In the early ’70s, the Chilean presidency under Allende commissioned a british engineer to build them something quite ambitious – a cybernetic economy. A huge telex network would feed information to and from factories through a central node.

Not the safest gamble – and, interrupted by the Pinochet coup in 1973, it was never completed. But seeing as ARK’s an ‘alternative investment company’, exploring the fringes of economics might be a useful strategy, and a self-regulating economic system certainly fits the sustainability agenda.

Article at the Guardian on ‘dark tourism’ – pilgrimages to sites of tragedy where we experience ‘a mix of reverence, voyeurism and maybe even the thrill of coming into close proximity with death’. Author John Lennon (?!), who presumably is tired of the Beatles ghouls lingering around his old apartment block where Mark Chapman emerged from the shadows and called his name, suggests we should use such sites to educate, not entertain.

Not sure the Disaster Tourism project represents the kind of education he has in mind.

The Guardian reports today that calls for geo-engineered reversals of predicted climate change have now made it into the highly predigious and, normally, formidably sane pages of the Proceedings of the Royal Society journal.Alok Jha explains more about them, Doug Parr, head scientist for Greenpeace, wrings his hands over them, and Jim Lovelock does the sensible thing: says we need to get used to the idea of a hotter, more violent world. Not that anyone will listen to him. After all, the earth’s climate out of man’s conscious control? What a crackpot!