A few days ago, while talking about mundane business issues, I learned that today, August 19th, was the birthday of that famous childhood delight, the 'black cow', what would later be called a root beer float.

If you are not up on your carbonated beverage lore, root beer hails from the root of the sassafras tree or the sarsaparilla vine.  When the root mixture is mixed with water, sugar and yeast, it is sweetened and the yeast generates carbon dioxide and carbonates the water.

Despite being one of psychology's most memorable concepts and a genuinely good idea, Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, immortalized in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" and later Motivation and Personality, needs a makeover, say some researchers.  

Maslow's hierarchy says humans will fulfill basic needs before moving on to higher level ones.    If you're unemployed and losing your house because fuzzy 'jobs saved or created' statistics have no real value to you, for example, global warming will not be your biggest concern.   

Researchers at Edinburgh Napier’s Biofuel Research Centre have done something unthinkable - they have used Scotch to fuel cars instead of violence-filled weekends.

Well, not Scotch specifically, rather whisky manufacturing waste from Glenkinchie Distillery (The Edinburgh Malt). Whew, the culture dodged a bullet there.     But it's also a good idea.  Scotch is a $5.5 billion industry in Scotland and Edinburgh Napier hit on the idea that whisky by-products could be an excellent resource for developing biobutanol, a next-generation biofuel with 30% more output power than ethanol. 

To understand how it works, you need a quick primer on whisky.

If Big Science complains about U.S. budget skepticism in the future, they are going to have to answer questions about the James Webb telescope.  It is currently 3 years and $1.5 billion over budget with no end in sight.   The latest projection, 2014 and $5 billion, has been greeted with so much derision that even the people behind the project in government have demanded an outside panel to oversee the boondoggle.

The difficult thing about popularizing movements is that, in the beginning, you want recognition but as time goes on the interests of the movement may be divergent from the people involved in it.  

So it goes with the singularity.  In 1993, Vernor Vinge said "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."   But 17 years into that, only the most optimistic thinkers think substantial progress has been made.  Ray Kurzweil thinks so, but he said so in 2005 also, including a whole book called The Singularity is Near.