Two Articles

Friends, what are you reading these days that's not design or mom related? Lately, the most interesting stuff I've found is in Ben Blair's magazines. Two that I liked:

1) This article about thorium energy in Wired. So neat! Apparently the element thorium gives all the benefits of nuclear power without the risks (no awful waste to store for thousands of years and no byproduct used for making weapons). The history as explained in the article was fascinating — and made me a little ashamed of the US. We abandoned thorium research and went with uranium-based power precisely because it allowed us to make more bombs. Oh dear. Kirk Sorensen is leading the way with his thorium advocacy programs. You can see more on his blog here.

2) This article about Ayn Rand followers in GQ. (Did you read Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead in college? For me it was the summer after my freshman year. While listening to Cat Stevens. I still like what Cat Stevens had to say. Not so much Ayn Rand. (Where's the compassion, Ayn?)

EDIT: I forgot! There's one more article I loved and wanted to share:

3) Also from the January GQ, an article about The Singularity (no link yet, but it looks like it's coming). Ben Blair read the book, The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurtzweil, sometime last year and we have been talking about robots and their eventual takeover ever since. The book is enormous, and I thought the article did a great job of summing up the idea in a much shorter space. The basic thought is that either we're all going to become cyborgs and live forever or that robots will take over the world and destroy the weak humans. For something so sci-fi, it is sort of amazing to realize how many intelligent people believe this as fact. (Instead of Team Edward/Team Jacob t-shirts, at our house, we wear robot t-shirts.)

Aren't Katie Sokolor's fingernails happy? What are you reading? Anything good? What would you say is the women's magazine with the most interesting articles?