Ron Bailey has a report on a conference this past weekend.

The admirable Virginia Postrel writes about how she became a kidney donor:

Usually when someone is seriously ill, all you can do is lend moral support and maybe cook some meals or run a few errands. Nothing you do will make that person well. But if you donate a kidney, you can (with the help of a team of medical specialists) cure her. Who wouldn

Via Clark Lindsey, here’s one of those periodic stories that someone is working on a Concorde successor. As usual, it makes little technical or economic sense (at least the story, if not the reality).

It is full of contradictory statements, to anyone who understands basic aeronautics. Example:

Japan is trying to leapfrog ahead in the aerospace field with a plan to build a next-generation airliner that can fly between Tokyo and Los Angeles in about three hours. But a string of glitches, including a nose cone problem during the latest test flight in March, has led the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to look for an international partner.

It’s actually a potentially serious problem:

The technology for remote-controlled light aircraft is now highly advanced, widely available — and, experts say, virtually unstoppable.

Models with a wingspan of five metres (16 feet), capable of carrying up to 50 kilograms (110 pounds), remain undetectable by radar.

And thanks to satellite positioning systems, they can now be programmed to hit targets some distance away with just a few metres (yards) short of pinpoint accuracy.

Security services the world over have been considering the problem for several years, but no one has yet come up with a solution.

Sounds like a job for the hive mind of the blogosphere.

Joe Katzman has some thoughts (and a useful comments section) about the comment and trackack spam problem that (among other things) keeps people from posting Blogspot URLs here. It’s not your father’s Internet.

Hosting Matters probably thought that it was a coup to host Instapundit, and it was, in the sense that they’ve gotten a lot of other high-profile bloggers as well. But there’s a down side. It’s not clear whether or not this DOS attack is an attack on so-called “right-wing” bloggers, but right now, I’m glad that I don’t share a pipe with him, and the others. It should be noted that, even if the attacks appear to be originating from Saudi Arabia, this doesn’t meant that the Saudis are doing it. There’s a reasonable chance that it’s being done by zombie machines directed from elsewhere (perhaps as an attempt to frame the Saudis for it, or just because they may have more unprotected machines).

When one sees the long list of quality blogs that were brought down due to this, it makes one think that there should be some diversification in hosting services, to eliminate this potential single-point failure for a significant part of the blogosphere.

This seems like good news:

This decline in death rates was so big it offset the increase in population, so the number of total deaths actually dropped by about 50,000 to 2,398,343 in 2004 from 2,448,288 recorded for 2003. Declines are rare — the last one was in 1997 — and this one was huge — the biggest decline in 6 decades.

Were any movies made by Hollywood about Pearl Harbor during the war? What movies were made during the war about events that precipitated the war?

As will probably be obvious, I want to know how soon is “too soon.”

You thought the Mini was a small car? Behold, the nanocar. Sounds a little too small for me, but it should get great mileage:

The nano-car’s molecular motor contains a pair of bonded carbon molecules that rotate in one direction if illuminated by a specific wavelength of light. After fixing the molecular engine to the car’s chassis and shining a light on it, Tour’s team confirmed that the engine was running by using nuclear magnetic resonance to monitor the position of the hydrogen atoms within it…

…Tour estimates that the car could travel two nanometres per minute but says his team has yet to find a way to watch their molecular automobile in action. “We think the car would drive along, but we wouldn’t be able to see it and I don’t think people would believe us,” he says.

You don’t say…

Even if they can get them working, I’ll bet they still can’t find a parking space in Manhattan.

Here are the top ten, according to Tech Republic. And the year is still young.