Energy, Prosperity, the Carnival and the Internet

The Importance of Energy to Prosperity

Yesterday, Rod Adams posted Power, Defined as Energy per Unit Time, Correlates to Prosperity. His post has a different slant than my post of two days ago: It's the Energy. Why I Love Nuclear. Our two posts make good companion pieces, and I especially like Rod's link to an IEA webpage with excellent graphics showing how people move from poverty to prosperity with energy use. The comments on his post are terrific. As always.

Meanwhile, the It's the Energy post is gathering comments and notice. A thank you and tip of the hat to Nuclear Townhall for listing the post among Best of the Blogs.

I also encourage you to explore the Nuclear Townhall site. The Townhall interview with Mr. Anti-Nuke and Anti-Global Warming, Joe Romm is particularly interesting. Last I heard Romm speak (at Dartmouth), he was against nuclear partially because it uses cooling water, and he was in favor of solar thermal, despite the fact that solar thermal also uses cooling water. Further, solar thermal works best in deserts where (surprise!) cooling water is in short supply. In the Nuclear Townhall interview, Romm seems to have joined the natural gas bandwagon instead.

The 13th Carnival Of Nuclear Energy is up at Next Big Future. It includes my post (as above) and a link to a post about a nuclear plant in China going on-line ahead of schedule, pictures of plasma in the fusion project at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and more. Visit the Carnival!

Off Topic: Our Daughter and Internet Tracking

Our daughter Julia Angwin, is a Wall Street Journal tech editor. She just finished spearheading a major WSJ investigative project on "What They Know." This project explores what Internet marketers know about you. I thought I knew about cookies. I mean, who doesn't know about cookies? I was wrong. Third party cookies, hundreds of cookies downloaded from a single web site, websites that don't even know how many third party cookies they are downloading, companies that help websites track how many third party cookies they are downloading, beacons that track your keystrokes. A whole world I didn't know about.

As the first article in the series points out: the new internet gold mine is your information. The WSJ web site for the project has databases and interactive graphics so you can explore your own experience. Visit it and have fun.

A bipartisan congressional committee is now investigating on-line tracking.