Month: November 2007

Google Climate

If Google’s can come up with a way to make renewable energy cheaper than the fossil-based alternatives, lowering the cost of just about everything, while reducing environmental externalities, then, by God, each and every one of them deserve to become rich

2007-12-21: I love Kim Stanley Robinson

2008-01-25: Google attitude

the cultural difference between the movement and Google: Google has the positive message of the potential for change through technology. The other unspoken divide is about economics: Gore and Friedman favor raising the cost of CO2. Page and Brin see a victory in reducing the price of the clean energy. Tax versus investment.

Skeleton Black Market

Investigative journalist Scott Carney has been working for the last half a year or so on a story about grave robbers in Calcutta who steal skeletons and sell them to medical supply companies in the US and Europe. “To research the story I combed the state of West Bengal and saw huge piles of police-confiscated bones. I even spoke to some of the people who deflesh human bodies for a living.”

makes sense, since we already outsource many of our medical studies to india as well. medicine will be increasingly catering to indian people i suppose 🙂

Bank Regulation

In the wake of subprime losses we are hearing claims that the United States should have regulated its banks more. It is worth pointing out that the US has some of the most heavily regulated banks in the world. It is plausible to argue that the United States should have fewer bank regulators (I’ll nominate the Fed for the main role), but that consolidation should be accompanied by greater efficacy of regulation. In the meantime there are too many regulatory authorities, and too many regulations. We have completely blurred lines of accountability, legal, political, economic, and otherwise.

the real problem is a culture that fetishises home ownership.

Dysgenic Fertility

Dysgenic fertility means that there is a negative correlation between intelligence and number of children. Its presence during the last century has been demonstrated in several countries. We show here that there is dysgenic fertility in the world population quantified by a correlation of − 0.73 between IQ and fertility across nations. It is estimated that the effect of this has been a decline in the world’s genotypic IQ of 0.86 IQ points for the years 1950–2000. A further decline of 1.28 IQ points in the world’s genotypic IQ is projected for the years 2000–2050. In the period 1950–2000 this decline has been compensated for by a rise in phenotypic intelligence known as the Flynn Effect, but recent studies in 4 economically developed countries have found that this has now ceased or gone into reverse. It seems probable that this “negative Flynn Effect” will spread to economically developing countries and the whole world will move into a period of declining genotypic and phenotypic intelligence.

the singularity can’t come soon enough 🙂