Word: hoses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Fear is a kind of parenting fungus: invisible, insidious, perfectly designed to decompose your peace of mind. Fear of physical danger is at least subject to rational argument; fear of failure is harder to hose down. What could be more natural than worrying that your child might be trampled by the great, scary, globally competitive world into which she will one day be launched? It is this fear that inspires parents to demand homework in preschool, produce the snazzy bilingual campaign video for the third-grader's race for class rep, continue to provide the morning wake-up call long...
...using technology to directly cool the earth to compensate for man-made climate change. The authors visit Nathan Myhrvold, the brilliant former chief technology officer of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, a private think tank. Myhrvold and his staff have the idea to build a giant "garden hose to the sky" that would pump liquefied sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists know that increasing SO2 in the air deflects sunlight, which cools down the earth; when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines exploded in 1992, for instance, the SO2 sent into the atmosphere created a brief global cooling spell...
...know what the potential side effects of geoengineering might be or whether the entire operation would backfire badly. Geoengineering might be a cheaper option, but followed out to at least one logical conclusion, it could be a pitfall. Say we try to use Myhrvold's giant-garden-hose scheme (after hopefully giving it a better name) without reducing carbon emissions. We could end up in a situation in which we can't abandon geoengineering without risking sudden, disastrous warming due to unchecked CO2 emissions. Then, what was meant to be a quick, cheap fix would turn...
...global climate. Mainly, though, it's an excuse to tout the mind-blowing ideas for combatting global warming that he and Dubner learned about while hanging out with former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold and his merry band of inventors (Myhrvold is a big Freakonomics fan). Like a hose 18 miles (29 km) long that would spew sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. That's not economics. But it is freaky...
...people with secrets to hide - everywhere. But there's one clear lesson from the strange case of Twitter and the Guardian vs. Trafigura and Carter-Ruck. Trying to suppress information in the age of social media is like trying to put out a forest fire with a garden hose...