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Nathan Myhrvold and the Business Of Invention
elwinc writes "There's a great New Yorker story about Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures company, whose business model is to nurture ideas, write patents, and sell them. Apparently they're filing about 500 patents a year including a passive thorium reactor which consumes waste from conventional reactors. On the lighter side, you can read how Nathan has achieved 'dominant T. rex market share.'"
Though we've discussed Myhrvold and his company in the past, the New Yorker focuses more on how incredible it is to have a group of very intelligent people sitting around a table developing ideas.
before crashing planes full of civilians into offices full of civilians - many of whom were not Americans, btw. You see - that's Islam's dirty little secret: most Muslims who die violently do so at the hands of other Muslims. Have fun killing yourselves, losers.
"The dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program, but imagine the hilarity if they did!"
hate to give you a rude awakening... but... NASA's only plan in the case of a large space bound object coming at the earth, that on impact would destroy all sentient life... is an old military project that would be a massive massive deep space space craft that would have to be built, in pieced in orbit, and propelled by detonation of atomic bombs!
it's the only fuel source with enough energy density To Get That Far Out Into Space to either destroy, or steer into jupiter etc, Before it Was In The Point Of No Earth Life Survival Range...
AN unproven technology, that was never even tested, is The Best we Can Come Up With... for what scientists believe destroyed the dinosaurs...
although I kinda like the global cooling mass extinction theory, where plant life evolved so that it could produce O faster than animal life could produce CO2, causing an ice age that destroyed the lifeforms dinosaurs needed to survive. there could have been a big comet, etc, but then, where is the crater, they don't just go away you know. Global weather change can cause massive drought, massive annual firestorms among leafy plants like ferns, who can grow quickly then dry out fast, and create a huge ash layer, with no crater, all from global cooling.
It takes a long time for nature to cool the planet, if enough plant life is on solid ground and keeps burning down once or more a year..
until the crater is found ash layers can be explained by annual or more frequent massive firestorms over enough years where plants can regrow in one season to burn down in the next.
So really dinosaurs needed massive massive fossil fuel plants to keep CO2 levels high enough, ah the irony.
I'm not sure I would call Alan Garner, Isaac Asimov and JRR Tolkien some of the "finest storytellers of our time." Part of the reason these writers don't have a great deal of literary credibility is that they do not demonstrate the deeply emotional expression of someone like Dostoevsky, who was able to combine a highly reasoned and intellectual approach with extraordinary insight into what it feels like to be human.