June 2012
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May 2012
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“Dragon spaceship opens the navigation pod bay door without hesitation. So much...”
– Elon Musk, SpaceX
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Surprise! IBEX Finds No Bow ‘Shock’ Outside our... →
For years, scientists have thought a bow “shock” formed ahead of our solar system’s heliosphere as it moved through interstellar space – similar to the sonic boom made by a jet breaking the sound barrier. But new data from NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) shows that our system and its heliosphere move through space too slowly to form a bow shock, and therefore does not exist. Instead...
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Indo-Pak Update: A Future of Nudges and Hopes ||... →
Few bilateral relationships matter more for the long-term stability of Asia than that between New Delhi and Islamabad. But few, too, are as seemingly intractable….
[A recent report by the International Crisis Group on Indo-Pakistani relations] provides some room for the one resource scarcer in the Indus Basin than water, optimism. The legacy media’s coverage of Indo-Pakistani relations...
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Can Hydras Eat Unknown-Unknowns for Lunch? ||... →
There is a fascinating set of ideas that has been swirling around in the global zeitgeist for the past decade, around the quote that will keep Donald Rumsfeld in the history books long after his political career is forgotten. I am referring, of course, to the famous unknown-unknowns quote from 2002. Here it is:
[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are...
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A Big Little Idea Called Legibility || ribbonfarm →
James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring. [He uses pictures to] graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure...
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Why We’re Losing: How free market ideas suffer... →
People don’t understand the private sector. They don’t like it. Intuitively, it seems selfish. Most people are busy trying to run their own lives. They’re grateful to politicians who want to take charge. It seems intuitive to think that a smart group of planners concerned about the collective good can accomplish more than free people pursing their own interests individually in the private sector....
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America and the Value of 'Earned Success' ||... →
In the end, I concluded, what set the United States apart from Spain was the difference between earned success and learned helplessness.
Earned success means defining your future as you see fit and achieving that success on the basis of merit and hard work. It allows you to measure your life’s “profit” however you want, be it in money, making beautiful music, or helping people...
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Socialism and Central Planning Still Can’t Defeat... →
As we watch Europe’s unfolding debt drama, it’s worth asking a question: If socialism and central planning can’t succeed in Europe, where can they succeed? After all, Europe possessed tremendous advantages when it launched its slow-running experiment in cradle-to-grave welfare statism and post-national political unity many decades ago: historically dynamic economies, educated citizens, relative...
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“Socialists absolutely hate the Laffer Curve because it takes as its starting...”
– Zombie
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Two kinds of austerity || Washington Examiner →
This approach to austerity, also known in the United States as the “balanced approach,” has unfortunately proven a recipe for disaster. In a 2009 paper, Harvard University’s Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna looked at 107 attempts to reduce the ratio of debt to gross domestic product over 30 years in countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They...
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Chinese Physicists Smash Quantum Teleportation... →
A group of Chinese engineers have smashed the records for quantum teleportation, by creating a pair of entangled photons over a distance of almost 100 kilometers.
Quantum entanglement is the mysterious phenomenon where two particles become tightly intertwined and behave as one system — whether they are next to each other on a laboratory bench, or either sides of a galaxy.
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The Common Hand || National Geographic →
The hand is where the mind meets the world. We humans use our hands to build fires and sew quilts, to steer airplanes, to write, dig, remove tumors, pull a rabbit out of a hat. The human brain, with its open-ended creativity, may be the thing that makes our species unique. But without hands, all the grand ideas we concoct would come to nothing but a very long to-do list.
The reason we can use our...
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The Power of “Once upon a Time”: A Story to Tame... →
“Once upon a time.” Four words. I don’t need to say anything more, and yet you know at once what it is you’re about to hear. You may not know the precise contents. You may not recognize the specific characters. You may have little notion of the exact action that is about to unfold. But you are ready all the same to take on all of these unknowns, the uncertainties, the ambiguities. You are ready to...
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Physicists Succeed in Making ‘Impossible’... →
Lenses are a part of everyday life—they help us focus words on a page, the light from stars, and the tiniest details of microorganisms. But making a lens for highly energetic light known as gamma rays had been thought impossible. Now, physicists have created such a lens, and they believe it will open up a new field of gamma-ray optics for medical imaging, detecting illicit nuclear material, and...
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Nigeria Burns || Via Meadia →
In recent days, gunmen and suicide bombers associated with Boko Haram bombed the offices of several prominent Nigerian newspapers; killed fifteen worshippers at a church in just the latest of many attacks on Christian civilians; bombed the convoy of a prominent policeman (who survived, unlike eleven not-so-lucky guards and bystanders); launched an assault on a police station, were repulsed, only...
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Al-Qaeda bombmaker represents CIA’s worst fears ||... →
Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who hails from a middle-class Saudi family, is the top bombmaker for al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch. Only 30 years old, he represents the CIA’s worst fears: a highly skilled terrorist determined to attack the United States.
American officials believe Asiri’s latest bomb was designed to be smuggled onto a U.S.-bound aircraft last month. The nonmetallic device had an advanced...
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Real Fake Missiles? || Arms Control Wonk →
There is a huge discussion about what sort of technological path these ICBMs might represent, if any. Allow me to articulate just one view, which I suspect is the view of at least some people in the intelligence community. North Korea imported Scud missiles from Egypt, then proceeded to build an entire missile program on this technology. North Korean enlarged the Scud into the Nodong, stuck a...
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“The problem is that no one wants to work with an acquisition system that’s so...”
– Arthur Herman, author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II. My granddad built Liberty ships in Baltimore. (via Time)
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Salt-tolerant rice: Nuclear-powered crops || The... →
Those who turn their noses up at “genetically modified” food seldom seem to consider that all crops are genetically modified. The difference between a wild plant and one that serves some human end is a lot of selective breeding—the picking and combining over the years of mutations that result in bigger seeds, tastier fruit or whatever else is required.
Nor, these days, are those mutations there...
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