Adumbration

Fazzari supports the stimulus program, which adds interest to the discussion of how we know what we know in economics - how would we know if things would have been worse without the stimulus, versus that the stimulus didn't work or made things worse.  F… more »

It might have been at work where I first saw mention of this story in Gizmag, describing how Evgeny Katz and fellow researchers at Clarkson University have implanted a snail with an enzyme-based biofuel reactor, allowing said snail to generate electrica… more »

This was one of a series of interviews with economist Russ Roberts, whose podcast subjects range broadly through the human enterprise, around how and why people do what they do, and what happens as a result.  A recurring theme has been to question how w… more »

Fascinating to see the 2012 venus transit in the different wavelengths (The sound track is a bit overdone).  Local conditions in Seattle were not ideal for a direct experience.   This reminds me of a few science fiction stories about engineering around… more »

The discussion from the first of these is from a very different business perspective;  I had previously seen Johanna Blakeley give a TED talk.  See also my fb posts from 4/18/2010 at 9:03 am for more on this. Fashion and Intellectual Property (6/14/20… more »

Not every scarce thing is valuable to lots of people, or even to a few people. Setting aside lifeboat situations and the like, our individual time in this life is unique in being both extremely scarce and generally non-transferable.  This note aims to r… more »

From my AIAA news feed this morning (2/14/2012) Flightglobal Pro (2/14, Ostrower) reports, "Boeing is exploring an ultra long-range replacement of the 777-200LR, conceptually dubbed the 777-8LX" that is "estimated to be a 14% to 16% improvement over th… more »

One of my regular podcasts is The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, which features a "science or fiction" segment where the host tries to stump the panel to distinguish obscure science news items from roughly plausible science fictions, following up with… more »

Some things can look like science (e.g., be published in peer-reviewed journals) but still be subject to subtle procedural and statistical and other errors and biases that can call the results into question. I wouldn't say that this one event demands w… more »

on the limits of the science surrounding psychiatry, made more interesting to me by having had some indirect but close encounters with practitioners. Psychiatry (5/31/2010) - Louis Menand of Harvard University talks about the state of psychiatry. Draw… more »