Scathing

But worth the read: Ayn Rand as sociopath.

Fiddling

Bummer, this. Fortunately for the rest of us, there was room and land enough for civilization after Rome. Maybe not the case this time around.

At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.

Romm has a somewhat more upbeat take:

Indeed, had leaders gone into Copenhagen without this recognition of the obvious and let the whole effort collapse under the weight of unrealistic expectations, that would have been all-but-fatal to the domestic bipartisan climate bill.

Now it will be obvious when the Senate takes up the bill up in the winter that the rest of the world is prepared to act — that every major country in the world has come to the table with serious targets and/or serious commitments to change their greenhouse gas emissions trajectories.  Every country but ours, that is.

Teletransporter

This video version of a classic problem on personal identity a lot of fun. Enjoy!

UPDATE: A friend points me in the direction of this slightly more in depth discussion with Derek Parfit from 1996. He suggests I chase it with this.