So, let me get this thing straight, the Pope says you can drink all the whiskey you want and you still get to go to Heaven? What if - heh heh - I want a quick roll in the hay with Condi, would I go to Hell for that?

My attitude coming in here is anti-petroleum and pro-renewable, but I think that industrial farming is a suspect solution to America's nascent energy crisis. I haven't yet delved into what internals or externals factored into this new research, but I can think of many that probably weren't, and the most important of these is fertilizer. Modern phosphorous-rich fertilizer requires enormous amounts of energy to produce and it is an absolute necessity for modern intensive farming, as is the heavy machinery so quickly pooh-poohed in Leonard's review. That machinery is every bit as important as the pump on an oil well. The pump for an oil well uses only a tiny fraction of the energy being pumped, whereas the tractors going back and forth over agricultural fields use a substantial fraction of the energy being grown. (Whether or not they are or could be running on ethanol is irrelevant from an efficiency perspective, but obviously if they can't grow enough ethanol to run on that would indicate a pretty serious problem!)

Ultimately, farming is another form of solar energy collection. Whether or not planting and harvesting crops is the most efficient means of collecting this energy is doubtful, given the fact that we've grown dependent on the rapid burning of our saved inheritence of millions of years of collected solar energy.

My father has written extensively about issues of clean vs. unclean energy sources and the thermodynamic reality that the distinction is a false one. He's had me post some of his articles online here:

http://www.asecular.com/forests/vfw/energy/

What is the Darwinian argument for the persistence of secular, liberal genes? The same argument as the one for the persistence of "gay genes" and even (if you understand the necessary cellular biology) Tay-Sachs and Sickle Cell Anemia: those genes ultimately help society. Though we are all of us descended from boneheaded reactionaries (I can trace my lineage to the famous 17th Century witch burner, Gov. Bradford of Mass.), liberal, subversive, creative, secular, and unreproductive genes persist because they strengthen society. Without hair dressers, inventors, artists, rock musicians, "terrorists," scoundrels, pot smokers, and crazy scientists, we'd still be banging each other on the heads with clubs. We'd still be "voting" (as much as cave men can be said to do so) for Bush-equivalents (of which there would be many), but there would be no fertility drugs and antibiotics to keep our litters of squalling would-be red staters alive.

While I agree that Actionscript, Javascript, and Java are all great ways to program on a modern computer, these languages all present problems for people just entering programming. These all have syntax based on the C language, where control structures require a careful syntax that includes semicolons and curly brackets. These are difficult to even SEE on the screen when you're just getting started. BASIC is superior for beginners because control structures are all keywords. FOR ends with NEXT, GOSUB ends with RETURN (or maybe END), and so forth. It's much easier for a beginner to grasp what is going on in such a language.

My preferred languages now are all C-based, but I got a lot of good work done and earned a lot of money in the DOTCOM era with knowledge I gained on an old VIC-20. For those who don't know, the ASP web-server language is very similar to Commodore BASIC, which should come as no surprise because they were both written by the fine folks at Microsoft.

I agree that BASIC should still be available on modern computers and getting to it should be easy and intuitive. In the meantime, though, the skills are being lost and (for parents worried about being supported in a future devoid of Social Security) the salaries of future programmers can only increase.

Having grown up in the heartland of Allen country, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a geographical region that makes even Utah seem faintly bluish by comparison, I know that Allen's flask of racism was always one of his biggest political assets, so long as he only brought it out and passed it around with a certain crowd of people. Based on his behavior and the legendary macaca comment, this story doesn't surprise me at all. Actually this morning I found myself wondering when "old friends" of Allen would materialize to tell us what a racist jerk he used to be back in the day. That when is now!

The idea behind cellulosic ethanol assumes that modern agiculture produces waste cellulose. But it doesn't. That cellulose is normally plowed back into the soil to provide organic nutrients. Without it, crop yields are much lower. If we start burning that cellulose in SUVs and feeling happy because we've saved the world, we've ended up in a deeper hole than before. The only solution to greenhouse warming is living with less energy, in ways that make our neighbors look askance. Get used to it; the future is full of unmowed lawns and people riding to work on mopeds.