Game Changing Ideas, and their Impossibility

There are probably a dozen, maybe a hundred even, people on Earth who have an idea that could really change things for the better. An example would be Robert Bussard, who's Polywell fusion reactor could potentially provide clean, cheap, endless energy for humanity. Or it might not. In any case, they have basically no funding, so it doesn't really matter.Federal research funding, it appears to me, is broken. In the first place, it is too broadly applied. While I am sure many important advancements in science have occurred in the last few decades,...

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A Thought for Thanksgiving Break

A device able to combust dark matter and convert it to mechanical energy will be the single most important invention in this millenniu...

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Adult Time

Katie Roiphe:Can we, for a moment, flash back to the benign neglect of the 1970s and '80s? I can remember my parents having parties, wild children running around until dark, catching fireflies. If these children helped themselves to three slices of cake, or ingested the second-hand smoke from cigarettes, or carried cocktails to adults who were ever so slightly slurring their words, they were not noticed; they were loved, just not monitored. And, as I remember it, those warm summer nights of not being focused on were liberating. In the long sticky...

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The Emotions That Rule Me, Part 3

Love is a funny thing, at least for me. The strength of love in me is not at all a constant thing. It ebbs and flows, sometimes filling me, and sometimes it seems altogether vacant from my person. My heart, it would seem, comes in a variable size.There are times when I am so filled with love it almost chokes me. I want to love everyone. I want everyone to know that I love them. I get this foggy feeling in my head and my eyes wet, and I believe, really believe, that if we all just had a little more love in us then hate, rage, loneliness, war, fear,...

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The Emotions That Rule Me, Part 2

When I was a junior in high school, I ran for senior class President. It was on a whim, really, because I didn't have huge aspirations for myself politically, nor did I have any especially great ideas for improvement at the school. What I did have was a cutting-edge strategy for getting elected: comedy comedy comedy. High school kids really don't care about issues. At least, not as much as they care about laughing. So posters like "Do you like air? So does Alex Waller, vote for him to continue free breathing." and "Vote For Waller To End The Vietnam...

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The Emotions That Rule Me, Part 1

Earlier in the year, I wrote a soliloquy musing on darkness. In it, I described that when darkness fell on me during an overnight fishing trip, the weight of the world pressing in on me was enormous, and overwhelming. Perhaps part of being human is a fear of the dark...and that is all it was. But instead (and since I've never really known a real great fear of the dark), I wonder if what pressed in on me was loneliness.There are times in my life when loneliness creeps in, and it usually has nothing to do with the number of other people around...

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Dehydrato

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I coined the now-famous term "Godzillionaire" which is defined as a person with a net worth of at least 1 Godzillion dollars.And, yes, Godzillion is also a TAE trademarked word, meaning "the amount of money required to genetically engineer or irradiate a small lizard so it turns into a 200-foot long, fire-breathing, immortal monster capable of destroying Tokyo yet somehow morally against it." I imagine that would take a lot of money to accomplish.This google search will reveal that Godzillion and Godzillionaire...

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Matt Yglesias and Engineering

Yglesias: The real problem with overspending on defense, by contrast, is that the defense establishment competes for people with civilian sectors of the economy. The guys who are building these cool military exoskeletons, for example, are obviously very talented. And the supply of talented engineers isn’t all that elastic. When they supply their talents to defense-related projects, the civilian economy is starved of talent.While I admit, my cool, defense related job has starved the civilian community of my daring and copious engineering talent,...

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The Post-Labor Era

Megan suggests that while we "lose jobs to China," we in fact are still maintaining jobs...we just create different ones:For an individual with a job in a textile factory, there may indeed be displacement.  Yet over the centuries, our economy has "lost" millions of jobs.  Weavers no longer ply their trade in front of a hand loom, threshers don't stride through the golden fields of wheat with their scythes, and wheelwrights and blacksmiths have lost their livelihoods to the horseless carriage.  Yet unemployment has not shot up...

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Axed

I'm taking Curious Cat off my blogroll, as it has degraded to hackery and advertisin...

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Ending Cars?

