Rat brain powered robot

http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg19926696.100-rise-of-the-ratbrained-robots.html

A disembodied rat brain interfaced to a computer chip, interfaced to a robot, which moves around the lab.

'As they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature. We know this because the network of neurons is connected at the base of the pot to 80 electrodes, and the voltages sparked by the neurons are displayed on a computer screen.'

This is strongly in territory of 'unknown' of the same sort that can be scary. But I can't think of any specific ethical issues that I have with this line of research.

HT to Timothy at Slashdot.

Clean Energy Gets Cheaper

Business Week: Clean Energy: It's Getting Affordable
Wikipedia: Electricity Market
CBO: Prospects for Distributed Electricity Generation

For the last decades or so, activists and technologists have hoped and worked for a world where cheap clean power improved living conditions all over the world. Not to be melodramatic, Most technological innovation improves living conditions everywhere they're used, freeing resources to improve standards of living everywhere else.

There have been many breakthroughs in the past few years in the forms of 'more efficient' solar cells, that cost more per watt. A power generating floor, and other nifty gadgets that just don't take off. But the real test is in terms of $$$ per Watt. Because it's not really the cleanness that we want, or even the security of knowing that we will have resources for generations to come, but the raw power that keeps us from working in the dark. The environment is important, but it's not how we base our decisions.

One thing I would love our government to actually tackle however, is the legal mess it's already created preventing home owners from selling their own power back to the grid. A good power market should allow this and be transparent enough to permit real time power pricing. So that homeowners can reduce their power consumption when the price gets real high, or feel free to crank up the AC when the price gets real low. If families could MAKE money by selling the power from their solar cell when the price gets high, we might see a much higher adoption rate.

Smurf Healthcare vs. US Healthcare

The Smurfs on Healthcare

My favorite part is how Jokey gets worse and worse as he gets more 'health care' from the other smurfs who 'just want to help.'
Here's Robin Hanson's take on health care at EconTalk. He talks a lot about the psychological effect about the act of providing health care. There's also a lot of research on information asymmetry, like donating a funny bone because the docter says your friend will need one.
Dr. Hanson talked about the RAND health experiment, where people who got free health care were compared to people who paid for all of their own health care. The comparison said that even though the free health care folks used 30% more health care, they got essentially zero health benefit. So all that extra money spent bought zero additional health. I recall Dr. Hanson asking class when I took his class at Mason,

"If you assume that some treatments are helpful, and on average, extra treatment buys no health, then doesn't that mean that some of that treatment hurts?"