Best quote from older blog, I got tired of hunting through the old posts to find it worded this way so I'm reposting it here

When your liberal friends say that capitalism demands that the individual be selfish, offer them Frederich Hayek's observation on profit:
"Profit is the signal which tells us what we must do in order to serve people we do not know. By pursuing profit, we are as altruistic as we can possibly be, because we extend our concern to people who are beyond our range of personal conception."

The WSJ and critical thinking skills

I spend 1-2 hours every day reading the WSJ cover to cover. Having the print edition is superior to the on-line addition as it allows for a faster, deeper sweep of all the articles. Today's paper, 9/14/10, presented the connection between two people that required a review of history that would otherwise not have occured to me:
1. Liu Xiabo and Andrei Sadharov. In: The Peace Prize's Subversive Potential by Gal Beckerman
2. Charles Mitchell and Ferdinand Pecora. In: Out for Blood by James Grant, in Bookshelf

when automobiles replaced horses: the Ford Model T

Here is an excellent little video on the Ford Model T, one of the great disrupters for personal transportation in the Industrial Age.
http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=S4KrIMZpwCY
Note that the Model T's engine, 20 horse power, is not equivalent to 20 horses. It moves at 10 times the speed, due the difference in power density between engines and horses.

Government and the Use of Force

A thoughtful article on Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and the free West.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703358504575543762918272950.html?KEYWORDS=stephens+bret#articleTabs%3Darticle

Spider web silk and new technologies

So what effect will having an abundant cheap new material like this be? We all need to pay better attention in Mr. Chisholm's class
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/silkworm-spider-silk

Critical thinking post

This is from Friday's WSJ (let me know if you can't access it).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704483004575524902014176726.html?KEYWORDS=apple+nano
In Comments, give three topics, raised by this post, suitable for a club meeting.

Could this be the club manifesto for 2010?

Read this post and see if you can refute any of the gazillion contentions.
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/from-the-unbelievable-to-the-passe/?singlepage=true