Godcasting

Mr. Lewis's pastor, the Rev. Mark Batterson, started podcasting, or "godcasting" as he prefers to call it, last month to spread the word about his congregation. The hourlong recordings of his weekly service, available on theaterchurch.com, have already brought new parishioners to his church, he said.

Just as Christian organizations embraced radio and television, podcasting has quickly caught on with religious groups. Since the beginning of July, the number of people or groups offering spiritual and religious podcasts listed on Podcast Alley (podcastalley.com) has grown to 474 from 177.

"Basically every church can have its own radio show," Pastor Batterson said.

Most religious podcasts can be subscribed to using R.S.S. (Really Simple Syndication, a tool for condensing information into a feed), which enables automatic downloading of a new show to the listener's computer as soon it becomes available. For godcasters who record prayers or psalms, the function is especially appealing, because it offers their listeners easy access to daily devotional readings. Pastor Batterson, for instance, is aiming to attract 10,000 subscribers in the next two years who are looking for doses of spirituality on demand.

Via New York Times

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Gas Thief Escapes on Tricycle

Too funny.

Via National Geographic

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Hamster Powered Cellphone Charger

16-year-old boy invented a hamster-powered mobile phone charger as part of his GCSE science project.

Peter Ash, of Lawford, Somerset, attached a generator to his hamster's exercise wheel and connected it to his phone charger.

"Every two minutes Elvis spends on his wheel gives me about thirty minutes talk time on my phone."

I love it. When I write my Sci-Fi novel, I was planning on having NYC run on electricity created by rats in the sewer running on treadmills. But hamsters, that works too.

I wondered if it made economic sense for animal created power. If I remember correctly, it doesn't. It would be better off just taking the animal's food and burning it directly to create the power. But, if you have an animal already might as well put it to good use.

Speaking of, how come I can't use a treadmill to power my laptop? I had blogged earlier about the treadmill/laptop hookup for work. If you generated your own electricity for the computer that would be sooo much cooler.

The teenage inventor was given a C for his project and has been awarded a D overall for the course.

Dude, that is so wrong. How did he only get a C for this? Seems pretty cool to me and better than my Science Fair projects.

Via Engadget via Ananova

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Making China green

Dennis Hayes throws down a lot of fat knowledge on China, energy and environmentalism:

China uses twice as much coal as the United States does. Eighty percent of China's electricity and two-third of all its energy come from coal. This is a planetary problem because coal produces more greenhouse gas than any other fuel.

Twelve years ago, China was a net oil exporter. Today, it imports 45 percent of its oil and is the second-largest oil consumer in the world, after the United States.

China uses nearly five times as much energy per unit of GDP as the United States does, and almost 12 times as much as super-efficient Japan.

China's national leaders -- most of them trained as engineers -- strongly support efforts to improve efficiency. No top Chinese leader would dismiss energy efficiency as merely "a sign of personal virtue" of no relevance to national policy -- as did U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

China's national energy efficiency improvement targets are four times as ambitious as those of the Bush administration.

China is implementing tough efficiency standards for appliances.

China's vehicle fuel efficiency standards are also stronger than ours. Most new U.S.-style sports utility vehicles will be illegal in China by 2008. China passed a national law calling for all utilities to obtain at least 10 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020 -- a proposal that has been rejected repeatedly by our Congress, most recently two weeks ago.

Strong, consistent policies to support wind energy development are leading to skyrocketing growth in Mongolia and the western provinces.

China is responding to the energy challenge much as the United States responded to sputnik. More than three times as many Chinese as Americans will earn Ph.D.s in engineering and the sciences this year. Bright young Chinese scientists who were sent abroad to study with the world's leading researchers of solar electricity and biofuels are returning home to build new industries.

Last year, President Hu Jintao announced that China is entering a new stage of development, which he termed "scientific development." His much-reported talk placed great emphasis on the need for environmental balance and social equity.

What a sad state of affairs when the Chinese government is a better model of environmentalism than the US government. Where the geo-green's idea of an Apollo project for sustainable energy independence is occurring, but not in the US but in China. Fortunately this is a global game and it makes no difference what side of the Pacific the energy breakthrough discoveries happen on, just as long as they happen. But it does feel kind of odd to be rooting for Chinese scientists to come up with solutions to solve America's energy issues.

