Is aging natural? Or normal? And even if it is, does that mean we shouldn’t try to beat it?

I think that part of this is people falling prey to the naturalistic fallacy, and mistakenly assigning a good/bad value to “normal.”

A homebuilt 3-D printer that creates objects out of sugar.

Tapping the jet stream?

And have we overemotionalized the climate debate? The most interesting thing about this article is the source.

[Update in the afternoon]

From comments:

What kind of an axe does Rand then have to grind here? It seems to be just hypocricy. We see a string of climate articles with his blurbs suggesting “Warmmongers are in trouble” or some such. Why oh why?

Because the policy outcomes, if global warming is admitted to be real, are something he is against in principle? And yet he advocates against denying evolution in a few posts to the side. Oh, the irony.

My “axe to grind,” if I have one, is that I am a skeptic (not a “denier”) on the need to up-end our economy for climate change, as I am on all religions. If global warming is “real,” we’ll deal with it as the effects become evident, and we’ll have a much better chance of having the resources in the future with which to deal with it if we don’t panic about it right now.

My “axe to grind” is against the overrighteous and hypocritical moralists who want to preach to the rest of us how to live while refusing to live by their own sermons, and purchasing indulgences for themselves. It is against the watermelon socialists who are using this new religion as a means to implement the collectivist (and ultimately totalitarian) social goals that they couldn’t achieve in the Cold War.

This long ago ceased to be about science. And, FWIW, evolution remains on much more solid footing than climate models.

…geek blog sites.

…that we should view as curable.

Note to self: should the need unfortunately arise, tell the surgeon that I don’t want him to do my colostomy this way.

Either way, I suspect that you’ll still pay through the nose.

From the past. Lileks would have a great time with this.

Well, we did get the undersea tourist boats.

An interesting, but somewhat depressing look at the upcoming crisis in geriatrics, over at the New Yorker.

What struck me about it was the assumption that the decline is inevitable, and that we have to focus on managing it, when in fact we need to put a lot more effort into technologies that can stop aging, and even reverse it. The assumption is that living too long is a problem, and it is, if we don’t figure out how to maintain and restore the ability of the body to repair itself.

[Via Alan Boyle]

Who will win out?

Following a market lead wrestled free in February, Blu-ray

Now here’s a solar panel installation business I could really get into:

It’s a two-piece bikini with photovoltaic film strips attached strategically to various parts of the clothing, so that you can charge your gadgets while you’re catching some rays. Better yet, the charging takes place via those rays.