Sun Rising Over New Orleans
John F. Wasik
September 20, 2005
As hundreds of thousands of souls return to the birthplace of jazz, one of the most critical questions facing the Big Easy is how to rebuild the estimated 200,000 homes that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Let’s take some of the estimated $100 billion or more it will take to fix the city and create the nation’s largest, most sustainable solar city.

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New Harvest:

a nonprofit research organization working to develop new meat substitutes, including cultured meat — meat produced in vitro, in a cell culture, rather than from an animal.
Because meat substitutes are produced under controlled conditions impossible to maintain in traditional animal farms, they can be safer, more nutritious, less polluting, and more humane than conventional meat.

Martin Geddes:

It would be a tragic mistake to underestimate the potential market power Skype is accumulating. According to Skype’s own figures from VON Canada, they’re sustaining a growth rate of 1000% a year. Just another 2 years of this growth and they would have over 200 million concurrent users online. This is not beyond plausibility given how Skype and broadband are symbiotically driving adoption of one-another; the addressable market is exploding too.

That means even if you’re a mega-telco — a Verizon or a Vodafone — you’re screwed. You can create your own Private Voice Application, and start marketing it to your early-adopter users, but who ya gonna call? Ain’t nobody but Skypers out there. Want some Skype presence in your Vodafone-branded VoIP app? Gonna cost ya!

The very special Milwaukee Art Museum currently features a Degas Sculptures exhibit. Several ballerinas from the Milwaukee Ballet performed a bit during this exhibit. The photo above was taken on a Saturday afternoon. Well worth the drive to.

Michael Kanellos:

When you look back, what products have inspired you to say, “Wow, that’s a beautiful piece of work?”
Moore: Well, the ones I think of as landmarks were not necessarily beautiful pieces of work, but they turned out to be economically viable. The first dynamic RAM we made at Intel is with that category–the old 1103. It was a 1K DRAM and that was our first really big-revenue product. I guess I have to put the first microprocessor in that category too. It was very slow, but it did the job that it was designed to do. There’ve been a lot of things since that have been very important economically. I tend to think of them as more evolutionary products.

Ben Moga has a useful campaign blog. Way to go, Ben.

Interesting trend to watch (props to John Robb for the pointer). Wisconsin based Quad/Graphics spent about $6,000 per employee [last year] on medical costs, 30% less than the average company in its home state of Wisconsin. Its 12,000 workers spend fewer days in the hospital and take their medicines more regularly. Vanessa Furhmans.

Paul Graham writes about things we Americans are good at and not so good at….

Americans are good at some things and bad at others. We’re good at making movies and software, and bad at making cars and cities. And I think we may be good at what we’re good at for the same reason we’re bad at what we’re bad at. We’re impatient. In America, if you want to do something, you don’t worry that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that people might think you’re getting above yourself. If you want to do something, as Nike says, just do it.
This works well in some fields and badly in others. I suspect it works in movies and software because they’re both messy processes. “Systematic” is the last word I’d use to describe the way good programmers write software. Code is not something they assemble painstakingly after careful planning, like the pyramids. It’s something they plunge into, working fast and constantly changing their minds, like a charcoal sketch.

Graham makes some useful points.

Tim Wu:

Witness the Copyright Gap in its full majesty. In the UK, Digital Radio has been live at the BBC for about three years now. As the BBC says, ?Digital Audio Broadcasting gives you far greater station choice, better reception & clarity of sound with no re-tuning.?
Yet meanwhile, in the country that invented both the radio station and the transistor, digital radio is stuck. Among other problems, the FCC is contending with the RIAA?s arguments that, absent proper controls, digital radio would be ?the perfect storm? for the music industry. Digital radio, the RIAA believes, must be prevented from causing the ?enormous damage wrought by peer-to-peer piracy.? On Monday, the RIAA filed a new letter reiterating that the ?threat? from digital radio is ?real and imminent.?