Sunday, March 22, 2009

One of these things is not like the other...

In preparation for the new arrival:

(Warning: Spoilers.) I dearly love BSG, but Bryan Caplan is absolutely right to declare absurd the idea of the Colonials abandoning their technology.

Here's my alternate ending. Instead of jumping 150,000 years ahead, we jump 150 years ahead. Almost all the Colonials' descendants are living in a single large city in what is now Iraq. They are a wealthy elite vastly outnumbered by the city's lower class residents, who are native to (this) Earth, destitute, illiterate, and capable of only very rudimentary speech. The city's deranged, vain leader, Emperor Gaius VII, has deepened the oppression of the Earth natives by conscripting a third of them to build a very tall tower that serves no purpose other than to glorify Gaius VII. Revolution is in the air...

Really though, I loved the finale, despite its flaws.

Friday, March 20, 2009

I really don't have time to watch bloggingheads.tv videos, but this week I gave in to temptation. I particularly enjoyed this diavlog between Peter Singer (Princeton) and Tyler Cowen about utilitarianism and ameliorating extreme poverty, and this one between Peter Singer (Brookings Institute) and John Horgan about robots of war.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

A strong argument for why news consumers shouldn't worry about the ailing newspaper companies. The too-short version: after N years we'll have more and better news about everything just like we now have more and better news about technology now than we did before the Web.

Monday, March 02, 2009

Which cities have more single women than single men and vice versa? See map here.

More ambitious is Richard Florida's attempt to find "the best city for you" using eight multiple-choice questions.