Freeman Dyson reviews two new books about Richard Feynman, one a serious attempt at capturing Feynman's scientific thought, the other his biography in comic book form. Note: there is no paywall on The New York Review of Books.
Freeman Dyson has been writing stuff for the NYRB fo many years now, but it's all but invisible to slashdot. He was born before microporcessors were invented, he can't possibly have anything interesting to say.
A news story from the London Times reports on a project to develop and commercialize vat-grown meat: Scientists grow pork meat in a laboratory. One of the thing's that's most interesting to me is how quickly people are thinking through the ethical implications. Would a vegetarian have ethical objections to this project, or welcome it? If you grew human meat like this, would cannibalism become chic?
A New York Times opinion piece by Robert C. Pozen: Inventing a Better Patent System This article contains a number of simple reforms for the US patent system that you would think would be no-brainers... and it doesn't even mention doing away with software patents. He's also an author on a book on how to reform the financial system. It's titled Too Big To Save, which makes it sound like he might be on the right track.
Freeman Dyson is one of the few survivors of the age of giants in physics (he was one of the people who developed the mathematical underpinnings for Feynman's work), and he remains a fascinating, wide-ranging thinker, the author of works like Infinite in All Directions. Of late he seems interested in being an environmental heretic, but in a much more moderate, intelligent way than the usual "conservative" style. Most recently he's published a long, thoughtful article on the Galpagos islands, with emphasis on the difficulties of balancing the needs of locals against environmental preservation.
The word is that John C. Mankin's outfit has successfully transmitted a megawatt of power by microwave beam in a test conducted between Hawaiian mountain tops; this is a technique often discussed for beaming solar power down from orbit. Needless to say, most of the obvious jokes have been done already, so try to do better, eh?
The physicist Freeman Dyson -- who made Feynman diagrams mathematically comprehensible to mere mortal physicists -- discusses some recent books about Global Warming. He accepts that anthropogenic global warming is a reality, though he departs from conventional wisdom about the urgency of fixing the problem immediately.
Thus far, there's only one thing I've noticed about the new system that I like: I can get the entire current state of the discussion in one huge page: I've always disliked the way the old system split things up into several pages (it made it hard to use text searches to skim for mentions of particular sub-topics).
In any case, as the slashdot brain-drain continues apace, it's going to be harder to find things in the discussion that are worth reading. It's more like a place you duck in if you feel like arguing with 13 year-olds and government propagandists. The various "features" being added to slashdot don't seem to address any of the real problems with the system.
(Actually: there's one "new" feature that sort-of works: I was skeptical of the utility of a friends network -- it just seemed like imitating all those other sites -- but actually it's kind of useful to be able to identify a cluster of nominally intelligent folks and automatically, instantly, mod them up. Kind of like the stuff I've been doing with nn and/or gnus on usenet for many a year...)
The bradblog is carrying a request: Database Geek Wanted: Programmer Needed to Help Pima County, AZ, Election Advocates Sort Through Largest Stash of Diebold Data Ever!. This is a paid telecommute contract to do some open source programming and help save democracy. The catch? You need to know how to deal with the Microsoft JET database engine.
But according to the wikipedia article on North Pacific Gyre, some details of this are in error: "Some sources[2] have incorrectly reported that there is a 'floating continent' of debris that is roughly twice the size of Texas, however no scientific investigation, including Moore's, has verified this." The Chronicle was using the terms "marine biologists" and "oceanographers" very loosely: this is not a finding that's been confirmed by any degree-holding scientists.
Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.
