The folks over at Balloon Juice are mocking John McCain’s proposal of an “X-Prize”-like monetary prize incentive for developing more efficient batteries. The general thrust of criticism is that if you’re going to have government investment in business, better to have it targeted for research efforts that pay off faster than as an undirected, unorganized “prize” that no serious research team would consider worthy of the effort (since the payoff in designing a better battery is having patents on the better battery, not the three hundred million smackers).

This isn’t entirely incorrect, but it overlooks the one definite plus of an X-Prize-like incentive; it widens and democratizes research effort. It was only about a century ago that the majority of invention was done by talented amateurs - and this during the Gilded Age, remember.

My favorite example is probably the Wright Brothers, who invented powered heavier-than-air flight on their own; they were distinctly not part of the research community involved in designing heavier-than-air flying machines, so much so that it took over thirty years for the Smithsonian to recognize that they actually invented it. They had no scientific background and essentially invented the basic theory of propellor aerodynamics because nobody else had done it.

What other Wrights could be lurking in the background, needing only an incentive, however meager and illusory it might be, to kickstart their heads? For that reason alone, X-Prizes are worth pursuing as part of any environmental or energy technology strategy.

I know a lot of my readership tend to be more scientifically inclined than me, so I’ll ask:

the Large Hadron Collider is set to power up next month. Now, I’m generally of the belief that scientists aren’t blitheringly stupid when it comes to danger, so I suspect the arguments made in this paper have been refuted somewhere, but where could I find that?

EDIT TO ADD: Okay, it took me a while (Google is occasionally unhelpful since most of the hits are going to the alarmist pages), but this page is a good counter.

A Livejournaller-slash-driving enthusiast tours a brand new Tesla Motors dealership.

Belly fat linked to increased risk of Alzheimer’s.

ZeroHouse.

Of course, there’s the question of expense, but… damn that is cool. All you have to do is park it somewhere; it’s like a trailer home, except future-awesome.

(In the year 2120, rednecks will live in ZeroHouses.)

Ben Goldacre writes a long, long and extremely pointed post on homeopathy and its practitioners.

Short version: he does not like it greatly!

Come on, you can’t go wrong with a story like “impoverished surfer comes up with workable unified theory of physics.” That is sublimely awesome.

So let me get this straight:

1.) we have discovered another, Earth-like planet, potentially capable of supporting life;
2.) it orbits a red sun;
3.) it’s a larger planet, and the gravity there is stronger than it is here;
4.) it is twenty light years away, so it could have exploded nineteen years ago and we would only know about it next year.

Clearly, we must watch the skies for incoming escape pods. Alert Kansas!

(Oh, come on, you thought of it too.)

A Stanford University study shows that children are more likely to prefer the taste of a given food when it is packaged in a McDonald’s container - it didn’t matter if the food is McDonald’s food or not, as the kids universally said any food they were given with a golden-arches symbol on the package tasted better than any food given to them in plain packaging.

This confirms what many people have suspected all along: namely, that children are stupid.