“Government U-turn over book scheme cuts” blares the Independent newspaper today. Apparently the UK Government decided to cut a scheme that gives books to all children last week, and has now changed their mind in order to decide not to cut it.

I don’t have any knowledge, or a particularly strong view, about how we should best encourage people to read as a society.

I do want to use this as an example, a simple and basic one, of how terrible information flow on the Internet is, and on how terrible modern journalism is. By terrible here, I mean just how utterly our society fails at giving the most basic tools for intelligent people to be able to have opinions based on any sort of knowledge or evidence.

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Looking for some sample data for the election quiz software I’m writing, I naturally went to the Official Monster Raving Loony Party website. The very first policy they list is:

Cool on the outside: To combat global warming and climate change all buildings should be fitted with air conditioning units on the outside. (Source: Monster Raving Loony manifesto proposals)

At first this sounds just funny… Until you realise that we do have a technology that is the same as “air conditioners on the outside”. Indeed, the office building I’m in right now is heated by one. They’re called air source heat pumps (Energy Saving Trust link).

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I like John Redwood. I started reading his blog in 2006 while I was involved in the Save Parliament campaign, trying to stop the Government pass a Bill whose craziness you’ll have to read about by following the link. John spoke prominently on the Internet and in Parliament against the Bill.

Since then, I’ve seen eye to eye with him on issues such as David Davis’s resignation over civil liberties and the lack of quality in Parliament’s law making process.

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Someone asked me to think up counterintuitive predictions for the next year - things which might happen, but where it would not be ordinary for them to happen. Things with a hint in the present world of their possibility.

Here’s some, make your own in the comments.

• Ordnance Survey will go bust - i.e. their revenue will suddenly fall dramatically (due to competition from OpenStreetMap, Google).
• Vince Cable will be Prime Minister (with backing of tabloids, after a hung Parliament coalition Government collapses due to a further financial crisis, and then the formation of a Government of national unity).
• Someone will work out how to print photovoltaic solar panels on a device as cheap as a household inkjet printer, shares in all other energy businesses will collapse.
• There will be a nuclear war, with a bomb at least as large as Hiroshima used on a civilian population. I don’t know where, because it’ll be somewhere we don’t quite expect.
• At least one famous person will lose their job, reputation and spouse due to an affair discovered using reverse face-image recognition on Flickr photos of crowds.

What are your wild predictions for the next year?

A year ago, I predicted “2008 to be quite a ride”. What happened?

On holiday, Eddie Izzard’s voice guided me round Wales. As we drove, a box smaller than my hand sang songs by a band that broke up nearly 40 years ago, as if they were in the car.

The same part of the US military which created the Internet funded the rat-sized cortex simulations. Most such projects in 60 years of Artificial Intelligence have come to nothing. I wouldn’t bet on them all, always coming to nothing.

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I’ve written before about how I cherry pick campaigns that are most likely to be successful. You’d have thought that on such a large, difficult subject as climate change and our energy security, it would be impossible to cherry pick.

But it turns out there is a big gaping hole.

Nobody is running a single issue campaign for people across the political spectrum. One to lobby the UK Government to stop climate change destroying our economy and way of life, and at the same time to safeguard our supply of energy.

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Travelling by car back from relatives yesterday, a woman’s voice, inside a box as small as my hand, knew exactly where we were at all times, and gave my mother detailed directions at every turn.

Earlier this year, a multinational corporation simulated a brain the size of a mouse’s on a supercomputer. This almost interactive simulation will help people learn more about the function of our own cerebral cortex, and hence how our minds work. They are moving on to a rat’s cortex, which is three times larger.

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Some people complain that all the activism, campaigning, trying to change the world for the better never has any affect. In the last year I can think of 4 major victories, all in campaigns I’ve had a small involvement in.

Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill - I posted about this boring sounding but deadly Bill at the beginning of last year. We had to set up a whole Save Parliament campaign to try and stop it. The Bill was still passed, but was much less dangerous partly because the Government rewrote it under public pressure.

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Three weeks ago my friend and colleague Chris Lightfoot committed suicide. He’d been taking anti-depressants for a long time. My mind flips like a necker cube between loving anger and complete compassion. Anger with anyone for deliberately leaving the privilege of being in this beautiful world. Compassion for the extreme pain that he must have been in, and that I am lucky enough never to have known.

I met Chris originally because he was my new ISP, and because of our shared interest in politics and computers. Tom’s written an excellent post summarising Chris’s achievements in software, politics and policy. He was argumentative, cussed, and super bright. He was loving and affectionate, for the world and his friends.

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The unusual short film competition with board games which I was at two weeks ago was fantastic fun. Again, Mark has a bit to say about it. There’s also loads on the Really Restrictive Shorts blog which I wrote some of. Click the “1, 2, 3, 4… next… last…” links right at the bottom of the page to see more. There are photos and videos and so on.

Also today, there’s a good description of mySociety in the Guardian. That’s the, also unusual, charity that I work for. Given we’re anarchically structured, Tom Steinberg clearly can’t be my boss. Instead you could think of him as the person the rest of us delegate fundraising, client management and making sure the accounts balance to. I missed it, but they put me in the week before last talking about PledgeBank.

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