Via Seattle PI

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Virtual Economics

For roughly a decade, people have used role-playing online games to conduct parallel lives. Raise another family. Start a new business. Build your own city. It's all possible in these virtual worlds.

Now, some economists and social scientists say these Internet worlds could be a new type of laboratory to study economic behavior, such as how consumers respond to inflation.

Now, Castronova wants to do more. He wants to tinker with the economic rules of the game in a way that would allow him to draw cause-and-effect relationships between changes in rules and changes in behavior. This is possible, he said, because of the way these virtual realms are embodied in server computers.

What Castronova would like to do, but so far hasn't accomplished, is gain access to the software that sits on those servers, changing some while leaving others alone. Assuming a random distribution of players to the various servers, differences in economic outcomes and behaviors should be traceable back to the changes, he said.

I like it. This seems like a great way to do "empirical" testing of economic prinicples in a controlled environment. I think that this concept could be applied to all of the social sciences. I can't wait for the day when government officials will run simulations of their policies before enacting them. What would be the impact of a tax change, or a drug law, or a trade policy? Test it out it in the virtual world and find out.

Via Seattle PI

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Intel Outlines Shift Toward Saving Energy in Processors

Good news, a company has decided that energy efficiency is a more important metric than power. Bad news, that company is Intel not GM.

On Tuesday, Paul S. Otellini, Intel's chief executive, sketched out a new plan to move the company forward on energy-saving computing, based on new multicore processors.

Energy-efficient computing, which can make possible more powerful servers and long-lasting laptop computers, was very much on Mr. Otellini's mind. "We need to think about measuring performance against a new metric, and that is performance per watt," he said.

He said the company's goals for microprocessor power consumption were 5 watts for a portable computer, 65 watts for desktop computers and 80 watts for server computers.

He also mentioned a new ultralow-power version of the original X86 chip architecture, which would consume power equal to one-half watt. The new chip, which would be available sometime toward the end of the decade, would be used in a class of computer Mr. Otellini called hand-tops.

Via New York Times

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StressEraser

New York based Helicor has announced the introduction of a new handheld biofeedback device called StressEraser, the company claims the device has been designed to quickly calm the body and the mind, anytime, anywhere. The formal announcement came at the ongoing 113th annual convention of the American Psychological Association (APA) where visitors were allowed to test the device.

The new product is likely to carry a price tag of US $399 for consumers.

Via Engadget

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I See Dead People

Seems like you can't turn on the TV anymore without seeing a cadaver. CSI, CSI Miami, CSI NY, Law and Order x 4, and the latest copy cats of these shows all seem to have an obligatory cadaver (if not 2 or 3) in each show.

It has gotten to the point that I no longer want to donate my body to science. Or at least I want check boxes on the organ donor form that allow me to specify exactly what shows my body can be displayed on. CSI, fine. Law and Order, ok. CSI Miami, only if that blonde chick is assigned to my case. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, I think not.

I was wondering to myself, where do they get all these bodies? Do med schools now have to double up in Gross Anatomy because all the bodies have been taken?

Then I pull out my Parade magazine, getting my weekly celebrity dish fix, and I come upon this article:

Are the corpses used in the various CSI shows actual dead people or mannequins?

Neither. They're actual live people. And the competition is so fierce that actors line up to try out for those parts.

Whew. Body going back to science.

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191 million die due to war in 20th century

Following up on the last post, another interesting WHO article.

Before we get there though, a brief editorial. This is called a fact sheet but it is full of estimates. I hate it when people call estimates "facts". The only reason it is an estimate is that you don't have the facts.

But, I guess when it comes down to it, all facts really are just best guesses because of inevitable data collection and analysis errors. Really what they ought to do is call all facts "estimates". Editorial done, now back to the facts.

The 20th century was one of the most violent periods in human history. An estimated 191 million people lost their lives directly or indirectly as a result of conflict, and well over half of them were civilians.

In 2000, over 300 000 people died as a direct result of violent conflicts. Rates varied from less than 1 per 100 000 population in high-income countries to 6.2 per 100 000 in low and middle income countries. Worldwide, the highest rates of conflict-related deaths are found in Africa (32.0 per 100 000).

Famine related to war, other armed conflicts or genocide is estimated to have killed 40 million people in the 20th century.

