Biofuel good after all?

Biofuel has been heavily criticized for taking up agriculture places, where food used to be grown, and so leading to higher prices for food. It also would cause deforestation.

But a report in the news shed a different light. Scientists are working hard to get biofuel out of agricultural waste, and are making good progress. Therefore it seems that biofuel competing with food is just temporary; once we can make biofuel from agricultural waste, food prices would go back to normal.

Beck and Will Smith in Scientology

I just read that Beck, the American singer, is a member of Scientology. Gee, this is a guy that I found so alternative, cool, smart, this is one of the last persons I expected to join a creepy cult like Scientology. In my music collection he seemed one of the cooler artists, unlike my favourite Prince, who I'll admit is quite weird.

I also read recently that Will Smith gave cards for a free interview from Scientology to people at a filmset. So he is in it as well, although in his case I'm less surprised, I always found him a little weird.

Monitoring employees

I just read an article about a Microsoft patent to monitor employees in different ways, like heartbeat, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure. This would allow superiors to determine how effective employees work.

I can imagine a demo of such a system:

Let me show you our system in action. Here we see Joes heartbeat go up, hmm, how come, oh, the system also notices that Jane just passed by his desk, and the system noticed that this has happened before. This is useful information, because we now know that we never should put Joe and Jane on the same project. And maybe move one of them to another department.

Number of religious people rising

This weekend I heard on TV that the number of religious people is rising. This surprised me somewhat, although the last I heard about it was over ten years ago, that it was decreasing. It proves that historic trends tend to be cyclic; if you see it going in one direction, that doesn't mean it will keep going in that direction - l'histoire se repète. Being an atheist myself, I feel a little sad, although I respect peoples choices in religion, expecting they respect me for being an atheist.

Here in Belgium it seems that the number of religious people is still decreasing, judging by reports stating that the number of people going to church is decreasing. But people seem to adopt other religions, so that may be no indication either.

It also said that different catholic religions in Europe are clinging together, because of the increasing number of muslim immigrants. I hope this doesn't lead to crusades :-)

Oh well, if they really want a religion, can't they just choose Buddhism, that is very peaceful and would not go to war just because of religion. Than I would have a lot less to worry about. Oh wait, Buddhism is not considered a real religion. Too bad.