Back when 20 dollars was an ounce of gold

I agree. It seems to me that we should encourage countries that have nuclear capability to develop ICBM's. Or even better, give countries that can put a satellite into orbit a limited number warheads. When I get time I'll write an essay titled "On Nuclear Deterrence" at njarboe.com to better describe the idea.

Wish I could find a reference, but I read somewhere the peak horse population in the United States, since it's reintroduction from Europe, was now.

Went to the store here in California yesterday to buy some 100 watt light bulbs. I usually get the frost free ones because I get more lumens for the watt. Trying to be/look green, they passed a law in California that light bulbs had to be %5 more efficient. So what do I find. 95, 71, and 57 watt light bulbs on the shelves. Imagine all the energy going into retooling, testing, printing, etc to change from a 100 watt bulb to 95 watt.

I hope the bulb manufactures go really green and make them 33% more efficient. I could then buy a 150 Watt bulb and it would only output 100 Watts to put in my max 100 Watt lamp.

A team of engineers is a bit of an understatement. About 500,000 people were working on the Manhattan project for about 4 years. A majority of the best physicists and engineers in the world (America had much immigration of scientists pre-Perl Harbor)were working on all aspects of the problem. A rough guess in today's terms might be and average wage of $200k per worker per year. That would give the labor cost alone of producing these bombs at $400 billion. With a population of 1/3 that of today call it $1.2 trillion. Add capital and material costs, it it probably closer to $2 or $3 trillion for comparison to today's dollars in comparison of the total economy.

I think that having a unique identifier for a piece of data, that does not change unless you decide to change it, is a good idea. It allows for different systems(including humans) to interact with the data. I imagine Microsoft would love to have the "My Documents" folder hidden in some data cloud that only their products could access. Luckily it seems like they cannot build a successful operating system from scratch and we still can get to C:

In California PG&E got into $30 billion in debt due to a poorly planned (for the public) de-regulation plan. The state bailed them out and now there is now a ~5 cents/kW/hr surcharge on residential power to service that debt for the next 30 years. I bet some places in America pay less than 5 cents/kWhr.

There was a study in Nature in the last few months about a tribe in the Amazon that did not interact with the outside world. They have no number system. Just words for one, two, many. Most people still have trouble remembering numbers. Powers of two are nice. It's too bad people supporting the metric system did not go more radical and advocate a base 12(or 60 like the Sumerians) numbering system that has more factors.