191 million is a big frickin number, but kind of hard to put in perspective. Wish they would have given a rate per 100,000 people. If you average it out, that is 1.91 million a year (wish they had a graph of it per year). Now we are down to less than 1/6 of that with lots more humans alive. That seems pretty good. If we keep going at this rate, war might be done forever in this century. But as the previous post shows, we are actually at the point where more lives can be saved by focusing on personal violence than international violence.

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More Killed by Suicide than War

I was curious how the casualties in war compares to homicides around the world. Does more violence occur in countries or between them? Or how terrorists attacks compare to homicides. Which really begs the question would Americans be safer if instead of spending all the money to fight terrorist "over there" we instead used the money to increase police to fight gangs, organized crime and violent people "over here".

I was also curious if "peace" were to break out over the world and there were no more wars, how many people would still violent deaths. If instead of working towards global peace if it made more sense to try and work toward minimizing homicides. To the person that died there is little difference between dying in war and dying via homicide.

In my quest for knowledge I came across something that blew my mind. Do you know the person most likely to take your life? You. In something I found startling, suicides outnumber homicide and war deaths combined. I found some good stats over at the WHO. Well they answered the questions I was asking, not sure about their accuracy because they don't show how they derived these numbers. Don't they know you are always supposed to show your work on the internet?

Deaths due to Injuries Worldwide, 2000

Type of Injury	# of deaths	Rate per 100,000
Road traffic Incident	1,260,000	21.0
Suicide	815,000	15.5
Interpersonal violence	520,000	8.6
Drowning	450,000	7.5
Poisoning	315,000	5.1
War and conflict	310 000	5.1

The WHO also has some good breakdowns by countries on suicide here and a .pdf by country here. Thanks to the gun nuts, I was also able to get some good data on homicides and suicides in particular countries. I like this polyticks.com page and this guncite page.

I still wish I was able to get some breakdown of interpersonal violence between individuals and gangs/organized crime. Wish I also could see how large terrorism was. I also wish I had homicide/war/suicide world map/country rates. Then you could see on something like a Google Map how this stuff pans out. Nationmaster.com is in the right direction, but their map doesn't work and their data is a bit incomplete. Also would like to see all three on the same map to see how things correlate.

Thoughts on data:
1) War is #3 killer, so maybe there should be more emphasis on promoting "peace" inside countries and inside individuals than between countries.

2) Looking just at suicide and homicide, they don't appear to be correlated very much. I thought maybe you would see high suicide correlate with high murder or maybe with low murder. Instead you have regional differences that appear to have more to do with culture.

high suicide/high homicide => Former USSR/Eastern Europe
low suicide/high homicide => Latin America
medium suicide/medium homicide => US, Most of Western Europe
high suicide/low homicide => Japan
low suicide/low homicide => Turkey, Greece, Kuwait (random, huh?)

This leads me to believe that low suicide and homicide are possible everywhere, but major cultural shifts will have to take place for it to happen.

3) US, Mexico and Japan have similar rates of total deaths but they look completely different.

Country	Suicide Rate	Homicide Rate	Combined Rate
US	11.67	6.3	18.55
Japan	17.93	0.6	18.54
Mexico	3.00	14.0	17.00

4) While deaths in Iraq get all the news, there have only (alright "only" is a bad word) 848 deaths in 2004 vs. approx 16,500 homicides and approx 30,000 suicides in the US. Why aren't homicide and suicide victims as worthy of media attention as fallen soldiers?

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Google going short on Google

Google Inc. said Thursday it plans to offer another 14.2 million shares, currently worth about $4 billion.

Google is selling lots more shares. Why? It does not appear they need the money. So the obvious answer is that they think their stock is priced to high. So they will float more shares now, and then in the future they will do a stock buyback and purchase them back at a lower price. Or another way of saying this is that they are going short on their stock. And at near $300, who can blame them?

You could argue that the need the cash for acquisitions, but really who wouldn't want Google stock over cash?

Or you could buy into the sexy rumor that Google is becoming an infrastructure company and needs the cash for that. Engadget blogs:

Business 2.0 reports that they’ve learned from “telecom insiders” that Google is hard at work on a nation-wide high-capacity data network, buying up unused fiber lines and cheap backbone access to really flesh out their capacity. B2 theorizes this could result in a massive digital video db, on-demand television (IPTV) system, or free ad-based WiFi network, which in conjunction with location-tracking hotspot firm Feeva, has already been pilot launched in San Francisco serving up Google Local-based ads.

