Here's a photo from my visit to the Melk Monastery. A broom standing in front of the garden pavilion (link to photo from my flickr photos). It got me thinking about the need to clean up all that oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Robert Reich has a good article with suggestions.
An ageing society is not, primarily, a demographic crisis. The problem is a failure to adapt – a failure that afflicts politics, management and society.
It's interesting because this failure to adapt is also true of so many other things. For example, in the railway industry it's not the lack of new technology that's the problem in many cases, it's the institutions that fail to adapt effectively to the new technologies. Slate's Jack Shafer in (The Beginning of the End for Newspapers) describes a similar failure of newspapers to adapt to new markets in the 1960s, with the results being felt in today's newspaper crisis.
Steven Strogatz, a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, just blogged about Math and the City in the NY Times. The article is fascinating because he describes mathematical relationships that seem to hold for city size and infrastructure, and how these are similar to those for living organisms. For example, large animals have a smaller circulation system (per unit volume) than small ones, just like large cities have fewer roads (per person) than smaller cities:
The same pattern holds for other measures of infrastructure. Whether you measure miles of roadway or length of electrical cables, you find that all of these also decrease, per person, as city size increases. And all show an exponent between 0.7 and 0.9.
In other words larger cities are more efficient than smaller ones.
Tim Harford, one of my favorite economists, just reviewed David J.C. MacKay's new book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air. MacKay is a Cambridge physicist who analyzes the physics of various renewable energy sources to see how they can help reduce climate change. Short answer: No. But, read the book or Harford's article for the long answer.
Armed with a knowledge of the physics of renewable energy, it is clear as Harford points out:
Dealing with climate change will need many small decisions to be made differently. The government cannot micromanage these. This is why a carbon price, whether set through taxes or emissions permits, is needed. It is not so much a nudge as a shove in the right direction.
facilitate ironic linkages, unexpected resonances across genres and media, and anarchic twists on established, institutional forms
is fascinating because this is just what is needed to help spur creative ideas in areas from research and development to business planning. I guess I need to go to comedy school ... but Brown has the solution: just being part of the e-world will help. Hope so.
By the way, the photo is from Luzern, it's under a big hook that can be used to pull people out of the river. The sign says that it is an "Official Rescue Device" and that "Missuse will be punished." Reminds me of the Vaudeville hook used to pull bad acts off the stage.
The NY Times' David Pogue has a great blog post about a group of people developing a 'system' for making electric cars happen. The basic idea is that they rent you the batteries for your electric car. He titled his posting Electric Cars for All! (No, Really This Time) that about covers it don't you think?
Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008) gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving presentation, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. For more, visit www.cmu.edu/randyslecture.
I just saw this music video on what the new supercollider at CERN is supposed to do (it was on a Wired Blog posting) of the top 10 physics videos. Finally, science presented in a way I can understand. Here's Wired's explanation of what happens in the LHC and what theories they hope to understand better and, here is the video - I just hope that the dancers don't give up their day jobs:
