1. The value of the marginal kid
2. New Mideast edition of the FT
3. Does resource wealth lead to tyranny?
4. Virginia Postrel and Grant McCracken on plagiarism and Virginia again
5. Is the "Great Filter" ahead us or behind us: Nick Bostrom roots against life on Mars
Who wants to have marginal kids?
I thought Nick Bostrom might be worried about environmental regulations.
The Nick Bostrom article is certainly interesting — I think it would justify it’s own post so folk could cohesively comment on it.
It reminded me of Jared Diamond’s commentary about alien civilizations in his first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee. His observations centered on the stone age tribes in New Guinea and their “discovery” by an outside advanced civilization in the 1930′s. The tribe members were severely depressed mentally by the encounter. Indeed, Guns, Germs and Steel was written to answer one of the tribe member’s question, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” where cargo is any manner of goods.
Diamond extrapolated this to any potential encounter with an outside, advanced race of aliens and concluded that it would be just as well if we didn’t meet anyone.
Bernard, keep reading. There’s a correction on Whole Foods.
What I don’t get about plagiarists is how they can figure that they’ll get away with it. I mean, especially with Google and Amazon Books Search.
UF should fire Twitchell immediately. Simon and Schuster’s reaction is unacceptable and we should boycott them until they pull all his books.
(and I forgot to add:) … and their energy consumption needs (spent largely on computation) will be such that they are compelled to remain in the vicinity of a very large energy source, like a star.
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