“Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you’ll get ten different answers, but there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us. It’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes…[and] all of this…all of this…was for nothing.
Thomas Friedman falls just short of getting it.
@lance (an ATDC startup guy) pointed me to a pretty good Op/Ed from Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.
Let me say that of all the NYT people, I respect Friedman the most. His Lexus and the Olive Tree sits up there with Mystery of Capital as one of the best economics books of recent years. It also sits up there with The Pentagon’s New Map as one of the best national-security books of recent times.
Economic View – For Much of the World, a Good Financial Decade – NYTimes.com
George Mason University Economist Tyler Cowen:
TO put it bluntly, if the United States takes one step back and the rest of the world takes two steps forward, even in purely selfish terms we should consider accepting the trade-off, if only for the longer run. Most of us gain from the wealth and creativity of other countries, even if we can’t always feel like the top dog.
via Economic View – For Much of the World, a Good Financial Decade – NYTimes.
Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke
Now this is what we should be spending our R&D money on.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
Fuel Thorium and uranium fluoride solution Fuel input per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated) Coolant Self-regulating Proliferation potential None Footprint 2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer zone via Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke | Magazine.
The pie is not a fixed size
What Xenophobic ass-hats like Pat Buchanan don’t say is that millions of people – who would otherwise have nothing better to do than hate America and start wars with us – are now able to feed their families, educate and vaccinate their children, and possibly even retire before laying on their death-bed.
To describe world GDP in percentages is to assume that economic development is a zero-sum-game and for others to win the US must lose.
How to Make a US County Thematic Map
I suspect this might be of interest to my political geek friends:
How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools | FlowingData.
British PM apologizes for treatment of gay code-breaker
British PM apologizes for treatment of gay code-breaker – CNN.com.
No single man did more to win the war in Europe than Alan Turing, who is also the father of modern computing. The fact that closed-minded homophobic bigots caused him to take his life is a tragedy that must never be repeated!
Kudos to Prime Minister Brown for acting quickly and decisively once the matter what brought to his attention, rather than trying to weigh its political consequences in the next election.
The Hydrogen Myth
An excellent presentation by Georgia Tech’s Stephen Fleming on the economics and physics of Hydrogen as an alternate fuel. Presented at Dragon*Con.
