that mould will mean we’re the losers.

The central image of the book is Cyburbia, this strange alternate world where we watch each other and the minutiae of each others’ lives.

You might have stared out of your window in suburbia in the 1950s and seen a few people across the street, but now you can stare at millions of other people. The danger is that when you spend all your time deciphering what other people are up to, you never get around to doing something original on your own, because you’re so swamped by opportunities to go onto other people’s lives on blogs, social networks and Twitter.
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Listeners to BBC World Service’s Science in Action program got a nasty surprise last week. In the midst of a discussion about the large snake fossil, a scientist dropped this bombshell:

“The Planet has heated and cooled repeatedly throughout its history. What we’re doing is the rate at which we’re heating the planet is many orders of magnitude faster than any natural process – and is moving too fast for natural systems to respond.”

Hearing this, I did what any normal person would do: grab all the bags of frozen peas I could find in the ice compartment of my refridgerator, and hunker down behind the sofa to wait for Thermageddon.

Hours passed. My life flashed before my eyes a few times, and a few times more. But then I noticed that the house was still there, and so was the neighbourhood. And so was I!

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Writing about Twitter is the journalistic equivalent of eating the fluff from your navel. The posh papers love it. Menopausal middle-aged hacks love it. The BBC is obsessed with it. Instead of telling us something we didn’t know before, Twitter makes churnalism so easy, it practically automates the entire job.

The rest of the world, however, completely ignores it. But with the journalists’ attention fixed firmly on each others’ navels, they don’t seem to realise what a fringe activity Twitter is. Now we can quantify this a little.

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The Nobel Prize winning chairman of the UN’s climate change committee, Rajendra K Pachauri, has said the the world’s largest developing economies will be exempt from international pressure to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
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