Somebody needs suing here, but I don’t think it’s the ice-cream manufacturer. I’d say that the employee who lost the fingertip was harmed far more than the customer who found it, and refused to return it so it could be reattached. Now it’s too late.
Ductile Concrete
From my alma mater. This could have a lot of applications, reducing future costs of highway infrastructure maintenance, among other things.
OK, De Tocqueville He Ain’t
Iowahawk is back (sans comments, apparently), from an alphabetical tour of our great land:
OK, De Tocqueville He Ain’t
Iowahawk is back (sans comments, apparently), from an alphabetical tour of our great land:
OK, De Tocqueville He Ain’t
Iowahawk is back (sans comments, apparently), from an alphabetical tour of our great land:
Why I’m Not On Television
Why I’m Not On Television
Why I’m Not On Television
Domains Missing In Action
First Clark Lindsey, and now Lileks. Do the end times approach?
[Update at 11:45 AM EDT]
Hobby space is back up. Lileks is still down, though.
Losing Reserve
I am reading The Ultimate Resource 2 by Julian L. Simon (Princeton, 1996). He makes the point that commodities prices tend to decline over the course of the last couple of hundred years compared to the cost of human labor. The average US wage in 1999 dollars is growing at about 2.1% per year geometric mean from 1900-1999. The real interest rate has been about 1% (in the UK anyway).
This means that if technology were constant and reserves were constant, the real price of a commodity would rise 1%. Otherwise, it would make sense to mine as much oil as possible and put the money in the bank, or leave the oil in the ground and wait for the price to rise.
In fact from 1860-2000 the price of kerosene (see figure 5) has dropped about a factor of 6. If you look at the service kerosene was providing (lighting), it has dropped a factor of 40 from