Three hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus predicted that human population would always tend to outpace food production, and that this would ordinarily lead to widespread starvation – but that people tend to respond by restricting their own reproduction to match the available resources. The fact of great differences in birthrates and starvation levels, from one … Continue reading
Can Desalination Proceed without Electricity?
It always seems like desalination (i.e., removal of salt from sea water to make fresh water) is treated as a power problem. It takes a lot of electricity to do that. But I was wondering, can this be done without electricity? I know this has surely been considered by many engineers. But my search didn’t … Continue reading
Needed: JokeBot
What every American household really needs is a robot pre-loaded with all sorts of puns and gags. Maybe it would get an update every week. It would follow us around and tell us jokes. Like, if it saw a baseball lying on the floor, it might say, “I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. … Continue reading
Scenario: The Rude Awakening
The concept of this post is simple: something bad is going to happen, environmentally speaking. I don’t mean bad in a scientific sense, like the extinction of some kind of endangered bat. I mean bad on the level of the ordinary person. Honeybees are going to vanish, taking all kinds of foods with them; or the … Continue reading
Contrarian View: The Zero-Sum Lens
There are many ways of seeing things. One perspective – particularly appealing, perhaps, to those who believe in yin and yang, give and take – is that of the zero sum. The concept of the zero sum is that everything has its price – that improvement in one area tends to entail loss or deterioration … Continue reading
What Do You Mean, Happy New Year?
We just passed New Year’s Eve 2012. Someone said, “Happy New Year!” My first question was, what do you mean by that? What, indeed, is a year? The stock answers are mathematical. Numbers can sound precise, but I say, be careful when people respond to an inquiry by stating numbers. It could be a dodge. … Continue reading
