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Friday Link Salad
Jun. 19th, 2009 11:35 amWe're getting hit in Chicago with a series of severe thunderstorms, dumping unneeded rain. Oh joy. In lieu of content, here's some links:
Forwarded from Jackie Powers, here's some market research: Who's reading books?. Highlights:
- The average book reader last year was 45 years old.
- Women comprise 65% of buyers.
- Of all Americans 13 or older, 50% bought a book last year.
- The average age of the most frequent book buyer is in the 50s.
- The average price paid for a book last year was $10.08.
- Unit sales (number of books sold) for the year to date are down 1.2%.
From The Atlantic, an interesting article on geo-engineering called Re-engineering the Earth. They point out that we can (or think we can) re-engineer the climate to avoid global warming. One point I'm confused about is the "Sword of Damocles" problem - which is, if we stop doing the mitigation, the climate will crash.
Yes, but why would we stop mitigation? If humanity is too messed up to run the mitigation scheme, climate change is the least of our problems. The other issue is how long will we be running a carbon-based economy? Oil will run out eventually, and before it does will get too expensive to burn. Or am I missing something?
Forwarded from Jackie Powers, here's some market research: Who's reading books?. Highlights:
- The average book reader last year was 45 years old.
- Women comprise 65% of buyers.
- Of all Americans 13 or older, 50% bought a book last year.
- The average age of the most frequent book buyer is in the 50s.
- The average price paid for a book last year was $10.08.
- Unit sales (number of books sold) for the year to date are down 1.2%.
From The Atlantic, an interesting article on geo-engineering called Re-engineering the Earth. They point out that we can (or think we can) re-engineer the climate to avoid global warming. One point I'm confused about is the "Sword of Damocles" problem - which is, if we stop doing the mitigation, the climate will crash.
Yes, but why would we stop mitigation? If humanity is too messed up to run the mitigation scheme, climate change is the least of our problems. The other issue is how long will we be running a carbon-based economy? Oil will run out eventually, and before it does will get too expensive to burn. Or am I missing something?
