Cyberpsyche

Lucky nobody was killed in an avalanche this week in italy. European avalanche deaths are at a record high this year. There seems to be a growing trend of people riding irresponsibly. Riding off-piste needs awareness of where avalaches may or may-not happen. There has always been people who have wanted to ski the risky terrain. Perhaps it's a misunderstanding of the sport: new skool skiers don't ski off drops without the right equipment to be safe.

Skiing off piste without a guide or without the skills to analyse the snowpack is not just risky, it's stupid. Getting caught in an avalanche is not a pleasant experience, it is most likely that if you were to get caught in one that you cannot rely on the emergency services to rescue you. Transeivers are essential. Buried at any depth greater than a metre in an avalanche has next to none survival rates. If you do get trapped near the surface your friends need to rescue you quick. The energy and force of the Avalanche caused the snow so set very hard indeed.

There has been much made of Green Tea's benfits as an antioxidant as a prevention for cancer. But drinking too much can cause problems, the fluorine that the tea contains in high quantities can cause poisoning.

Some of the Linux Community are working hard on producing a version of Linux for the iPod.
Although this might not to be really that useful for most, but ultimately it might. It creates a platform to create and make applications, including support for other file formats and interfaces. There is no real support for the fifth-generation (Colour) iPod yet.

Wikis can often suffer from the Tragedy of the Commons, where the individual's needs aren't necessarily the in the common interest. So it important to think about who is reading the wiki and what they're likely to look for. Wikis are good at producing highly navigatable the pages can be highly interconnected. Here are some common failures:

• Lack of interconnection: Wiki's like wikipedia are most powerful when related concepts are linked together.
• Separation of Concerns: Better use of indexes/categories and recent history means that pages of lists are less necessary. Wikis should be arranged heterarchically rather than hierarchically.
  

According to The Economist we don't have long in the UK till a new type of betting. Hedge Steet in America is already providing a service allow people to buy futures, protecting them from fluctuations in the market.

The Mayor of London was recently suspended for a month by an adjudication panel over comments he made to a Jewish reporter. He likened the reporter to a concentration camp guard. It appears that Livingstone felt that he was a fascist, or at least the Evening Standard is. This case is not as simple as it first seems, the reporter may well have been a fan of Livingstone.

Yahoo, after a year in development, have produced a library of Javascript Components to improve web user interfaces. Interesting information about their components and design is available on their
Yahoo! User Interface Blog.