Here's a standard account of autism, from Wikipedia: Autism is a brain development disorder that first gives signs during infancy or childhood and generally follows a steady course without remission or relapse. Impairments result from maturation-related changes in various systems of the brain. Autism is one of the five pervasive…
Here's a thoughtful and well-researched article on the safety of bicycling by Alan Durning of Grist. Here's his bottom line: Biking is safer than it used to be. It's safer than you might think. It does incur the risk of collision, but its other health benefits massively outweigh these risks.…
I wrote about complacency once before. I focused on the complacency of most Americans in the face of the energy crisis that is clearly upon us. We have no assurance that gasoline won’t double or triple in price over the next five or 10 years, throwing our economy into a massive depression. With stakes like these, you would think that prolific energy wasters like us would immediately jump on our energy consumption problem by enacting a national conservation plan to cut our petroleum use in half. This could be accomplished by modifying our wasteful energy usage in dozens of ways. For instance, we really could carpool. We could build up our mass transit systems and encourage their use. We could walk and bike more. We could make our homes much more energy-efficient. Instead of building new homes in existing farm fields, we could renovate homes that already exist. While we’re at it, we could cut our use of all other forms of energy in half too. For instance, the technology already exists to make zero-carbon footprint buildings.
Others have written extensively regarding many methods by which we could reduce energy use. Due to the widely accepted law of supply and demand, cutting our use of energy would also have the effect of lowering the price of energy (relative to whatever it would have been had we not taken such measures), thereby diminishing the financial damage from our perennial trade deficits and budget deficits.
My concern is that so many people …
It is awkward for me to argue that adults have the right to smoke marijuana. Whenever I make this argument, I suspect that people think that my arguments constitute a thin and self-serving façade for my own personal desire to smoke marijuana.
I have never smoked marijuana, though, and have never desired to do so, even though I worked as a rock musician in the 70’s. I don’t know why I have never desired to use marijuana or any other street drug. Maybe it’s because I fear the loss of “control”—life is already a bit out of control, it seems. Perhaps I have been cowed by the existence of criminal laws prohibiting possession of even possession of small amounts. Nor do I smoke or drink. I try to find my personal high through things like talking with friends, exercising and by exploring ideas.
When discussing the potential legalization of drugs, personal prejudice and flimsy anecdotes have a way of driving the conversation. That’s why I wanted to say a few things about my own attitudes toward marijuana before preceding.
This topic of the illegality of marijuana arose at a gathering of acquaintances yesterday. For those opposed to legalizing marijuana I suspect that their main argument was that marijuana use is morally wrong. In “mixed company” (involving people for and against criminalization of marijuana), this moralistic argument is left unarticulated, however, because it is a rare day when a simple claim that something is “immoral” convinces anyone of anything. In such …
I’m learning a lot about honeypot ants. They are incredible little creatures. Also known as repletes or storage ants, certain members of these ant colonies serve as living storage jars for the nectar gathered by the other workers. Their abdomens extend many times bigger than the ant originally was, such…