The difference between rich countries and poor countries is trust.

Slate takes a look at hybrid technology, with a local connection:

Hybrids Plus Inc., founded last year in Boulder, Colo., lashes together up to 1,200 lithium-ion cells the size of D batteries into pumped-up battery systems that can be charged in wall outlets. "In daily usage, we're seeing numbers as high as 137 miles per gallon," says CEO Carl Lawrence. Even with their Rocky Mountain-high cost—refitting a Prius can cost $24,000—the conversions are drawing interest from wealthy techies who gain psychological satisfaction from using less gas. (This is Boulder, after all.) The 15-person company has completed six conversions and should finish an additional 20 this year.

Prenatal genetic testing and relatively easy access to abortion leads to all kinds of questions about sex selection and eugenics:

What is a “designer baby” but a new consumer choice? When a vague, distorted feminism is conflated with enthusiastic consumerism, when “choice” is the catchword of both, designer babies can easily emerge as the natural, if not inevitable, next step in the evolution of our liberated, capitalist society.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow takes a thorough and honest look at disentangling the ideology of eugenics from the pro-choice movement, and is eventually led to this fascinating paragraph:

The first and least controversial task for pro-choice activists, then, is to make it very clear that the rights for which they have fought are fundamentally different from the right to determine the genetic makeup of offspring. Whether the latter right is legitimate or not, it is not the same as or an extension of the former. Pro-choice activists have struggled for women’s freedom to control their own lives and bodies, not to control the lives and bodies of their children.

Homeowner associations are taking away your right to dry:

The clothesline was once a ubiquitous part of the residential landscape. But as postwar Americans embraced labor-saving appliances, clotheslines came to be associated with people who couldn't afford a dryer. Now they are a rarity, purged from the suburban landscape by legally enforceable development restrictions.

Checkers is a draw.

Another town is switching to "shared space" traffic control - letting pedestrians and cars wander together without traffic lights. I think Boulder should be next.

I've mentioned this approach before.

These days, no one has any blue-collar skills. I can definitely relate to that; if I have to interact with a physical object other than a book or a computer, I'm pretty much lost.

Medicine and health are not the same thing:

If you would not pay for medicine out of your own pocket, then don't bother to go when others offer to pay; the RAND experiment strongly suggests that on average such medicine is as likely to hurt as to help.

Using graph theory to transplant kidneys.

"Somalia needs water. But it needs peace, too."

Diversity transforms us all into turtles.

An intentionally inflammatory post at Overcoming Bias:

In many situations it would be better to impose a punishment of torture than imprisonment. The fact that the U.S. justice system rejects torture as a punishment is the result of an anti-torture bias.

Overcoming Bias, though interesting, is firmly in the "we're super-rational and you're all superstitious morons", "most people are mindless lost sheep except the chosen rational atheist libertarian few" camp of blogs.

As a critique of this kind of thinking, this post gets it half right. But the problem is not really consequentialism, it's materialism.

An advice column from a theoretical physicist:

It will be impossible for you to determine precisely both the position and velocity of your dog, rendering him maddeningly difficult to catch.

Creepy sentence of the day:

The UN recommends a gender ratio of no more than 107.

It's from a BBC report on how China's one child policy is leading to more boys being born than girls.

Many thanks to Crawdad for designing a new header for this blog. It may be tweaked a bit in the future, but it's already such an improvement that I decided to go ahead and use it.

While I'm updating the header, I have a small problem that I was hoping my readers could help me with. The Solzhenitzyn quote above is attested several places on the always trustworthy and factually accurate internet, but this variant also appears:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

When sources are cited, both quotes are attributed to The Gulag Archipelago, which I unfortunately don't own. Did he write them both, or is one of them made up? Note that all the quote sites I've been to list one or the other, but not both. If they're both accurate, which should I use?

In China, you are forbidden to reincarnate without government permission.

Arthur Miller had something in common with Albus Dumbledore:

It would be easy to judge Arthur Miller harshly, and some do. For them, he was a hypocrite, a weak and narcissistic man who used the press and the power of his celebrity to perpetuate a cruel lie. But Miller's behavior also raises more complicated questions about the relationship between his life and his art. A writer, used to being in control of narratives, Miller excised a central character who didn't fit the plot of his life as he wanted it to be. Whether he was motivated by shame, selfishness, or fear—or, more likely, all three—Miller's failure to tackle the truth created a hole in the heart of his story.

This is the kind of article that suffers most from reading it on a glowing screen from a pithy link on a third-rate blog that compares the tragic but somehow redemptive subject to a wizard in a children's book. The article is touching, not funny, and long, and deserves to be read in dead tree form while sitting in an armchair. But it deserves to be read, so I'm linking.