I'm usually annoyed by people who whine about spoilers; it's all about the journey, and knowing the destination ahead of time doesn't really hurt my enjoyment. Sometimes it helps.

==major spoiler warning==

So I breezed right by the "minor spoiler" warning, only to read that Omar gets taken down! I really thought that he'd be the last one standing; it was a huge surprise to find out that he isn't. And that really is going to affect my experience of this season.

So, IMNSHO, HH and/or an editor should either take out the part about Omar, or upgrade the spoiler warning from "minor" to something larger. Also, it would be really cool if the spoiler warning included a link that would take you to the part of the piece immediately after the spoilers are done.

Fueling all the giddy dreams is the hope that the same relentless process of manufacturing innovation that continually drives down the price of computer hardware components will work its magic on a smorgasbord of solar power technologies.

The process of manufacturing innovation at work in computer hardware involves squeezing lots of stuff into an ever smaller area. Since costs are a function of area, but value is more related to the amount of stuff you can fit in that area, the cost curve for computer hardware had a lot of room to grow downward.

With computer hardware, small is good. But with solar, small is not so good. The amount of power you can generate is a function of area. So your costs are pretty closely related to the value you can create; with solar, you can't have your cake and eat it too the way you can with computer chips.

What cracks me up about the letters here is the comment from tomreedtoon. With the internet, even micro-celebrities like HH have their own micro-gawkers. It's turtles all the way down!

7:19pm! Wow, that was a minute, for sure. Brings back memories.

I love how they have two kids.

It's a freshwater bath, not a saltwater one, that makes cells burst through osmosis. I don't know if it would happen to an amoeba, though.

Heh, so there's a China angle. That must have made you very happy, Andrew :)

To quote "Not only does Waldron have a long history as a China basher, but the World Journal is owned by a Taiwanese publishing company and sports its own long-established record of eagerness to present the CCP in the worst light possible."

Does Mr. Leonard read the newspaper in question? It is indeed edited and set up in Taipei for local printing globally, part of the United Daily News group. It is owned, I believe, by emigres who came with Chiang Kai-shek (not Taiwanese) and traces its ancestry to several distinguished pre-1949 publications (hence "United" Daily News--the name of their Taipei paper). It is a serious newspaper, full of information and tightly written and edited, but its editorial policy and general slant are pro-China and anti Taiwan's current government.

I'm just echoing Kaykuri here, but an anti-CCP stance is exactly what I would expect from people who emigrated with Chiang Kai-shek. They emigrated because the CCP drove them out of the mainland! And since that party of emigres (the KMT) is now out of power in Taiwan, they'd be against the current Taiwan government as well.

I would expect all that to be obvious to anyone even vaguely paying attention to Taiwan's 20th century history. How could someone who claims to have spent his "entire adult life studying and teaching Chinese language and history" possibly argue that the KMT and the CCP go together? Observing that they both originate on the mainland and are both "pro-China" misses the fact that they have diametrically opposite ideas of what China should be, and that they fought a war over it.

Okay, maybe I did read that too narrowly. I was just surprised, since I thought that sustainability had been a goal of agronomy for a long time. A bit of googling led me from Wikipedia's Green Revolution article to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural research:

http://www.cgiar.org/who/history/index.html

The Second Decade (1981-1990)

The objective of research was defined as increasing sustainable food production in the developing countries in such a way that the nutritional level and general economic well-being of the poor are improved. This approach called for a more direct focus on poverty, as well as greater emphasis on protecting biodiversity, land, and water.

The US has been a member of CGIAR since it started.

It is sobering to note that agronomists have never been asked to develop innovative management systems that both accelerate yield gains and protect natural resources.

This sounds a little too sweeping. I was talking to a guy from Monsanto at ISMB and he specifically mentioned nitrogen utilization as a goal of crop genetic engineering. If that's successful, it would dramatically reduce or eliminate the need for fertilizer.

And fertilizer production is one of the things that the peak oil crowd likes to point to as one of the ways we're dependent on oil. Plus, reducing fertilizer usage should help clean up agricultural runoff, lessening the intensity of algal blooms.

Anyway, it's one example of genetic engineering to reduce resource usage. Also, I'd be surprised if some of the work on drought resistance didn't help reduce water requirements as well.