Required Reading

Color-blind monkeys get gene therapy and are cured. That's insane. They did it by injecting a type of virus carrying a gene that essentially activates a protein that the monkeys are lacking in their cone cells. Wired and MIT.

Interesting video on tangible statistics. So fascinating...

More interesting food research by Brian Wansink. Short

More on high speed rail. It's so cool but just not cost effective for the most part. More on this later when I eventually talk about sunk cost fallacy.

Great article on entrepreneurs in Africa. Must read.

Cameras in London and cops driving around in cars in America are really expensive and both don't do ANYTHING to deter crime... (sarcasm) shocking (/sarcasm)!

Buzz Aldrin gives a Q&A on Freakonomics.

Well written piece about the future of cars, or rather; electric cars are taking over.

New Scientist puts out a list of 13 things in science that can't be explained. Here's round two.

Contact lenses that can monitor your bodily functions. They actually have a working model too.

Penn and Teller's show, Bullshit, covers The Bible. It's good but I wish they'd scream less and be a bit more objective. Then again, it's a show called bullshit.

Some college professors are giving money back to their students that they receive in royalties for required texts that they authored.

Some 9/11 Bush hate pieces. One by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture and excerpt of an article in The Atlantic (long) commented on by Chris Blattman (short), a professor of economics and political science at Yale who runs this insightful blog.

Finally, an explanation of why people who don't necessarily agree with Republican candidates vote Republican; they prefer their moral values and views on personal wealth. The strongest indicator? "Whether candidates view themselves as 'better than normal' human beings because of their wealth."

Think the Tevatron (ever notice that just about everything cool was either invented in Chicago [skyscraper] or resides near Chicago?) or Large Hadron Collider is huge? The US was planning one back in the 90's that was over twice as big as the LHC and actually started construction. Here's a photo gallery and story about what remains - yeah I'd totally live there. Here's a piece from Wired about how Fermi Lab's Tevatron is working around the clock to churn out ground breaking research before the LHC comes online.

A company has found a way to detect autism in children much earlier - 2 years old instead of the usual 5 to 6.

A university professor lands in jail for sharing research with Chinese graduate students... really? And apparently The State Department classifies satellites as munitions so that some cutting edge research done on them is considered classified. Short.

A 48 pound genetically engineered rainbow trout was caught in Canada. Just go look at the photo.

The highest resolution photo of Andromeda ever taken can be seen here. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away and is the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy.

If This Were a News Blog...

The first 80% of the show would all be about unemployment, the depression we're denying we're in, and in general what went wrong. If you have any desire to read stuff like that then check out this Q&A with Richard Posner on Freakonomics. It's semi-easy to understand and spot on.

I guess number two on the list would be global warming (which should really be retitled global climate change). Here's a TED talk about cleaning the air with an incredibly easy to implement solution involving house plants.

Then probably a story about hybrid cars even though they aren't very viable. This is from GOOD Magazine and outlines cars and technologies you can actually buy now or in the near future.

And then they'd finish it off with a homicide story even though murder rates have been falling since the dawn of man. This is a TED talk by Steven Pinker.

Great Links

Drug money saves banks... "It would appear, that the criminal masterminds of the under ground economy apply 'conservative' leverage and tend to be 'highly liquid'."

Let the government spend. "Bizarrely, however, some Congressional critics have denounced the administration’s stimulus proposals as 'mere spending programs.' Of course they’re spending programs! More spending is exactly what we need."

Google introduces work on a power meter application that allows you to view your real time energy usage online. I remember reading that studies have been conducted showing that by merely placing a meter that allows you to see your energy usage in real time consumption generally drops around 20%.

Cool art prints.