How to fix the patent system, part 2

Get the Supreme Court to do it for you, by establishing more rigorous standards for obviousness:
The justices today unanimously overturned a decades-old test used by the lower court that handles patent appeals, saying the lower court went too far to shield patents from legal attack. [...]
The decision extends a Supreme Court trend that has [...]

Read Full Post »

What’s killing the bees, part 2

Update to my previous post about the declining bee population: it appears that the real culprit is a parasitic fungus, and not cell phones:
A fungus that caused widespread loss of bee colonies in Europe and Asia may be playing a crucial role in the mysterious phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder that is wiping out [...]

Read Full Post »

How to fix the patent system

Hat tip to Steven Landsburg (via Eugene Volokh): Michael Kremer suggests letting the government buy up the patent and put it in the public domain, with an auction system to determine what the fair market value of the patent would be.
Quoth the blog post:
When you design a better mousetrap, we grant you a patent. The [...]

Read Full Post »

On 31 dead students and 3000 dead soldiers

Last night CBC News interviewed an anthropology professor on the Virginia Tech shooting who had an interesting take on the incident. He suggested that in long periods of war, violent crime tends to increase as people become more and more desensitised to violence. Therefore, this shooting may presage an increase in the rate of violent [...]

Read Full Post »

What’s killing the bees?

Interesting question, and the answer may be cell phones.
[Scientists] are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world – the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last [...]

Read Full Post »

Bits and pieces:

Paul Ohm on Eugene Volokh has a couple of nice posts discussing the price of digital music and the analog hole (the analog hole costs exactly 23.9828 cents) here and here.
MiniBooNE saves the standard model of particle physics: it finds no neutrino oscillations where LSND did, which means there is no reason [...]

Read Full Post »

Today’s clever little QOTD comes from the Kibitzers’ Cafe at chessgames.com.
‘The bad news is – there is no key to the Universe. The good news is – it has never been locked.’

Read Full Post »