Hopefully Interesting

It seems that there's now something new under the sun in the world of computer memory. Way back in 1971 Leon Chua noticed that there ought to be a 4th type of basic circuit element, which he called the memristor , alongside the traditional resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Then, just a few years ago in 2008, a group from HP was actually able to create one of these things that Chua had dreamed up. I was expecting that someday, maybe by 2018 or so, people would be starting to make things with memristors that were actually usable. I've recently found that I was way too pessimistic, though, and it seems that people have already made cells of resistive RAM, and that once they can be made cheaply in bulk its going to bring huge changes. If everything works out we'll have memory that is just as fast as RAM but which is non-volatile, that is it can continue to store information even when it looses power. For many years computers have had separate memory and storage

Recently I read The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan and I feel like I got a lot out of it, but from a very surprising direction. Like many people who are interested in economics, I'd long been aware of the idea of rational ignorance, that because it takes time and effort to become informed many people won't in situations where there is no direct benefit to them. Because the effect any given person has on national elections is utterly tiny it doesn't make much sense for individuals to invest much time and effort on learning about political issues since any good they do is further spread out among 300 million of their fellow citizens. This was my explanation for what problems there are in the US political system before reading the book and though it came strongly recommended (1) I figured it would just be an elaboration on this theme. I was very wrong, because Caplan spends a few pages near the start of the book utterly demolishing this argument as a sufficie

Ah, it seems my original ambitions fell a bit short and its been a year since my first post. Oops. Lets hope I can do better in the future. My thoughts have been turning to energy this last week, mostly due to the Fukushima nuclear power plant problems. I'd briefly considered putting "power plant disaster" there, but the scope of the damage from radiation seems so relatively small that it feels like doing so would trivialize the tsunami. Some back of the envelope calculations make me think that even if you assume a linear no-threshold dosage model for how radiation causes cancer (i.e. the silly conservative assumption) the plant meltdown will end up causing some tens of cancers. I'm generally a supporter of nuclear energy. Its a lot better than, say, coal which in the US kills tens of coal miners each year, and over ten thousand people through pollution. Its certainly possible to do better than that, but its possible to make nuclear plants much safer as well.