Rarely has obsolescence been announced so sharply.

Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling, best known for his work in game theory, delivered a speech here at Carleton today on the subject of climate change. [Recording to be posted here.] Here are the salient points:

1. It would be wrong to ask developing nations to retard their development in an effort to slow climate change. Development is their best defense.
2. The recent food price crisis is only a preview of what is to come, for one simple reason: The masses in developing nations cannot afford meat. More development means more meat consumption, and the production of one calorie of beef requires eight calories of grain. Because of this increasing demand for food, biofuels may never become cost-effective.
3. Kyoto-type treaties are excellent in principle, but impossible to enforce, because carbon emissions do not result from government action. There is no historical precedent for the sort of massive controls and penalties that would be required.
4. “Climate engineering” solutions, e.g. shooting sulfur particles into the stratosphere, sound scary—but they are worthy of serious discussion. Isn’t a definite, scientific solution preferable to asking billions of people to change the way they cook their food and heat their homes?

From last week’s New York Times Magazine:

“Alan Durning, an experimental researcher whose blog about living without a car inspired Walk Scores, argues that walking may be the ultimate timesaver. He cites a British study that suggests that for every minute you walk, you live about three minutes longer.”

As an avid walker, this is fantastic news! As long as I spend 25% of my time walking, I’ll have the rest of eternity to learn to be more skeptical of studies.¹

1. I have no idea what study he’s referring to. Any ideas?

From Nikil Saval’s piece “Birth of the Office” in the latest n+1:

Several factors aided the cubicle in its rise to monolithic status. The first was a seemingly minor shift in economic policy. In the early 1960s, the US Treasury instituted new rules for depreciating furniture assets in order to encourage more corporate spending. Furniture was given a shorter taxable life (7 years), while permanent features of a building would have a concomitantly longer one (39.5 years). This meant that, from the ’60s on, it became vastly cheaper to buy and replace office furniture and systems like cubicles, since corporations could write off cubicles, but not fixed office suites, on their tax returns.

“There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God,” decries Ben Stein in an upcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Surely he jests.

Quoth the New Oxford American Dictionary:

• science, noun: the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.
• religion, noun: the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods.

To allow science to touch God is to make Him a part of the observable, natural world, subject to experimentation. To allow religion to touch science is to make its results dependent on deeply-held personal beliefs.

Is that really what Ben Stein wants? Or is he using a different dictionary?