http://www.blog.speculist.com/#BATT091308_04

The topics:

• This is our good news show, so no whining. Wining, however, is both permitted and appreciated.

• The Denver Broncos beat the New Orleans Saints. Phil and Michael, of course, are proud Denver guys. Stephen, being from Louisiana, didn't want to talk about that. Instead he celebrated the LSU win over Auburn.

  And Michael's Cubs have clinched their division.

• MikeD's Obi Wan warning has convinced us to not talk about the memes we want to kill.

• Phil, being the man who orders the coffee cups, declares himself the sole judge of the Presidential coffee cup contest.

  Going into the first debate (this coming Friday), Senators McCain and Obama are tied up.

  Here's the James Taranto column that Phil quoted.

• "Better All the Time" is our effort to gather good news in one place. Phil is now publishing the feature every two weeks.

• Phil's inspiration for the title of the "Better All The Time" feature is the book "It's Getting Better All The Time."

  A great book - Stephen quoted briefly one example from the book - the drop in the maternal death rate. Mothers dying in child birth was 100 times greater at the beginning of the 20th century than at the end - which was about 1 in 10,000 births.

• Who would have thought that study of a potato virus would lead to a treatment for Alzheimer's Disease?

• Phil mentioned "Spock's Chessboard."

  The future is less knowable today than ever. Human creativity is both the cause of this, and how to deal with this. Here, once again, is the Sirken Robinson TED Talk:

• Anything (gross) can be turned into oil.

  Oil is the gold of our time. So what is this story? Modern alchemy!

• Tweaking the gene for ear hair can improve hearing for many with hearing loss.

  Hearing loss in the elderly is something that we who are younger sometimes make light of. In reality this disability can be profoundly isolating for older people. Faster, please.

• The Internet is getting better all the time. One big way - cloud computing. With cloud computing it doesn't matter what Internet-based machine the user is operating. Both data and computation has been outsourced away from local computers to the Internet. This outsourcing of computer power is making low powered netbooks useful.

  Blogging, postcasting, and web-based email are early examples of cloud computing.

  Stephen is excited about the Steam video game service. No more worrying about patches for games because you're games are updated automatically. You buy a game once, and download it whenever you want to play it to whatever machine you want to play it on - as many times as you like. The service includes both old and new games.

• Cat lost for 9 years is returned to the owner because of a embedded microchip.

• The Lage Hadron Collider worked. Well, actually, there have been a couple of setbacks in the last few days. Still, the fact that the Collider worked initially means that once these other problems are worked out, the Collider will allow us greater understanding of the universe. And that, according to Stephen Hawking, is absolutely essential for our species.

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from Modern Science. The song is "Ever Little Thing."

Don't miss the FastForward music compilation:

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