Brian Gongol
New energy bill mandates vastly more ethanol than we produce now
Some inventions sound more promising than they really are
Homonym fun in the comics
Borlaug: "Africa needs roads. Roads bring know-how and fertilizer"
A basic infrastructure network isn't just a matter of making markets work better (which infrastructure certainly does); Borlaug makes the astute point that infrastructure also conducts knowledge transfer
High rate of real GDP growth reported in 3rd quarter
And yet Americans still aren't accumulating diddly for capital. We're spending all of our growth on consumer goods, it would seem, and that's just going to end up becoming a long-term transfer of wealth from here to the places where people are making those consumer goods -- in many cases, China. That probably hasn't crossed a sufficient number of American minds yet; our lack of frugality is like eating our seed corn.
Spanish theoretical physicists think the whole universe is like a wind-up clock
While solving the grand mysteries of the universe has some limited real-world benefit in addition to some larger existential advantages, it sure seems like we as a species spend a whole lot of time gazing at our own navels instead of solving some real-world problems right in front of our noses, like how to use energy more efficiently (or even produce it more efficiently) or how to end the spread of epidemic disease
