Yesterday I would have ranked country music as one of my least favourites. Now, thanks to CBC Radio 3, I’m a big fan.
Microposts
Fantastic photos of the Sun, via The Big Picture
The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief
Michael Pollan describes the upcoming food crisis in an open letter to the next President of the United States.
This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation.
The core of his solution is:
… we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine
But the Black-Scholes model is quite different. It uses a model of the future to describe the present. In the absence of this model, or some equivalent of it, present stock options have no reasonable assigned value. What then is the test of the model? Presumably, it is that if one uses it as a guide to buy these options and, as a result, goes broke, one will be inclined to re-examine the assumptions.
Without God - The New York Review of Books
Steven Weinberg provides a great overview of the tension between science and religion and a discussion of morality in the absence of God.
Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God.
A New Bank to Save Our Infrastructure - The New York Review of Books
A proposal to create a new institution to fund and co-ordinate infrastructure investments.
Thursday, September 18, 2008 →
Dan Gardner . Harper economics
Dan Gardner interviews Harvard University economist Gregory Mankiw on climate change economics. The article is an interesting description of the differences between cap-and-trade and carbon tax policies.
So why is the cap-and-trade option preferred by almost all politicians? As usual, it’s politics. Under cap-and-trade, politicians can claim they are hitting “big polluters” while leaving the ordinary person unscathed. That’s nonsense, of course. Costs borne by big polluters will be passed on, so the ordinary person pays either way. But with cap-and-trade, unlike a carbon tax, the cost to the ordinary person is hidden.
The cycles in economic fashion show how far economics is from being a science. One cannot think of any natural science in which orthodoxy swings between two poles. What gives economics the appearance of a science is that its propositions can be expressed mathematically by abstracting from the real world.
kung fu grippe - Better
www.kungfugrippe.com/post/4858…
This is an excellent post by Merlin Mann and something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit recently.
Now that I’m halfway through my parental leave with Kelly and the kids, I’m wondering about all of the distractions I have opted into – especially on the internet. When I have a few free minutes, is refreshing my Twitter feed really a priority? It shouldn’t be. So, I’ve been cutting back, cancelling my Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Last.fm, etc. accounts and trying to be much more careful with my time and attention.
Senate Report on “Emergency Preparedness in Canada”
This report is well worth a read just for the direct – almost sarcastic – writing. Some of the report’s commentary on the bureaucratic replies to the senate committee’s queries is fantastic.
globeandmail.com: Half-truths and zingers on the campaign trail
www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/s…
I wonder about this too. Why do politicians pretend to be “regular” people. Don’t we want extraordinary leaders?
The ’80s: Were They Really That Bad? : NPR Music
NPR’s All Songs Considered provides an entertaining discussion of ‘80s music. They play some classic bad '80s music, but also find some great songs from the decade.
Even before the writ has dropped, the Tory campaign has made clear its intention to portray Mr. Harper as a minivan-driving hockey dad from the suburbs. The Liberal Leader, Stéphane Dion, by contrast, is to be ruthlessly caricatured as a wimpy and elitist academic of the mad-professor type.
Is it really good for future generations - the alleged beneficiaries of this deluded parsimony - to pass down a clapped out wreck of a town in need of major repairs and upgrades, long-deferred works that become more expensive with every minute they are neglected?
globeandmail.com: Debt free in a clapped out wreck of a town
Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that’s starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon.
Many hospitals put the drugs “on reserve,” but an apparent cure-all was too tempting for some physicians, and the tight stewardship slowly broke down.
Medical Dispatch: Superbugs: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Ask a Kandahari what he wants from his government and you’ll get a familiar answer: not vast ideas but practical solutions to everyday problems
Success in the sciences unquestionably takes a lot of hard work, sustained over many years. Students usually have to catch the science bug in grade school and stick with it to develop the competencies in math and the mastery of complex theories they need to progress up the ladder. Those who succeed at the level where they can eventually pursue graduate degrees must have not only abundant intellectual talent but also a powerful interest in sticking to a long course of cumulative study.
How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science - Chronicle.com
globeandmail.com: We must green the market
On Language - Me, Myself and I - NYTimes.com
Ontario is not Alberta, and the philosophy that provincial rights should be paramount has always had to compete with a powerful sense that Canada comes first.
globeandmail.com: Ontario struggles to decide whether or not it exists
BBC NEWS | Magazine | No time to think?
The New Atlantis » The Hydrogen HoaxUnfortunately, it’s all pure bunk. To get serious about energy policy, America needs to abandon, once and for all, the false promise of the hydrogen age.
Bridges Still Crumble, a Year After the I-35 Disaster - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog
The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear - NYTimes.com
The café operates on the honour system: Grab what you want, drop your money into an old streetcar fare box next to the doughnut counter and waltz out.
At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.
Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com
… the result will be an open culture of trust which gives scientists a real incentive to outsource problems, and contribute in areas where they have a great comparative advantage.
At one moment the patient experiences a painful phantom limb; at another he sees a mirror image of his intact hand and the pain disappears
How the Mind Works: Revelations - The New York Review of Books
Toronto, in my opinion, is uniquely a city of neighbourhoods, and the most important person in my job is the neighbourhood cop.