Re-shocked
In Thursday’s Grauniad there was an article about the recent sale of 72 “Eurofighter” war machines aircraft to Saudi Arabia. I suppose I knew that the government (no matter which party’s in power) is heavily involved in “helping” arms trade. But it’s the sort of thing you don’t think about day-to-day. It’s shocking—so why isn’t there more of a fuss about it?
On a totally different subject, yesterday’s paper had a smallish article on an unlikely-sounding — actually, impossible-sounding — power source: a generator that outputs 4 times as much energy as is input, using a particular arrangement of magnets. It’s apparently been developed by some folks at a company called Steorn, and they’ve issued a challenge to scientists internationally to test and verify this effect. They claim that it has been tested and verified by assorted independent scientists, but only off-the-record. It appears to contradict the law of conservation of energy, so people are understandably very suspicious about it! It will be very interesting to see what happens. Most likely, a few people get egg on their faces.