I’d love to think that a “movement” like Unity ’08 (which strives to nominate a Democrat and a Republican for President and Vice-President in 2008) could actually influence the course of American politics, but I can’t help but thinking its founders are indulging in magical thinking. American politics is in the sorry state it is not because Democrats and Republicans just don’t realize a lot of Americans are turned off by partisan politics, but because the current structure of American elections favors the party that does partisan politics best. Unity ’08 is not going to change the system by playing by the system’s rules — if they want to do that they need to come at it from outside the system.
That said, it would be cool to see an all online primary.
A company called Avanti Metals claims to have developed a process by which it can refine titanium for many times less than the cost of the current method, while at the same time eliminating the chlorine gas by-product that keeps titanium production ecologically “dirty”. Their own estimates are that they’ll be able to sell the metal at $25 per pound (titanium currently trades at $40/lb.), though they say even that amount would be conservative. My dad was pissed when he heard about this, having just dropped a fortune on titanium golf clubs; I’d sure hate to know anyone that just bought a plane.
Alloy is an application that tests software at the design stage, where the kinds of problems that ruin an application can appear. It’s not a trivial problem; an application of moderate complexity can have a near-infinite number of possible states.
Research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences puts numbers on the amount of energy required to create a new species (and explains why there are more species at the equator than the poles). Choice quote: “It takes more energy than all the fossil fuel people burn on the planet in a year to form one new species of plankton.”
Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001