Anybody who pumps a barrel out of a reservoir today to sell at $60 could make three times as much money if they just left it in the ground another two years before pumping it out. The same is true for anybody with above-ground storage facilities-- they're throwing away money, and lots of it, for every barrel they sell at $60 that they could have instead stored for two years and sold for $200. If oil producers did respond to these very strong incentives by holding back oil from today's market, the effect would be to drive today's price up.

Really good. I don't believe in peak oil: short a cosmic-scale disaster, the supply isn't going to dry up suddenly. Instead, I think the price will steadily increase over time as the remaining reserves become more and more expensive to exploit. At the same time, alternative tech is going to get more investment and become progressively cheaper. At some point, the curves cross and that's that.

Econbrowser: How to talk to an economist about peak oil

Walking to school may be the cure for teenage couch potatoes. A Scottish study demonstrates that the walkers are more active during the rest of the day than their peers who arrive by car, bus or train.

Not really surprising...

High Marks for a Walk to School

We now have 7 teams that have climber hardware and are intending to show up for the 2005 competition. The competition date has been pushed back 3 weeks - we will start accepting hardware on the original Sept 30th date, but will spend 3 weeks debugging both our infrastructure and the team's hardware - this is the first time this hardware is being brought together, and we expect integration to require some extra time and attention.

This is the X-prize for space elevator technology; I think
they want to have a workable climber by 2010.

Space Elevator Update

SGamgee wrote:
An altered view of the source of consciousness through sub-cellular quantum entanglements.

Roger Penrose was advancing a precursor to this theory in The Emperor's New Mind back in the 1980s. My take (from having not read it) is that the whole thing smacked of cartesian dualism and was more about putting the ghost back into the machine than anything else.

If his theory is right, then so what? We're going to build quantum computers someday anyhow. I think that Penrose will get backed into a corner arguing for an ineffable something that makes our meat computers special. They are not. They're just meat.

RE: Quantum Consciousness . Stuart Hameroff

It now costs about US $20 000 per kilogram to put objects into orbit. Contrast that rate with the results of a study I recently performed for NASA, which concluded that a single space elevator could reduce the cost of orbiting payloads to a remarkably low $200 a kilogram and that multiple elevators could ultimately push costs down below $10 a kilogram.

We will build this. Believe it!

IEEE Spectrum on Space Elevators

Under the new plan, called Pleistocene "re-wilding," close cousins and counterparts of the lost beasts, mostly from Africa, would be released into large, protected tracts of land and allowed to roam freely. Ideally, such actions would not only give parts of North America back an approximation of their long-ago megafauna diversity, they would also help save animals such as the African cheetah from extinction.

I heard about this on All Things Considered the other day. Wow ... just ... wow.

Conservationist Plan Would Give Lions, Elephants a Home on the Range

OMG! Its like a car. Except that its like a bike. Except that its like a fighter jet. Must be seen to be believed. This was featured on Top Gear on the Discovery Channel. Apparently, it costs €35K.

CARVER - The most athletic car in the world

Surprising investors and analysts, Google said today that it would sell up to $4 billion in stock, but the Internet search company offered few details on what it would do with the cash other than to hint at possible acquisitions.

Google to Sell Up to $4 Billion in New Stock

NASA may push back plans to launch its next shuttle mission until March 2006, allowing engineers more time to solve an ongoing foam shedding problem with orbiter external tanks.

What a mess. The formal report of the "60 day study" is due out this week. The new launchers being kicked around are so much simpler than STS that I could almost imagine it flying by 2010 if they could start working on it now.

I think that the possibility is growing that the next flight may be the last.

NASA May Push Next Shuttle Flight to March 2006

AT NEXT WEEK'S Intel developer forum, the firm is due to announce a next generation x86 processor core. The current speculation is this new core is going too be based on one of the existing Pentium M cores. I think it’s going to be something completely different.

I'm not entirely sure this guy knows what he's talking about but it gives one an idea, at least, about what Intel might be up to.

The hidden currents powering Intel's next gen chips