Patent number 6,368,227: A method for swinging. You know, on a playground.

In articles published on consecutive days, Slate finds "cracks" in the religious right and "fault lines" in the religious left. There's nothing new here; were these movements somehow unified and single-minded before?

Millions of computers sit idle for most of the time, doing nothing. Harvesting that processing power is a great idea. Too bad we're using it for the wrong thing.

Paul Bloom says fMRI studies aren't all they're cracked up to be. If you're at all interested in how we think, Bloom's book, Descartes' Baby, is well worth reading.

Warren Buffett's strategy in philanthropy mimics his strategy in investment.

Genetic selection is upon us:

About 200 heritable conditions can be detected by pre-implantation diagnosis in IVF treatment so that only healthy embryos are implanted in the mother or frozen; the new technique - pre-implantation genetic haplotyping - will be able to detect nearly 6,000 diseases and conditions.

We can do it. For Minette Marrin this means that we should, obviously:

What it means is that thousands of parents who are at known risk of passing on terrible disabilities and diseases will now be able to have only healthy babies. This is the best news I have heard for years.

That is a case that can be made, and it may even be a strong case. But she doesn't make it. Instead she makes the common mistake of assuming that technological change is completely uncontrollable and cannot be shaped by ethical concerns; that ethics is ultimately irrelevant to science.

Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy.

Not really. Science is nature amplified; it can be astonishingly cruel. It can also be the instrument of mercy. And knowing which it will be in a particular case is not always simple.

The future of space travel is privately funded; even NASA thinks so.

Traditional media still has some life:

Network newscasts "are going to be dying for a long time, and dying quite profitably," [...] The same applies to most newspapers, so save your tears.

In a slightly related note, Alan Jacobs says blogs are bad for reasoned discourse about complex topics. Which is not really a surprise.

At Language Log, John McWhorter tells you why you shouldn't worry about grammar.

The ink-spot theory at work in Afghanistan:

The commanders pick an area, send in troops to clear it of insurgents, and keep it secure—at which point government representatives and foreign aid workers come in and build roads, schools, whatever's needed or wanted. The example of this success spreads to other areas, where the sequence is duplicated, until gradually the country prospers, the insurgents lose favor with the population, and the central government—which has been taking credit for these successes—gains legitimacy.

Maybe it works. Maybe not. The article is a pretty balanced description of the promise and the problems with the idea.

3,145 miles per gallon? That's nothing compared to what I get. I will admit, though, that their car is cooler looking than my bike.

First they used the American Idol model to recruit politicians in Russia. Now they're using it for scientists in the UK.

Peter Beaumont, in a review of Failed States, has questions for Noam Chomsky:

Is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River? Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it? The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world's greatest - if flawed and selfish - democracy going to the polls.

You know someone's taking soccer too seriously when they can say this:

If the above data leads us to conclude that communism does not produce a superior soccer society, fascism has far more to recommend itself.

A report about mathematicians trying to be funny. The results, as you might expect, are not pretty.

Shuji Nakamura has won the Millenium Prize "for a technological innovation that significantly improves the quality of human life":

Nakamura's invention of a blue laser also can be used to purify water, benefiting developing countries, Alvesalo said. "You give bacteria in water real sunburn with the laser. You kill them."

Maybe we should apply the American Idol method to get young people interested in politics. Russia is trying it.

The symbiosis of terrorists and journalists:

More ink equals more blood, claim two economists who say that newspaper coverage of terrorist incidents leads directly to more attacks.

The General Convention of the Episcopal Church is going on this week. It's a mess. The best and most even-handed explanation of why it's a mess and what's going on was in The New Yorker a little while back; you can read it here. Ruth Gledhill is usually good, and her take is here; for the local angle, look at the Denver Post's article about the Colorado deputation.

Ronald Bailey urges you to vote for gridlock.

A possible vaccine for Alzheimer's.

Dave Eggers's piece about the peculiar American attitude toward soccer is funny, as you might expect. But what I noticed was that the picture, captioned "A German goal at the World Cup," is clearly a screen shot from a video game. Is this intentional?

String theory is so worthless that it's not even wrong.

In time for the World Cup, you can read about how Beckham actually bends it.

You actually don't have to show ID to fly on a plane.

Today I'm going to offer you a window into my blogging mind, all the difficult decisions I make in my daily effort to bring you the very best.

I often have to decide between an important boring article and a trivial fun article. For example, this takes a look at East Timor, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and talks about the difficulty of nation-building, which is an important and relevant topic; the article is terribly boring. This "underpants manifesto", on the other hand, discusses the somewhat less important question of what kind of underwear men should wear; it is funny and easy to read.

I like math. I would like to link to good popular articles on math. I usually link to Keith Devlin's monthly column. The problem is, June's column about the beauty of calculus and the definition of the derivative is pretty bad. He's trying. He's trying really, really hard. And that may be the problem.

I have linked to several reviews of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, probably too many. Today there is a really excellent and thoughtful review by Freeman Dyson, which pulls in topics like kamikaze pilots that you wouldn't think are relevant but turn out to fit. But for some reason I have been reluctant to link this other response (pdf) to Dennett despite the fact - maybe because of the fact - that it's written by one of my heroes, Alister McGrath. At some point I should read the book myself; I've found the discussion about it fascinating.

Apparently a judge in Orlando got so fed up with two lawyers bickering that he ordered them to settle a dispute by playing "Rock, Paper, Scissors."

Auditing media predictions:

We find that the media not only fail to weed out bad ideas, but that they often favor bad ideas, especially when the truth is too messy to be packaged neatly.

GE has a cheaper way to make hydrogen.

A though-provoking op-ed from Peter Beinart:

What Truman understood — and Bush does not — is that for the United States to change the world, it must also change itself. For Cold War liberals, the struggle against communism and the struggle for civil rights were intertwined — because only by overcoming injustice at home could the U.S. inspire others to do so abroad.

Forget mosques; gyms are the real breeding ground for terror:

Today's gym culture seems like the perfect vehicle for nurturing the combination of narcissism and loathing of the masses necessary to carry out a terrorist suicide mission.

Fuel cells for your laptop.

Karl Zinsmeister defends urban sprawl and Wal-Mart, saying that both are examples of ordinary choices by ordinary people:

Economists calculate that because of its soaring efficiency, Wal-Mart singlehandedly reduced the overall cost of living in the U.S. by 3.1 percent. That amounts, on average, to $2,329 of extra cash available to every American family, every year.