Genetically modified food is usually the enemy of environmentalism. But it doesn't have to be, says James E. McWilliams:

Cows that eat grass are commonly touted as the sustainable alternative to feedlot beef, a resource-intensive form of production that stuffs cows with a steady diet of grain fortified with antibiotics, growth hormones, steroids, and appetite enhancers that eventually pass through the animals into the soil and water. One overlooked drawback to grass-fed beef, however, is the fact that grass-fed cows emit four times more methane—a greenhouse gas that's more than 20 times as powerful as carbon dioxide—as regular, feedlot cows. That's because grass contains lignin, a substance that triggers a cow's digestive system to secrete a methane-producing enzyme. An Australian biotech company called Gramina has recently produced a genetically modified grass with lower amounts of lignin. Lower amounts of lignin mean less methane, less methane means curbed global warming emissions, and curbed emissions means environmentalists can eat their beef without hanging up their green stripes.

McWilliams says yes, frequent commenter Theo says no, I say maybe. Basically I believe in science - the phrase "genetically modified" isn't evil in itself, and it is possible for new technology, even biotechnology, to be used responsibly in ways that improve life. But it's not really the case that biotech companies are looking out for the environment or for our health - the incentives are wrong.

I really don't understand the economic situation. I've read several "The Stimulus Explained" type of blog posts that don't help. This one helps. A little.

It's important that we have independent media and newspapers. That way, our news won't be influenced by billion-dollar corporations. Instead, it will be influenced by billionaire Mexican mobsters.

The New Urbanism is coming. It sounds like that means there will be more trains.

A long time ago I posted about the Traveler's Dilemma, a problem in game theory. I thought it was interesting, but when I talked to my friend Patrick about it, he said, "Game theory is dumb, nobody thinks about it anymore."

So, being the contrary person I am, I thought about it, and wrote a quick little program to simulate it, and improved that program, and, well, wrote an article about it that appears in the January 2009 College Mathematics Journal. You can find a pdf here.

The CMJ is not a high-prestige research journal, but it's a perfect fit for this little paper and I'm happy with the result.

Charles Murray wants the bachelor's degree to no longer be the primary requirement for getting a job:

Colleges have adapted by expanding the range of courses and adding vocationally oriented majors. That’s appropriate. What’s not appropriate is keeping the bachelor’s degree as the measure of job preparedness, as the minimal requirement to get your foot in the door for vast numbers of jobs that don’t really require a B.A. or B.S.

I might agree with that, and I agree with half his description of the problem:

Many young people who have the intellectual ability to succeed in rigorous liberal arts courses don’t want to. For these students, the distribution requirements of the college degree do not open up new horizons. They are bothersome time-wasters.

But I strongly disagree with the other half of what he says about the problem:

It is a truth that politicians and educators cannot bring themselves to say out loud: A large majority of young people do not have the intellectual ability to do genuine college-level work.

A football game is a story. If you're the best story-teller in the business, you can win eleven Emmys:

If the production crew of a televised football game is like a symphony orchestra, Bob Fishman is its conductor. He sits front and center in the dark trailer, insulated from the sunshine and the roar of the crowd, taking the fragments of sounds and moving images and assembling the broadcast on the fly, mediating the real event into the digital one. He scans the dizzying bank of screens to select the next shot, and the next, and the next, layering in replays, graphics, and sound, barking his orders via headset to his crew, plugging into a rhythm that echoes the pulse of the game.

Also on the football beat, Bill James calls for a boycott of the BCS:

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do. If you're driving to Cleveland and you get lost and wind up in Youngstown, you don't blame your car. If you're doing a ranking system and you wind up with Murray State in western Kentucky as the national football champion, you don't blame the computer.

The 2009 Edge question is up. If you don't remember from previous years, this is a game where super-intellectual people compete with each other to say shocking, original things that will make everyone marvel at their creativity and uncommon wisdom.

So, in response to this year's question of "What will change everything?", we get answers like "Understanding the mind" and "Artificial, self-replicating meme machines" and "The anthroposphere" and "Brain-machine interface."

Read through ten or so of these, and you're very refreshed to read Keith Devlin's simple answer:

The mobile phone. Within my lifetime I fully expect almost every living human adult, and most children, in the world to own one. (Neither the pen nor the typewriter came even close to that level of adoption, nor did the automobile.) That puts global connectivity, immense computational power, and access to all the world's knowledge amassed over many centuries, in everyone's hands.

I declare Devlin the winner. Yes, he is a mathematician. What, you expected me to declare a sociologist the winner?

2008 was a rough year, judging by headlines. But there was still some good news.

Terence Tao (yes, again) has some thoughts on multiple choice tests. Of course he's right that more open-ended questions are better in some sense. But I wonder: here at CU, the applied math department takes great pride in administering open-ended tests where the work is graded to hundreds of engineers three times a semester. Are we sure that's better than giving, say, six multiple choice tests a semester?

Anyway, Tao might have a good claim to be the greatest living mathematician in the world, but I doubt any of his students have offered to start a riot on his behalf.

Terence Tao's trip through the airport leads him to a puzzle about moving sidewalks. I really like this problem. It's simple, related to real life, and the solution is not obvious.

Malcolm Gladwell on recruiting teachers:

In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before

Top headlines on major news sites as I write this:

BBC: India police name Mumbai gunmen.
CNN: Gov. tried to sell Obama Senate seat.
New York Times: Illinois Governor in Corruption Scandal.

They're all missing the most important story of the day, and probably the month:

Malaria vaccine may be available by 2012.

Saving lives with checklists:

These are, of course, ridiculously primitive insights. Pronovost is routinely described by colleagues as “brilliant,” “inspiring,” a “genius.” He has an M.D. and a Ph.D. in public health from Johns Hopkins, and is trained in emergency medicine, anesthesiology, and critical-care medicine. But, really, does it take all that to figure out what house movers, wedding planners, and tax accountants figured out ages ago?

Think Starbucks drove little independent coffee shops out of business? Just the opposite:

Starbucks was the gateway drug to specialty coffee. Customers tried it there first and then graduated to the often-superior products sold by indie shops. Even Duane Sorensen, owner of the proudly anti-corporate Stumptown Coffee in Portland, Oregon, concedes that Starbucks raised standards in the industry. Ward Barbee, publisher of the coffee publication Fresh Cup, is even more effusive. “Every morning, I bow down to the great green god for making all of this possible,” he told the Willamette Weekly in 2004. In short, Starbucks and indie shops grew up side by side. Indie shops learned from Starbucks’s retailing genius and built off its customer base. Then the indie shops left Starbucks in the dust.

Pick up the trash in your neighborhood:

A fence partly closed off the main entrance to a parking lot. There was a narrow gap and a no-admittance sign that pointed out a new entry, 200 yards away. A second sign prohibited locking bikes to the fence.

When the fence was clear, 27 percent of people heading for their cars ignored the no-admittance sign and squeezed through the gap in the fence. But after several bikes were locked to the fence in defiance of that ban, 82 percent of people going to their cars squeezed through the prohibited entry.

This doesn't prove the broken windows theory, but it does make it more plausible. Public order matters.

Car horns are useless.