Craig Venter wants to make a bacterium that will eat CO2 and produce fuel.

A Bug to Save the Planet

You are the Fly Guy.

Fly.

Fly Guy

“People loved comedies during the depression, too,” said R. J. Cutler, executive producer of “Flip That House.”

Housing Slump Helps the Draw of Fixer-Upper TV

The United States continues to lead the world in science and technology. It generally benefits from the influx of foreign science and engineering students and workers, and it will likely continue to benefit from the development of new technologies by other nations, as long as it maintains the capability to acquire and implement such technologies. However, U.S. leadership in science and technology must not be taken for granted.

Is the United States Losing Its Edge in Science and Technology?

How relevant is it to declare oneself to be “for” or “against” copyright? Neither the stabilization nor the abolition of the copyright system seems within reach. All we see is a seemingly endless assembly line of new extensions to the law being proposed and enacted. The most recent is the proposed “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA) [1], to be tabled at next month’s G8 meeting in Tokyo, including a clause known as the “Pirate Bay killer” that would force countries to criminalize services that may facilitate copyright infringement, even if not for profit. This is just one example of how copyright law is mutating into something qualitatively different than what it has been in previous centuries.

A very condensed version of copyright history could look like this: texts (1800), works (1900), tools (2000).

The Future of Copyright

What does it mean to be human? And can science illuminate the answers?

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Anthony Lane:

The tactic here is basically pornographic—arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach—and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.

In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don’t be a mother. And don’t work. Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life?

The Wordcount rank of "superannuated"? 52417. That's three down from "purloined" and ten down from "uhm".

Carrie

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

WordCount was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, to let the information speak for itself. The interface is clean, basic and intuitive. The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sifting through words like an archaeologist through sand, awaiting the unexpected find.

Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about our culture. For instance, “God” is one word from “began”, two words from “start”, and six words from “war”. Another sequence is "america ensure oil opportunity". Conspiracists unite! As ever, the more one explores, the more is revealed. Some of the best sequences people have sent me are here.

WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language /

Money, money prices, market transactions, and economic calculation based upon them are the main targets of criticism. Loquacious sermonizers disparage Western civilization as a mean system of mongering and peddling. Complacency, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy exult in scorning the “dollar-philosophy” of our age. Neurotic reformers, mentally unbalanced literati, and ambitious demagogues take pleasure in indicting “rationality” and in preaching the gospel of the “irrational.” In the eyes of these babblers money and calculation are the source of the most serious evils. However, the fact that men have developed a method of ascertaining as far as possible the expediency of their actions and of removing uneasiness in the most practical and economic way does not prevent anybody from arranging his conduct according to the principle he considers to be right. The “materialism” of the stock exchange and of business accountancy does not hinder anybody from living up to the standards of Thomas a Kempis or from dying for a noble cause. The fact that the masses prefer detective stories to poetry and that it therefore pays better to write the former than the latter, is not caused by the use of money and monetary accounting. It is not the fault of money that there are gangsters, thieves, murderers, prostitutes, corruptible officials and judges. It is not true that honesty does not “pay.” It pays for those who prefer fidelity to what they consider to be right to the advantages which they could derive from a different attitude.

That’s Ludwig von Mises, writing on pp. 215-16 of Human Action (4th edition). Oh, how I love that man. I hereby pledge to use the phrase “mentally unbalanced literati” at least once per year.

That's Peter Klein, writing on his blog. I like to collect words and phrases.

Best "Best Paragraph I Read Today" I Read Today

A report from the Rebel’s Republic, a breakaway state in western Bosnia where the Minister of Smiles rules alongside the Minister of Artificial Blondes.

Letter from Bosnia