And as cool as that sounds, I just don't see it happening. Running a search/internet portal company and running a telco are two different ballgames.

Via Yahoo! News

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Earth Lights

After my postings on footprints and densities, here is another cool way to look at human's impact: lights at night. Click on the image for a larger version or click here for a frickin huge version.

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More Animal Sexual Deviance

First we find out that there are gay animals. Now we find out that there are species that like to have sex out side of their species (is that considered beastiality?). It is getting so a parent can't let their kid watch the nature shows anymore with all the immorality that is going on.

National Geographic had an article about how this can lead to new species:

Most new animal species are believed to arise when a single species splits into two. But new animals can also be created when two species come together to create a single new species, the researchers say.

Turner says recent evidence indicates that some fish species also evolved as hybrids.

German researchers have studied cichlids (a type of tropical freshwater fish) living in tiny volcano-crater lakes in Cameroon, West Africa. Their studies have shown that at least one cichlid species started off as a hybrid.

Interesting. Makes you wonder how much of evolution is driven by this cross-species mating. Sure seems like it would speed the whole process up with all the extra genetic varience thrown in.

Also makes you wonder what the heck the definition of a species is. I had thought that species were defined by who they could procreate with. Otherwise, why wouldn't you consider different races of humans or different breeds of dogs be different species? They certainly look different. But, I guess that is not the case.

Then there is Napoleon Dynamite's "pretty much my favorite animal" the liger. National Geographic had another article on them:

It's half lion, half tiger, and completely real. Now thanks to a cameo in the 2004 cult movie Napoleon Dynamite, the liger has leaped into the limelight, prompting fans to ask, What are they really like?

The faintly striped, shaggy-maned creatures are the offspring of male lions and female tigers, which gives them the ability to both roar like lions and chuff like tigers—a supposedly affectionate sound that falls somewhere between a purr and a raspberry.

Weighing in at about a thousand pounds (450 kilograms) each, they typically devour 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of raw meat in a meal.

Lion-tiger mating occurs in captivity.

For unknown reasons they let a dumb-ass biologist comment:

"Crossing the species line" does not generally occur in the wild, because "it would result in diminished fitness of the offspring," said Ronald Tilson, director of conservation at the Minnesota Zoo in Apple Valley.

Only to be refuted a paragraph later in the same article:

"The interesting thing about these animals is that they have the best qualities of the tiger and the best of the lion," said movie actress and conservationist Tippi Hedren, who has run Shambala since 1972. "Those qualities manifest themselves in the fact that they like to be in the water [a tiger trait] and are very social [a lion trait]."

Then there was the dolphin-false killer whale baby: wholpin that happened a while back. And there was even a case of a an animal dying after having sex with another animal 10 times its size. What a silly species.

With all these different species mating, makes you wonder what evidence scientists are looking at when they say that humans never mated with neanderthals (or at least that they didn't have offspring).

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Urine-Powered Batteries Developed for Cell Phones

Um, excuse me but I need to go, umm, recharge my cellphone.

Physicists in Singapore have succeeded in creating the first paper battery that generates electricity from urine. This new battery will be the perfect power source for cheap, disposable healthcare test-kits for diseases such as diabetes, and could even be used in emergency situations to power a cell phone.

The battery unit is made from a layer of paper that is steeped in copper chloride (CuCl) and sandwiched between strips of magnesium and copper. This "sandwich" is then held in place by being laminated, which involves passing the battery unit between a pair of transparent plastic films through a heating roller at 120 degrees Celsius. The final product has dimensions of 60 mm x 30 mm, and a thickness of just 1 mm (a little bit smaller than a credit card).

Using 0.2 ml of urine, they generated a voltage of around 1.5 V with a corresponding maximum power of 1.5 mW.

From this site we learn that:

The capacity of cell phone batteries currently is about 2,000mW.

So the average cellphone battery is 2000/1.5 = 1,333 times larger. But if the same ratio holds you would need 1,333 *.2ml = 266 ml or .26 liters to recharge. I think my 6 glasses of water a day ought to be able to handle that. If it works, it would be great for hikers and 3rd world countries where plugging in isn't very easy but, um, relieving oneself is.

Via Mobiledia

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Cyberlink's Brainfingers

I can't wait for the day when instead of using a keyboard and mouse, I can just think of what I want to do and it happens. We are one step closer to that day with Cyberlink's Brainfingers.

