Scott Adams on our current batch of presidential candidates:
According to Time, ethanol is very bad economics and disastrous for the environment.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html?
The major candidates for President of the United States all support ethanol. If Time has correctly reported the consensus of expert opinions on ethanol, it seems to me that any candidate who supports it would be proved incompetent for leadership.
Is Time’s cover story wrong, or will the next leader of the United States be certifiably incompetent on day one, no matter what time the phone rings?
Any presidential candidate who claims they know right now how to solve America’s energy and environmental woes is likely to screw things up even more and isn’t worthy of our vote. Daniel has a great post about how policy makers should proceed sensibly when it comes to making energy policy.
I don’t think there is enough scientific data available from any source to justify the costs of governmental action to deal with the problem of global warming. The scientists who are working on providing that data might deserve a Nobel Peace Prize but Al Gore sure doesn’t.
The idea that Gore’s movie qualifies him for a share of the same award given to real scientists is asinine no matter what Ed says.
Hat-Tip: CATO
Our current healthcare system is broken. It is too expensive and it provides incentives for people to make poor decisions on their own healthcare spending.
Things could be worse…we could be like Canada.
UPDATE: 7/31/2007 2:10
Paramaphil disagrees.
We had them nearly eradicated worldwide a few decades ago thanks to widespread use of pesticides…but they’re back.
Here’s a story about how bedbugs in Salt Lake City closed down a fire station.
Story and photo courtesy BOING BOING
Here’s hoping this works out successfully as soon as possible!
Sometime when you’re bored because you think you know everything check out this animated video of the processes taking place inside a living cell every second produced by BioVisions at Harvard University.
Here is the story behind the video.
Link courtesy of Boing Boing (which also has an explanation of one of the cooler scenes in the video)
I’ve always been a little creeped out by the picture of “Batboy” you see yearly on the cover of the Weekly World News tabloid. This guy, Ben Underwood is the real thing…without the creepy sharp teeth and freaky looks. He’s a completely normal 14 year old boy who is blind…but he can gain a striking amount of detail about the world around him by interpreting the echo’s from clicking noises he makes as he moves around. His abilities are really amazing.
There was the time a fifth grader thought it would be funny to punch the blind kid and run. So he snuck up on Ben Underwood and hit him in the face. That’s when Ben started his clicking thing. “I chased him, clicking until I got to him, then I socked him a good one,” says Ben, a skinny 14-year-old. “He didn’t reckon on me going after him. But I can hear walls, parked cars, you name it. I’m a master at this game.”
…”I tell people I’m not blind,” he says. “I just can’t see.”
Very cool. Read the whole story.
Hat tip Boing Boing
Ann Althouse has a great post this morning on new laws in England that require Science teachers to discuss creationist theories in their classes. She finishes with this concern which I think is valid:
I wonder if in the end the religionists will be happy. The science teachers, most of whom won’t like having this imposed on them, will be pressing students to use the tools of science to question the assertions made by religion. Won’t this teach them not to believe? Students who hold to the belief in creationism will be shredded in any classroom debate that is framed in scientific terms…
She’s exactly right. Students should learn science in science class and religion at home or in religion classes. Science teachers should never be required to try to teach intelligent design or bring up discussion about it in their classes. I know this post is a few weeks late in regards to legislation in Utah but I saw Ann’s post and thought is was a good analysis of the issue.
It has been over a year since I first blogged on the Space Elevator. Here is a very optimistic and interesting article from the NY Times on the technology that will take my kid on a recreational trip to the moon sometime in her lifetime (and hopefully mine…I want to go with her). Since the Times article won’t be up permanantly I’m including part of it in this post:
“The first thought is, Is this really going to work?” said Dr. Steven E. Patamia, a researcher at Los Alamos, who was enlisted into performing space elevator calculations a week before the conference. “When you get into it, it begins to make sense. There are a good number of technical issues. They are probably all `overcomeable.’ ”
The original idea of a space elevator is more than a century old. In 1895, Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, a Russian visionary who devised workable ideas for rocket propulsion and space travel decades before others, proposed a tower thousands of miles high attached to a “celestial castle” in orbit around Earth, with the centrifugal force of the orbiting castle holding up the tower. (Imagine swinging a rope with a rock tied to the end of it.)
But the idea was fundamentally impossible to build. Steel, then the strongest material known, was too heavy and not strong enough to support that weight.
Other scientists periodically revisited and reinvented Tsiolkovsky’s idea, inspiring science fiction writers like Mr. Clarke.
Nanotubes spurred NASA to take a more serious look in 1999. A team of scientists envisioned huge cables of nanotubes and magnetically levitated cars traveling up and down. The structure would be so large that it would require grabbing an asteroid and dragging it into Earth orbit to act as the counterweight for holding up the elevator.
This is a really cool idea. It is too bad we have to rely on the government to do something like this. I would love it if someone like Bill Gates who has a couple billion dollars laying around for a rainy day were to sponsor the research and first construction. He would probably never see a return on the money…but his kids would. This should be done privately. NASA will just screw things up. Maybe I’ll just have to do it myself. I’ll start saving money…if any of you want to contribute to the cause I’ll cut your grandkids in on the future earnings!
UPDATE 10/6/03
Kelly sent me this cool depiction of what the Space Elevator might look like once it gets big enough to take passengers. (I’m experiencing tech difficulties right now…the pic will be posted this afternoon.)
I could never have been admitted to MIT because I couldn’t ever muster enough ingenuity to invent something as useful and cool as this. Good work eggheads!!!
(Link courtesy Dan S. who only has one more week of school left then he is one of thousands of jobless JDs out there looking for work!!! I’m sure he won’t be jobless for long)
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There have been several stories about people outside of any government trying to make it into space. I think this is awesome. In fact, I think this is the only real hope we have for making space travel an ordinary thing. My generation doesn’t have any really cool memories as far as space travel is concerned. There’s the space shuttle program but it obviously hasn’t been a smashing success…Hubble’s cool (13 years old this week) but not super cool…and that is about it. We need something major like the moon landing.
Now Jeff Bezos is throwing some of that money Amazon has started to make in the direction of private space travel. There are others too who are working on making private space travel a reality. Good for them! If I ever have any money to invest I want some of it to go to ventures like this. I also want to save some cash away for the time when it is possible to take a trip up there. Of course there are some other preparations I’ll have to make too (I need to go on a diet!) but it will be easier to get motivated for that if I know the reward will be a trip up into space.
“I want to go high because that is where the view is” Burt Rutan
Links courtesy Instapundit
Bullets fired straight into the air probably won’t kill you when they land. A penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building won’t kill anyone. Check out Steven Denbeste’s post to find out more about these and other interesting facts!
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