LifeItself

 Dear Friend, I do not mention your name, for you can be anyone on the whole Earth. You could have any color of skin, and belong to any tribe and clan. You could give offerings to any Gods and believe in any myths. In modern impersonal terms, you could be of any race, nationality, religion and political creed, and be of any sex whatsoever.  It took us a million years to develop that big, complex brain of ours. Some 100,000 years ago, in the harsh, frigid climate of Europe and Asia, there were perhaps a few hundred of us left on the brink of extinction.  But we did not go extinct then and here we are, my friend and brother, all 7.8 billion of us. Gregory, John Walter 1896 - 1968, The Great Rift Valley. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. This Sketch by Gregory from his expedition to East Africa in 1892-3. shows "Mount Kenya from the Kapte Plains west of Machakos". Learned people say that we must have come from Africa, mostly from the Great Rift Valley : "Our species, Hom...

And here is a third blog I did not bring myself to publish for exactly one year.  It's as fresh today as it was 365 days ago. The feeling of grief  permeates everything these days, but there are happy moments. Let me paint for you our act of random wildness . We were coming back from an early morning walk, when behind a road curve we heard the loud shrieks of a scared deer and the much fainter shrieks to the right. When we approached the curve, this is what we saw: On our side, a young doe was running back and forth and shrieking her lungs off. To the right, behind a wire net fence was a new-born fawn of the size of adult cat, trying to join mama. But how could she? The fawn was pursued by a large black labrador, who was visibly upset and confused, and tried to sniff her. Finally, the fawn hid behind a bush on the side on the fence with the dog behind the bush, standing there and doing nothing. We talked to the dog trying to calm her, and my wife, Joanna, was able ...

...As sheep, that step from forth their fold, by one, Or pairs, or three at once; meanwhile the rest Stand fearfully, bending the eye and nose To ground, and what the foremost does, that do The others, gath'ring round her, if she stops... Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio , Canto 14 Most economists make it all too easy to bash them. When I think of how eerily detached from reality the main stream of economics is, I also recall the situation with corn ethanol in 2005.  Only two U.S. faculty, Dr. David Pimentel and I, went public against the nonsense that was being propagated throughout the society by the ill-informed greens, scientists, lobbyists, economists, venture-capitalists, lawmakers, and almost everyone in the media.  We were both savaged at the time and for a few more years.  Now everybody shrugs their arms and says pretty much what we were saying all along.  Today, Chapter 2 of the same nonsense, or the "second generation biofuels," is being closed at a g...

Has anyone heard of foreigners clamoring to emulate the U.S. K-12 school system?  I certainly haven't.  I do receive, however, foreign delegations that want to learn how we organize academic research and graduate programs at UT Austin.  This happens at least once a month.  People around the world correctly perceive that most Tier 1 academic institutions in the U.S. are second to none and worthy of emulation. And how about premier U.S. corporations?  Do they come to UT Austin or to the local community colleges to hire their top engineers and scientists?  Do they set up research campuses and incubators around UT or the Austin Community College?  (Please do not get me wrong, ACC is a very fine and vastly underfunded institution, which treats the most difficult cases of acute high-schoolitis and online-learnatis .  My youngest daughter, a BS graduate in premed from UC Santa Cruz, is a nursing student at ACC, and I am pleased with the quality of her ...

On Friday, 06 May, 2011, Professor David Summers posted on OilPrice.com an oddly emotional article,  A Look at the Serious Energy Shortages in India and Pakistan . Dr. Summers correctly points out that severe shortages of coal supply in India and Pakistan will not be quenched by imports from Australia, because China will outcompete anyone for the same coal imports. From our analysis it follows that China's coal production will be difficult or impossible to maintain at the current high level. And China's coal demand is skyrocketing despite attempts to reign in coal burning by their most inefficient industrial enterprises. Dr. Summers then goes on to say that the folks like Tad Patzek and Dave Rutledge have it wrong anyway, when they talk about the global peak of coal production and inability to satisfy demand that follows.   Well, here we are: Too much demand worldwide, and not enough supply. The coal price goes up, way up, and still not enough supply.  How does o...