The hands-free access solution includes Cyberlink Hardware and Brainfingers Software. The hardware consists of a headband, interface box and connecting cables. The Brainfingers Software includes training software and universal software access.

The headband senses and responds to surface electrical signals generated from muscle, eye movement, and brainwave activity detected at your forehead. Three sensors mounted inside the headband are used to detect the forehead signal.. The headband connects to the interface box which filters, amplifies and digitizes your forehead signal.

The interface box connects to your computer through a serial or USB port, The Brainfingers Software further amplifies your forhead signal and uses patented algorithms to decode your forehead signal into separate frequency bands or channels of information. Each channel or band becomes a virtual finger or Brainfinger. The total amplification of the resulting Brainfingers is over two million. In this way your Brainfingers become responsive to the subtlest of facial muscle, eye and brainwave activity. A total of eleven Brainfingers are computed by the software. These eleven Brainfingers span the controllable frequency range of your forehead signal. The three lowest Brainfingers are responsive to your lateral eye movements. The next three Brainfingers are responsive to alpha brainwaves. The next four Brainfingers are responsive to beta brainwaves and the highest Brainwave is responsive to your facial muscle activity.

So basically you wear a headband, train it and then you have 11 different "buttons" you can press just by thinking in certain ways. Not quite as cool as the USB port to the brain, but still pretty spiffy.

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World Population Density Map

Following up on my previous post on the areas of the world with little human footprint, I found this cool map that looks at human population per kilometer around the world. Check this link out or go straight to the .pdf. You can really see the areas of India and China where all the population is. For reasons I don't get, in India the density is all in the foothills of the Himalayas rather than on the coastline as I would have guessed. You can also see the density of Indonesia. If you know where to look you can see the density of Rwanda and Burundi, that in part caused the genocide there. In the US and Canada it is interesting to see how many more people live on the east coast than the west and how the coasts have all the people.

Cool stuff.

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Men's, Women's and Einstein's Brain

Interesting article about Sandra Witelson's brain research, which looks at brain differences between men and women. She also got a hold of Einstein's brain and looked at that.

Men vs. Women

Men's brains, for instance, are typically bigger — but on the whole, no smarter.

All in all, men appear to have more gray matter, made up of active neurons, and women more of the white matter responsible for communication between different areas of the brain.

Men and women appear to use different parts of the brain to encode memories, sense emotions, recognize faces, solve certain problems and make decisions. Indeed, when men and women of similar intelligence and aptitude perform equally well, their brains appear to go about it differently, as if nature had separate blueprints, researchers at UC Irvine reported this year.

Among women, the neurons in the cortex were closer together. There were as many as 12% more neurons in the female brain.

Perhaps, she speculated, these neuron-rich layers in an area associated with perception and speech were the reason women scored more highly than men on tasks involving language and communication.

As she matched the brain specimens to the intellectual qualities of their owners, she discovered that differences in the size of the corpus callosum were linked to IQ scores for verbal ability, but only in women. She found that memory was linked to how tightly neurons were packed, but only in men.

Witelson determined that brain volume decreased with age among men, but hardly at all among women. Moreover, those anatomical changes appeared to be closely tied to a gradual decline in mental performance in men. "There is something going on in the male brain," she said, "that is not going on in the female brain."

Einstein's Brain

At Princeton Hospital, Harvey weighed Einstein's brain on a grocer's scale. It was 2.7 pounds — less than the average adult male brain.

She found that one portion of Einstein's brain perhaps related to mathematical reasoning — the inferior parietal region — was 15% wider than normal.

Witelson also found that it lacked a fissure that normally runs along the length of the brain. The average human brain has two distinct parietal lobe compartments; Einstein's had one.

And a couple of good old random brain stats:

In the prime of life, the cerebral cortex contains 25 billion neurons linked through 164 trillion synapses.

Thoughts thread through 7.4 million miles of dendrite fibers and 62,000 miles of axons so compacted that the entire neural network is no larger than a coconut.

Via LA Times

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The Human Footprint

The Wildlife Conservation Society has some good analysis and a spiffy map (.pdf) of the human footprint on the world. Their analysis shows that only 17% of land in the world is still virtually untouched by humans. Only 2% of land where it is possible to grow rice, wheat or maize is untouched.