After several months of arguing in favor of autonomous cars...I feel its about time to start tackling mass transit. This comes on the heels of me reading a report that for every ten barrels of oil that enter the United States, seven of them power automobiles. That's a lot of oil. And subsequently, it is a lot of CO2.The solution to this abject waste of natural resources would of course be to expand mass transit, and streamline it, and make it more personal, so that large number of people gave up on their cars. This, of course, assumes that Transfer...

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Busy

Like TPI, I have been pulled away from my hobbies as of late, due to familial obligations and certain temporary extra-curriculars. Forgive me, dear readers, but posts may be a bit light - for a bit longer.Just to keep you in the know, I am working on two proposals, worth $50k each, to develop clean energy technologies. I can only write so much a day...and those proposals involve a lot of writing....

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Cars that Drive Themselves, Ctd

Tim Lee has made a bet with Ryan Avent:I bet you $500 that on your daughter’s 16th birthday, it won’t be possible and legal for someone with no driver’s license to hop into a self-driving car in DC, give it an address in Philly, take a nap, and wake up at her destination 3-4 hours later (depending on traffic, obviously).The car must be generally commercially available–not a research prototype or limited regulatory trial. It can be either purchased or a rented “taxi.” And obviously there can’t be anyone helping to guide the vehicle either...

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To my friend

When I was a kid, I had this mental image of the woman I believed would eventually be my wife. She was blonde, about 5'4", loved hunting, was a genius, and did lots of outdoorsy stuff. She also was great genetics for my five blonde sons who were essentially "Little Alex" X 5.When I got to college, this woman evolved a little, to having red hair and freckles. However, a penchant for the outdoors and a sharp mind were still just as essential. I had in my head this hilariously (in retrospect) improbable image where I'd be in my pickup driving...

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Friday Poetry Burst

The Early Purges, by Seamus HeaneyI was six when I first saw kittens drown.Dan Taggart pitched them, 'the scraggy wee shits',Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny dinWas soon soused. They were slung on the snout Of the pump and the water pumped in.'Sure, isn't it better for them now?' Dan said.Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluicedThem out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hungRound the yard, watching the three sogged remainsTurn mealy and crisp as old...

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Cars that Drive Themselves, Ctd - Video Edition

I think the need for driverless cars can be completely justified by this guy:The double irony being that the guy recording this video and the driver are also not paying very good attention to the roa...

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Electrocuting Yourself To Get Smarter

Remember, dear regular readers, back in April when I reported that scientists had induced a mild current in someone's head while they tried to do complicated tasks? It turned out that their memory but more importantly people showed faster rates of learning.Now those results have been repeated by a group in England. They isolated a section of the brain that contributed to math skills and applied a mild current while the volunteers practiced math. Turns out the volunteers had enhanced memory. Turns out that enhanced memory lasted for months:"This...

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Staying abreast of technology

TAE thinks that it is a good idea to embrace every new technology that emerges, be it Twitter, Facebook, mp3s, tablet PCs, and now the new Microsoft Kinect. Occasionally I will look foolish, like when I was using "livejournal." But by embracing new tech, and staying comfortable with it, I will avoid the following situation when I am 65:TAE to his grandson: Will you please fix this quantum-shift voice-coil replicator?Grandson: **EYE ROLL** Grandpa, this is a boson-phase-shift replicator. No one has used quantum shift replicators in at least 5 years....

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In Defense of Not Voting - UPDATED

When I was a senior in high school, some years ago, I took a trip with Brian Knapp to Washington D.C. to learn all about the government process. The trip was part of the "Close Up: Washington, DC" program for kids, and involved round table discussions, lectures, and trips to important monuments. It was January and man was it cold.Anyways, Brian and I got into this entertaining routine of choosing the minority opinion whenever we, as a group, were discussing an issue. Didn't matter the issue, we just looked for which side was the minority opinion...

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Modifying SETI for Earth Hunting

Let's assume the number of exoplanets being found continues, as expected, to increase. Let's then assume that increased technology also allows, as expected, finer details about those exoplanets to be discovered. It's fairly safe, based on this and simple statistics, that the chances of finding a rocky planet in the habitable orbit zone around its star asymptotically approaches one very rapidly.Give this data, should we not release probes out of our own orbit to observe our planet from afar, to determine what, if any, characteristics of a "planet...

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