Winter’s Haven

Libertarians love France’s socialized medicine.
Karx Marx loves capitalism.

Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson have recently gotten themselves into a scuffle over cryonics, immortality in silicon, and personal identity. I suggest skimming the original two posts and then reading Julian Sanchez’s take on the question — he approaches the issue with more caution and more philosophical expertise than either Caplan or Hanson.
Finally, Will Wilson [...]

Ars Techina reports:

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented a paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group’s massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain [...]

Michelle Goldberg ponders the Feminist Case for War.
Matthew Yglesias writes about the current research on birth control and fertility rates (featured in The Economist recently) and how it applies to Afghanistan.

Julian Sanchez has an article in The Nation, which begins

We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George [...]

Firstly, Ars Technica brings us the news that gyroscopes are the new training wheels. Every physics major in the world is undoubtedly kicking themselves for not having invented this sooner. I certainly am.
Secondly, Dan of XARK writes in defense of rule breaking generally, and in defense of cyclists breaking traffic laws in particular. I’d sign [...]

Glenn Greenwald says that among progressives there has been
a tribal refusal to criticize one’s own, a gut belief that someone as good and just as Barack Obama couldn’t possibly really be continuing Bush/Cheney policies and complicitly helping to suppress their war crimes
…and he documents just how very, very different the reality is.

Tolerance is a terrible word. Here’s a real, live example which illustrates the problem all too well:

My unwillingness to tolerate your intolerance doesn’t make me intolerant.

Ugh. There is a way to interpret that sentence that makes it something other than an analytic falsehood, but it’s still very confusing. The dictionary actually addresses the different meanings [...]

Robin Hanson says we are presently living in the most interesting stage of human development, and in the age where our delusions have the greatest impact. I will not even attempt to summarize this. Go read it for yourself.

Today I am writing a check to my landlord, and wondering how America managed to lose its innovative edge to Kenya. Where, oh where did we go so wrong?