Sunday, August 17, 2008

Next-gen infantry guns

Oh yeah, the XM8 was dropped.

Radical water privatization for poor countries

Let's say the new water prices were so high as to capture all the benefits that buyers would receive from the new supply of water. We can expect much lower rates of diarrhea and other diseases, if only because the water supplier can charge more for cleaner and safer water. The resulting decline in disease means that children will die less frequently and adults will be healthier and more energetic. Those long-term social benefits are of enormous help to poor communities, even if high prices take away many of the initial, upfront benefits of the new water supply. In other words, we should consider radical privatization precisely because water is a public good and because clean water is so important for long-run economic growth.

Flipswap -- trade in your cell phone

Get store credit, cash in online, donate to charity, or recycle.

Uh oh. Problems with the service.

A religious history of American neuroscience

3) The third point is how the broader cultural equation of religion with “spirituality,” with “mystical experience,” and with the “search for meaning,” has shaped the research concerns of neuroscience when it turns its attention to religious questions. At least in the popularized image of the intersections of religion and neuroscience that filter out of the laboratory and into, say, Newsweek, the focus seems inevitably to be on “Tibetan monks lost in meditation” or “Franciscan nuns deep in prayer.” Such images of brain imaging convey an essentialized romantic picture of religion as mystical absorption, as immediate personal experience.