Vaclav Smil Interview

The WFP recently interviewed scientist, environmentalist and author Vaclav Smil about globalisation and energy consumption. Smil is a prolific author and can count Buffet and Gates as two of his many admirers.

Taken from the interview:

Q: Do you call yourself an environmentalist?

A: Of course, but the first qualification for such a label should be an extensive quantitative understanding of nature. Without it, everything dissolves into emotional qualitative claims that may, or may not, have any real merit.

The same view could surely be applied to so many other things that the population opines and votes on - the first qualification being an extensive quantitative understanding of the facts. 

Hard Talk

I seemed to have missed this one - the inimitable Hugh Hendry on BBC's Hard Talk about a month ago:

How Big ?

Ripped straight from Tim Iacono's blog (graphic via the Big Think blog). Looking at this it makes it easy to understand one of the reasons why Stephen Jennings has bet so much of RenCap on Africa:

. . . . After having looked at the same flat maps as you’ve probably looked at for many, many years, it came as a surprise to me that land masses around the equator are actually much bigger than is commonly believed, the image below. . . proving that point quite clearly.

Of course, the corollary is Greenland, an island nation that, though quite large, is not nearly as big as most people believe. Then again, most people probably don’t even know where or what Greenland is, let alone wonder whether their perception of its size has been distorted by looking at flat maps of a sphere for so many years:

Mid-Week Tunes

Silversun Pickups - Little Lover's So Polite

Brand New - The Quiet Things No One Ever Knows

Through Moscow on an R1

The fastest way through Moscow traffic. . . on an R1:

The Renaming Of The United States

Source and larger size.

Richard Dawkins on Real Time

Bill Maher interviewed Richard Dawkins on his show a few days ago. HBO gets upset about copyright and keeps forcing these clips to get pulled. So here are two different sources of the same thing in case one gets pulled in the future.

The first source below is the whole show. Other guests include Andrew Ross Sorkin and PJ O'Rourke - so the whole show is worth a watch. But Dawkins is the first guest - so skip ahead to 7:15 if you only want to see him. And the show gets pretty funny again from 44:55:



And if the vid for the whole show above gets yanked, you can see just the Dawkins interview segment here.

How Fake Money Saved Brazil

How fake money saved Brazil - An interesting piece on NPR describing how Brazil changed its currency to solve its inflation problem.

I bet most people have no idea of the story of the real. A great story about four drinking friends who changed Brazil's economy and got it on the high-octane path it now finds itself on.

It essentially shows how money (fiat currency) is a psychological concept - perception can become reality.

Have a listen.

Housekeeping

For anyone who's interested, I've just cleaned up my blog roll - there's a bunch that I've trashed, as I don't read them anymore. And a few additions too. So the links there largely follow what ends up in my aggregator.

Blog roll still where it's always been, entitled "Who I Read", towards the bottom right on the blog home page.

Bill Maher interviews Richard Tillman

For those of you who don't know the Tillman story - here's the intro from Wikipedia:

Patrick Daniel "Pat" Tillman (November 6, 1976 – April 22, 2004) was an American football player who left his professional sports career and enlisted in the United States Army in June 2002, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. He joined the United States Army Rangers and served multiple tours in combat before he died in the mountains of Afghanistan. Initially, the U.S. government attempted a cover-up, reporting that Tillman had been killed by enemy fire, with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal approving a Silver Star citation. Later, his actual cause of death by friendly fire was recognized.

A New York Times book review of Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman noted that the book did well to compile the facts and "nauseating" details regarding the cover-up of Tillman's death, stating "After Tillman’s death, Army commanders, aided and abetted by members of the Bush administration, violated many of their own rules, not to mention elementary standards of decency, to turn the killing into a propaganda coup for the American side."

So Bill Maher interviewed Pat's brother Richard last month on his show. The whole thing is worth a watch, but for those in a rush it gets good between 4:30 and 7:05:

Power From The Earth ?

From Tea With The Economist:

Power from the earth: The largest generator. There is enough heat stored just below the earth's surface to potentially meet the world's energy needs. But can we tap it?

Tea With The Economist: Sidney Rittenberg

Mao's interpreter on the evolution of individual ambition, China's development, and why Mao was the best listener he ever met. . . 

Visa Restrictions

From The Economist:

THE ability to visit a foreign country without the cost and hassle of obtaining a visa is a welcome bonus for any traveller. It is also a barometer of a country's international alliances and relations. A report released on August 25th by Henley & Partners, a consultancy, shows that Britons have the fewest visa restrictions of the 190-odd countries (and territories) for which data are available. British citizens can enjoy a three-day stay for business or pleasure to 166 destinations without needing a visa.

Not included in the chart below are New Zealand and Australia, which are both ranked 9th = with Canada.

Economist source here. Henley & Partners Visa Restrictions Index Global Ranking 2010 source here. 

Cardinal Sinister

Cardinal Sinister by Nick Walker