If you don't know Lamarr's spectacular story, read about it here and here.
The BIG question: What contemporary actress could possibly play Lamarr? .. perhaps the most brilliant and beautiful actress to ever set foot on a Hollywood sound stage.
Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, noted that Intel sponsors an international science competition every year. This year it attracted some 50,000 American high school kids. "I was in China 10 days ago," Mr. Barrett said, "and I asked them how many kids in China participated in the local science fairs that feed into the national fair [and ultimately the Intel finals]. They told me six million kids."
For now, the U.S. still excels at teaching science and engineering at the graduate level, and also in university research. But as the Chinese get more feeder stock coming up through their high schools and colleges, "they will get to the same level as us after a decade," Mr. Barrett said. "We are not graduating the volume, we do not have a lock on the infrastructure, we do not have a lock on the new ideas, and we are either flat-lining, or in real dollars cutting back, our investments in physical science .. ". More TOM FRIEDMAN.
Here's a suggestion -- change the funding system of the university. And here is how. Combine the wealth producing fields of science and engineering into independent universities completely outside the control of the wealth consuming disciplines -- with absolutely independent funding structures. Just a thought.
The Wikipedia entry on Friedrich Hayek is actually rather good -- far better than any short piece I've seen on Hayek from a commercial encyclopedia company. I corrected one glitch -- "catallaxy" had been misspelled. Tyler Cowen links to this fascinating story on the strange power and hidden logic of Wiki spontaneous cooperation.
UPDATE: Here's the Wiki entry on Web Blogging, via The Modulator.
Charles Krauthammer on going to Mars. Krauthammer claims there are worse things we could be doing -- like, say, what we're doing right now.
The invasion of the digital packrats:
Nearly 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person each year, or the equivalent of 30 feet of books, according to the report. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002, with 92 percent of the new information stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.To fully comprehend the size of 5 exabytes, the report explains, "If digitized, the 19 million books and other print collections in the Library of Congress would contain about 10 terabytes of information; 5 exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections."
Another powerful example of 5 exabytes is that it is the equivalent of all the words ever spoken by human beings ..
The PrestoPundit digital archive is down below there just to the right.
Bush's folly -- Hydrogen. A look at the science tells the story:
At least one small benefit of the current interest in FCs [hydrogen fuel cells] is that even many scientifically illiterate enthusiasts now realize that hydrogen is not an energy source, merely an energy carrier. Unless we get some environmentally benign means of producing it by the electrolysis of water (that would require either exceedingly cheap photovoltaics or an entirely new generation of nuclear reactors) we would get it by using today's most practical method: steam reforming of natural gas. If you wonder how that would not lead to higher natural gas prices (and hence to higher oil prices as the two fuels are substitutable to a large degree) and how that would reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, you have to ask true hydrogen believers for an explanation.Moreover, hydrogen is an inherently poor choice for a transportation fuel because its uniquely high energy density depends on its liquefaction, i.e. storage under high pressure, or at least on its incorporation into metal hydrides to avoid bulky fuel storage in vehicles. And here's a curiously underappreciated fact given the litigiousness of this society: what would be the liability repercussions of distributing a fuel that now can be handled only by select personnel to hundreds of thousand commercial outlets? For these, and other, reasons -- all of which have been detailed in some excellent technical reports that have called recently for rethinking hydrogen cars -- we are not on the threshold of a new era dominated by FCs and hydrogen.
But try getting a television newsie or a politician to learn some basic science and technology -- I mean real stuff, not drug store pseudo-science techno blather, which is like a contagious disease in contemporary public discourse. It ain't happening.
Who should bring wireless to the world -- entrepreneurs or the UN? Kofi Annan knows. And a BBC analysis.
Microsoft lobbies California legislature to ease anti-SPAM regulations.
Meanwhile Matt Drudge comes out strongly in favor of the right to SPAM, telling of his own SPAM powered rise to fame and success on his KFI Sunday night radio show.
TIME has some spam recommendations:
Outlook users might be better off buying a third-party program, and the market's flooded with them. Ella ($29.95) stands out for its simplicity .. it uses an adaptive engine to "learn" your preferences � what qualifies as junk, which messages are top priority and which can be put aside for later � and organizes your e-mail accordingly. QURB ($24.95) and Mailblocks ($9.95 a year) are also worth a look. Finally, there's a community project that attacks spam .. with a blacklist. For $4.99 a month, SpamNet checks your incoming mail against its own ever expanding database. The service's 475,000-plus members contribute by "voting" on what's spam and what isn't, using the BLOCK and UNBLOCK buttons that the SpamNet program adds to your Outlook task bar. Enough votes from individual members and a message is blocked for all. With thousands of reports coming in every second, it can be pretty effective.
And Virginia Postrel has this:
The combination of SpamAssassin at the server and Entourage's next to highest setting mostly works, except Entourage still misclassifies a lot of my NYT reader mail as junk.