David Boaz says "at its core, the movie is about defending property rights."
He reviews James Cameron's new film at the LA Times, pointing out that it's "like a space opera of the Kelo case."
Wild Balkans
I used to work with some wild Balkans, but that's not what this post is about...
"The Balkan Peninsula...where ancient forests and vast wetlands harbor pristine wilderness, and sheer cliff walls and desolate plateaus preserve a seemingly unchanged past."
We're going to have to tune in to see this show on Nature on PBS.
Long tails, tribes, and pluralism
An oldie but goodie from Chris Anderson on the WIRED blog network
Here's my take on what the Long Tail is doing to pop culture. Rather than the scary fragmentation of our society into a nation of disconnected people doing their own thing, I think we're reforming into thousands of cultural tribes, connected less by geographic proximity and workplace chatter than by shared interests. Whether we think of it this way or not, each of us belongs to many different tribes simultaneously, often overlapping (geek culture and Lego), often not (tennis and punk-funk).
Copenhagen: our wake-up call
In the Washington Post today, Bjorn Lomborg says "it's time to give up our Rio-Kyoto-Copenhagen fantasy and get real about combating global warming."
Clearly we need "to radically ramp up green-energy technologies -- to the point where we can increase our reliance on them by several orders of magnitude."
Who should invest? Who should be in charge? What's the best way to ensure practical, actionable solutions?
Inevitably, investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs will wake up. Will policy makers stay out of their way?
Yellow & Blue Neuroscience
A powerful new class of tools from the neuroscientists at MIT will reversibly shut down brain activity using different colors of light.
It appears chronic pain, epilepsy, brain injury and Parkinson's disease could best be treated by silencing, rather than stimulating abnormal brain activity.
Read more about the Cognitive Rhythms Collaborative in Science Daily.
sea turtle hatchlings make their first journey to the sea
The World Wildlife Fund has released its annual list of the most threatened species around the world. Due to a host of threats, including climate change, the long-term survival of many animals is increasingly in doubt.
“We have a window of opportunity in which to step up and pull back some of the world’s most splendid animals from the brink of extinction."
- Director of WWF Scotland, Dr Richard Dixon
The WWF list includes tigers, polar bears, pandas, and the leatherback sea turtle.
If you're unfamiliar with the leatherback, you can visit Paso Pacifico's photo gallery.
If you're interested in making a year-end contribution to sea turtle conservation, you can donate to Paso Pacifico here.
Empty LA
What would LA look like if it were completely empty?
Photographer Matt Logue shows us in his eerily beautiful new book.
environmental stewardship, community service, and a spirit of inclusion
The good news is that "America is becoming better educated, more inclusive, and more concerned about the environment."
There's no law that someone who enjoys organic food, rides his bike to work, or wants a diverse school for his kids must also believe that the federal government should take over the health-care system or waste money on thousands of social programs with no evidence of effectiveness.
Why science is better than politics
Skill at articulation does not correlate with intelligence, and intelligence does not correlate with wisdom. The qualities that correlate with wisdom are humility and curiosity (Socrates and Einstein). This is why science works so well and politics doesn't (and also why many corporate boards and managers aren't as effective as they might be).
-Gerry Ohrstrom
Socrates: nonconformist hero?
The Economist imagines Socrates in modern America:
Who and what, then, was Socrates to Athens? Part of his glory derives from his incorruptibility, his brave nonconformism, his determination to think as an individual not as part of “the herd”. Nonconformism became a heroic value in the Western tradition that Socrates helped to found, especially in societies such as America’s that value individualism.
But nonconformism is not an absolute virtue and easily veers off into sedition, subversion or other actions deemed unpatriotic. Psychologists suggest that people make constant trade-offs in social settings between, on one hand, insisting on their notion of truth and, on the other, the cohesion of a group. Sometimes truth and virtue require dissent and rebellion. Other times the survival or security of the group takes precedence and requires solidarity. If Socrates the free thinker belonged to a team, a club, a firm or a country today, he would never compromise his values, but he might well compromise his group.
'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die'
On lists:
The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.
On books (even better):
I have a hallway for literature that's 70 meters long. I walk through it several times a day, and I feel good when I do. Culture isn't knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes. Of course, nowadays I can find this kind of information on the Internet in no time. But, as I said, you never know with the Internet.
good year for Ostrom
Kudos to Foreign Policy for including Elinor Ostrom on their list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for "for showing us that the global commons isn't such a tragic place after all."