I'm home today because the little one is sick. I guess there's never a good time for anyone to be sick. It's always an inconvenience, but I was far enough behind at work that I was never going to catch up anyway. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

For the last two years Best American Nonrequired reading has featured the Edge Foundation (www.edge.org). This foundation asks leading scientist interesting questions and collects them in a book. The question this year was "What is your Dangerous Idea?"

The answers are varied and facsinating.
One guy argues that in the next few years we'll be able to increase human longevity a lot. He also argues that over population won't be a problem because we'll have solved the energy issue by then. We only to need to capture one percent of one percent of sunglight to meet all our needs.

Another explains Fermi's Paradox with runaway consumerism. Fermi's paradox essentially says- okay so if there are a hundred billion stars out there and life evolved pretty quickly on Earth then there should be lots of intelligent life out there, where are they? An evolutionary biologist argues that we've gotten sidetracked on space exploration and development because we've become addicted to computer games. Colonizing the galaxy is much harder than pretending to have done it by watching Star Wars. We've got too many distractions these days. Most of our latest inventions involve virtual reality rather than phyiscal reality.

There are a bunch of interesting concepts you really aren't going to see anywhere else. So check it out.