I just got back from the Darfur rally in front of the Boulder County Courthouse. I feel like we had a pretty decent crowd, probably a couple hundred; more than the unicycle guy, at least.

A history of pizza:

The pie was a uniquely Chicago institution, like a perennially losing major-league baseball team, that other cities showed no interest in adopting.

Popular Mechanics takes a look at alternative fuels.

We need to do something in Darfur, but I'm not sure privatizing warfare is the answer.

Saving the world from malaria isn't going so well, since the people trying to do it are cheating and lying. Saving the world from pollution and high oil prices may be going a little better. But high oil prices don't usually kill people.

Bird flu wouldn't scare us quite so much if we were better at making vaccines.

Global warming is happening, but don't exaggerate it.

Boredom may not be bad for you:

Where people have written about being bored, they describe just sitting about more. You withdraw from things, so maybe there's an energy-conservation function going on. But at the same time, it is still unpleasant, and the unpleasantness could be a protection against your withdrawing completely.

This comic is funny. Maybe because it hits a little close to home.

It's supposed to be a public statement, so I might as well be public about it: yesterday I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

When I was your age, kids had respect, and constants were really constant.

The Jasons, a secretive group of scientists more or less in the service of government. I'd never heard of this before.

Shaving with a straight razor:

There are two ways to look at this moment. You can say that no one in his right mind should wield a double-edged razor half-asleep. Or you can say that no one in his right mind can stay half-asleep when he picks up a double-edged razor.

Long, but worth reading.

Women get better tips than men. Therefore, tipping is illegal:

Tipping as it is currently practiced is probably unlawful. It is against the law to discriminate on the basis of sex and skin color. The Civil Rights Act states that any time race, sex or age has a dispirited impact on the employee, the job is unlawful. If I was the owner of a large restaurant, I would be afraid of a class action suit.

This is probably not a surprise:

Catching sight of a pretty woman really is enough to throw a man's decision-making skills into disarray.

But this is:

The researchers are conducting similar tests with women. But so far, they have failed to find a visual stimulus which will affect their behaviour.

I'm not sure if I believe it. Maybe the problem is the "visual" bit.

Richard Harries, bishop of Oxford, writes about science and faith.

If he had taken more math, he might still be a free man:

The recently arrested "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian Mafia, Bernardo Provenzano, wrote notes using an encryption scheme similar to the one used by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago.

Hybrids: maybe not as great as you think. (Hat tip to the sunny day tracker.)

A greenpeace founder supports nuclear power:

Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster.

A fairly interesting article about mathematical biology at Oxford; also Keith Devlin discusses the Abel Prize. I'm shooting for the Fields Medal, myself, but I wouldn't turn down an Abel Prize.

Women are the future.

When he was eight, Carl Friedrich Gauss figured out a clever way of adding the numbers from 1 to 100. Or did he start at 81,297? And how did his less clever classmates do it? Brian Hayes explains.

Inventing diseases. This says more about the evils of advertising than it does about the evils of the pharmaceutical industry.

Garry Wills:

There is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian.

He also makes fun of the "what would Jesus do" catchphrase. This is the best piece on politics and religion that I've read in a long time.

It's the lawyers' fault:

If America now routinely has a shortage of vaccines, it is in part the long-term consequence of the Cutter Incident.

Seymour Hersh writes a piece in the New Yorker bringing up the possibility of a US nuclear strike against Iran. The BBC thinks a nuclear strike is highly unlikely but does not say the same for conventional bombing. And Jeff Sharlet sees a theological angle to the story.

Quirky, socially responsible independent companies selling out to soulless multinationals:

Unfortunately, we have seen little evidence of this sweet organic cream rising to the top of the global milkshake.

Helping the blind to see.

A primer on the religious left, a little reductionist but still interesting.

You can start a band in your garage, or make a movie. How about designing a space elevator?

Biofuel may not be such a great idea, says Peter Huber.

Scientists are having trouble making artificial bacteria. Apparently they're a bit more complex than we thought.

Alan Jacobs, one of my professors in undergrad, writes about Christian education in First Things.

William Easterly says foreign aid isn't working:

This is the tragedy in which the West already spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last 5 decades and still had not managed to get 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $4 bed nets to poor families.

I read a little bit of his book in the Boulder Bookstore the other day, and it seems quite interesting. But I'm not sure preaching about "accountability" really counts as having a concrete plan for fighting poverty. Then there's this:

Economic development happens, not through aid, but through the homegrown efforts of entrepreneurs and social and political reformers. While the West was agonizing over a few tens of billion dollars in aid, the citizens of India and China raised their own incomes by $715 billion by their own efforts in free markets.

But how do you turn Ethiopia into India?

If you don't want to read the long articles on French employment I linked to yesterday, take a look at this cartoon. Worth a thousand words, as they say.

This makes sense:

Soccer referees in Nigeria can take bribes from clubs but should not allow them to influence their decisions on the field, a football official said on Friday.

Theodore Dalrymple thinks French students are being dumb. Andrew Sullivan agrees.

Neutrinos have mass.