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Still, Levitt and Dubner do tackle one legitimately controversial topic, one that I think could benefit from a somewhat contrarian perspective: geoengineering, or 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...
...Levitt to express his skepticism of models of complex phenomena such as the global economy or, in this case, the 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...
...Update: Not so fast, Microsoft. A few hours after Bing announced its Twitter deal, Google announced one of its own. The second Twitter deal of the day doesn't quite erase Bing's advantage. Bing's Twitter search is already live, whereas Google's Social Search, which was previewed at Web 2.0, is a few weeks away from launch. But it does change the day's big-picture winner. That would now be Twitter. Neither Microsoft nor Google revealed the terms of their Twitter deals, but the critical point is that there were terms. For Twitter, and more importantly...
...demo by Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the online audience business group at Microsoft, a number of advances were immediately apparent. The most important for Twitter fans is that Bing reorders the massive, unwieldy Twitter stream by creating a "social relevance" score based on the quality of the tweet - "Life sucks" for instance, would not achieve high relevance - as well as the popularity of the tweeter. Then the tweet is run through spam and obscenity filtration to get a final result. (See the 50 best websites...
What this means for Twitter, which has been answering questions about possible revenue streams almost since its founding, is still unknown. Qi Lu refused to announce any terms of the deal, and Twitter CEO Evan Williams was similarly mum. But for Microsoft, it's another territorial advance in what's shaping up to be a very interesting search...