But Americans shouldn't just think more about Canada. They should consider building on the two countries' free-trade deal and forming a more perfect North American union. It is past time for the U.S. and Canada to eliminate their border—either by creating a customs and monetary union or, more radically, by merging outright into a single nation-state or a European Union-style partnership.

Such a merger makes perfect sense. No two countries on Earth are as socially and economically integrated as the U.S. and Canada. They share geography, values and a gigantic border. Their populations study, travel and do business together and intermarry in great numbers.

Why Canada and the U.S. Should Merge, Eh?

Would you like your genome shone 30-40 kilometres into the atmosphere from the middle of the desert with a giant laser? What are we saying, of course you do.

Burning Man laser show will project human genome into atmosphere

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.

Bill: http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/legislation/EAS13500toMDM13313redline.pdf

Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigration Reform

On the first weekend in June, civic activists, technology experts, and entrepreneurs around the country will gather together for the National Day of Civic Hacking. By combining their expertise with new technologies and publicly released data, participants hope to build tools that help others in their own neighborhoods and across the United States.

It's a great cause and we're excited to take part. On June 1, we'll welcome developers and tech experts to the White House for our second hackathon.

If you have the skills necessary to work with APIs and develop visualizations, tools, or other services that rely their data, we want to hear from you.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/developers/apply-national-day-civic-hacking-white-house

National Day of Civic Hacking at the White House

On January 26, 2008, a 30-year-old part-time entrepreneur named Mike Merrill decided to sell himself on the open market. He divided himself into 100,000 shares and set an initial public offering price of $1 a share. Each share would earn a potential return on profits he made outside of his day job as a customer service rep at a small Portland, Oregon, software company. Over the next 10 days, 12 of his friends and acquaintances bought 929 shares, and Merrill ended up with a handful of extra cash. He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be nonvoting: He’d let his new stockholders decide what he should do with his life.

Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share

CNET reporter Jay Greene, an avid skier, hit the slopes to try three pricey goggles with heads-up displays showing his speed and distance. Glitches in both the hardware and software led him to a much cheaper, more reliable alternative.

Skiing showdown: GPS-informed goggles miss the mark

Chris Lee’s first thought after seeing the Millennium Falcon was a bit different from Luke Skywalker’s.

“When they walk down the stairs into the docking bay and Luke looks up and goes, ‘What a piece of junk!’ — as soon as he said that, I had the opposite reaction,” Lee said. “I was like, ‘It’s not a piece of junk. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve got to have me one of these!’ ”

Lee’s dream, hatched when he was a 12-year-old watching the first “Star Wars” movie at the old Cinema North theater near RiverGate Mall in 1977, wasn’t simply a boyhood fantasy. It just might come true one day.

Star Wars Fans Building Full-Size Millennium Falcon In Nashville

It’s not true that we can’t solve big problems through technology; we can. We must. But all these elements must be present: political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem, our institutions must support its solution, it must really be a technological problem, and we must understand it.

The Apollo program, which has become a metaphor for technology’s capacity to solve big problems, met these criteria, but it is an irreproducible model for the future. This is not 1961: there is no galvanizing historical context akin to the Cold War, no likely politician who can heroize the difficult and dangerous, no body of engineers who yearn for the productive regimentation they had enjoyed in the military, and no popular faith in a science-fictional mythology such as exploring the solar system. Most of all, going to the moon was easy. It was only three days away. Arguably, it wasn’t even solving much of a problem. We are left alone with our day, and the solutions of the future will be harder won.
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Great article!

Why we can't solve big problems

The near-Earth asteroid 4179 Toutatis, which is about 3 miles wide, will zoom within 4.3 million miles of Earth during its closest approach early Wednesday morning, Dec. 12.

Slooh will webcast Toutatis views from a scope in the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa beginning at 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) Dec. 11. Another show will follow at 10 p.m. EST tonight (0300 GMT Wednesday), with footage from an instrument in Arizona. You can watch them at Slooh's website: http://www.slooh.com.

3-mile-wide asteroid to buzz planet Earth tonight

OTTAWA — It was an inside job of sorts. Thieves with access to a warehouse and a careful plan loaded up trucks and, over time, made off with $18 million of a valuable commodity.

The question is what was more unusual: that the commodity in question was maple syrup, or that it came from something called the global strategic maple syrup reserve, run by what amounts to a Canadian cartel.

In $18 Million Theft, Victim Was a Canadian Maple Syrup Cartel