This raises the bigger question of whether there is a moral or ethical reason to try and set aside land just for nature/animals or whether the goal of humanity should be to maximize the number of humans that can live. Personally I would like to see more land/ecological resources set aside for nature. But, given the number of humans on the planet and the increasing population not quite sure how we get there. How much land should be set aside for national parks in an ideal world? I don't know but maybe 15% sounds like a good number. And not just the crappy deserts and arctic land. Some good quality highly ecologically productive land should be set aside as well.

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Trading Cricket for Jihad

David Brooks has an interesting article looking at who is becoming terrorists.

We have learned a lot about the jihadists, from Osama bin Laden down to the Europeans who attacked the London subways last month. We know, thanks to a database gathered by Marc Sageman, formerly of the C.I.A., that about 75 percent of anti-Western terrorists come from middle-class or upper-middle-class homes. An amazing 65 percent have gone to college, and three-quarters have professional or semiprofessional jobs, particularly in engineering and science.

Whether they have moved to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, England or France, these men are, far from being medieval, drawn from the ranks of the educated, the mobile and the multilingual.

They have sought instead some utopian cause to give them an identity and their lives meaning. They find that cause in a brand of Salafism that is not traditional Islam but a modern fantasy version of it, an invented tradition. They give up cricket and medical school and take up jihad.

In other words, the conflict between the jihadists and the West is a conflict within the modern, globalized world. The extremists are the sort of utopian rebels modern societies have long produced.

Not the standard Madras educated, living in the Middle East oppressive regimes that we have come to take to think of as the source of terrorists. I think Brooks is right on with how we fight against it too.

The first implication, clearly, is that democratizing the Middle East, while worthy in itself, may not stem terrorism. Terrorists are bred in London and Paris as much as anywhere else.

Second, the jihadists' weakness is that they do not spring organically from the Arab or Muslim world. They claim to speak for the Muslim masses, as earlier radicals claimed to speak for the proletariat. But they don't. Surely a key goal for U.S. policy should be to isolate the nationalists from the jihadists.

Third, terrorism is an immigration problem. Terrorists are spawned when educated, successful Muslims still have trouble sinking roots into their adopted homelands. Countries that do not encourage assimilation are not only causing themselves trouble, but endangering others around the world as well.

Via New York Times

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The Top 1% of Humanity

Reading the Tom Friedman book The World is Flat a while back, made me ponder whether the US needs more scientists and engineers. I basically came to the conclusion that my standard of living is not dependent on how many scientists and engineers are in the US, but the number in the entire world. If I find the time, I would like to write more on that. And the key is not that all the best and brightest become scientists and engineers, but that a good % of them do (not sure what that % would be, but an excellent point to think about). And if in the US a higher percentage of our best and brightest become financial wizards and managers/leaders than scientists and engineers due to the US's relative advantages in these fields, I don't think that is a bad thing.

But the point of this post is: how many people are in the top 1% of humanity? The simple answer is that if there are 6 billion people in the world that gives you 60 million. But a more interesting question is how many 22 year old are there in the world? This is the age when the best and brightest are just leaving undergraduate school and making the decision on what they want to do with the rest of their lives.

Oh yeah, you should take a guess before I tell you the answer. And average life expectancy in the world is 63 years which should be enough to get you in the ballpark.

So I did a little research. Turns out the US Census Bureau throws down some fat statistics on world demographics here. Unfortunately there don't have a good online searching mechanism, so you have to download to excel and mess with it. And for some reason they didn't aggregate all the number into a world total, so you have to do that on your own which is total lame. But anyway I digress.

There are approx 111,750,000 22 year olds on the planet. So the top 1% is 1.1 million or for a good rule of thumb 1 million. Each year there are 1 million people people are the best of the best. The top 1% who will have the largest impact on the shape the future of human civilization.

Of that 1 million, 42,000 will be from the US (4.2%), 204,000 from China (20.4%) and 201,000 from India (20.1%). For every top 1% of class American there will be a combined 10 Chinese and Indians. I don't know how the US can compete with that, but luckily, as I already stated, I don't care because my standard of living is tied to the world at large not just the country I live in. I wish I had the number for Europe but I was too lazy to aggregate all of those frickin countries together. But I bet they are somewhere in the same neighborhood as the US, maybe a little bigger 50-60,000 or so.

But the question I will now ponder (and you should too) is what % of these people would I like in various professions? How many teachers, scientists, engineers, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, doctors, preachers, business people, and finance people? Where should they go to have the greatest positive impact on humanity?

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