Category: Random

It took me many years of reading Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins to really grasp what their disagreement was. I’ll try to summarize it here. They both, of course, completely accept the standard story of evolution as descent with modification and natural selection. Their disagreement is about the degree to which species will change…

I’ve thought for some time that the most sensible approach to the oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge is to hold onto it until we need it. The amount of oil there is irrelevant to today’s economy. On current trends, the total production would be some 1% of the world’s oil production, not enough…

Our drug laws don’t work. Immense amounts of money are spent on drugs. Because drugs are illegal, this money goes to criminals. This leads to ghastly levels of violence in places like Mexico and Colombia. Drug money supports the Taliban (admittedly this money is probably mostly from Europe) which spends it on attacking U.S. armed…

The New York Time had a big article on Sunday on missed opportunities to cut oil consumption. The article covers various ideas, but it focuses on automobile fuel standards. I think that is a mistake. I do think that the automobile fuel standards should be higher. Historically the American car companies have argued against this,…

We are most likely facing two significant problems in this century. The first is climate change due to increased greenhouse gases. The second is the loss of our major energy source due to oil depletion. I think it’s interesting that solving one problem is likely to solve the other one at the same time. The…