America is exporting its water even though it is a resource that is desperately needed at home write Peter Culp and Robert Glennon:

• Shipping companies have realized that after containers full of goods from China are unloaded in the United States, it makes economic sense to fill up those containers with something that the Chinese will want to buy.
• A lot of those containers return to China filled with alfalfa – a crop that is used to feed animals. It now costs half as much to send alfalfa to China than it does to send it to California.
• However the United States provides agricultural water subsidies to farmers that make it easier for them to grow crops. Alfalfa is a crop that requires a lot of water, and farmers use the subsidy to over-produce it.
• With all the alfalfa exports then, 50 billion gallons of water, in the form of alfalfa plants, is being exported to China. This water could fulfil the needs of 500,000 families in the United States.

Read more about why farmers have no incentive to decrease their water usage, and how the current state of affairs prevents the United States from exporting higher value products to China over here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Via: Marginal Revolution, Cato Institute

By most estimates China will soon be a superpower, and people assume that as a superpower it will behave just as the United States has. Martin Jacques disagreed and pointed out that:

• China and other western superpowers have different histories. While the West expanded and colonized other countries, China never did, even though for most of its history it had the capability to do so.
• China didn’t ignore its neighbours. It demanded tributes from them as a symbolic acknowledgement of its preeminence in the region.
• This is partly because the country is so big and complicated, that China has generally been focused more on internal issues than external ones.
• There are other differences in culture. Western explorers who went and lived in other countries are honoured and admired. In China they are seen as outcasts.

Read more of what Jacques thinks the future will look like under China over here.

Source: BBC

Glenn Fleishman, a writer for the Economist, was selected to be a contestant on the popular quiz show, Jeopardy. He took the opportunity to review how other candidates have prepared for their appearances on the show in the past:

• Fans of the show have assembled a comprehensive archive of every clue and answer in the history of the show. One contestant downloaded it and created his own training program to practice.
• Other contestants have turned their homes into replicas of the Jeopardy Studio. One contestant even made sure that the snacks in their mock green room matched those available on the show.
• Fleishman himself, however, simply brushed up on his knowledge of a few categories that seem to be tested often. This included knowledge about popes, royal families, pop songs, states, major rivers, Presidents, and wars around 1900. It worked. He made it to the next round.

Read more about the experience, and how the show’s producers trick you into thinking it has been filmed over several weeks over here

Source: The Economist

Plenty of cities from around the world aim to be the next Silicon Valley. But only one has the backing of the actual Silicon Valley: Cornell is building a campus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island in an initiative backed by most major technology companies. The first designs of the proposed campus were recently released and Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan looked at some of the highlights:

• The campus will be built for 2,000 students and is expected to be completed in 2037.
• While it is going to be a university campus, there will be few classrooms. Instead there will be open spaces where students can collaborate and hopefully build the next big thing.
• The government even plans to house a representative from the patent office on the island to deal with the expected deluge of patent infringement complaints
• The campus will be energy neutral. Solar panels and energy generated by turbines in the east river will power the buildings.
• One concern is getting the building materials onto the island. New Yorkers won’t appreciate having the lone bridge to the island clogged up with construction vehicles.

Read more about the plans for the campus, the companies backing it, and some concept photos over here.

Source: Fast Co.Design

A speech by Neil deGrasse Tyson caused Jeff Porten to think about what it means for something to look cool. He pointed out:

• We think the SR-71 Blackbird (pictured above), and the Concorde look cool, but not the double deckered Airbus A380.
• We consider the Saturn V space rocket to look pretty cool, but not the Atlas V.
• Yet the SR-71 Blackbird, Concorde, and Saturn V are fifty years old, and none of them are in active service anymore. In contrast the modern A380 and Atlas V are considered to be ugly.
• We don’t think that phones that are fifty years old look cool. But we do think these ancient pieces of technology do. Why? Perhaps it’s because they were at the very top of their class and we have yet to develop anything cooler. When we develop something that’s even better than these older pieces of technology, we’ll begin to think that the old things look dated.
  • It’s disappointing then that some of our best technology was invented half a century ago.

Read more about the argument and how this relates to the space race over here.

Source: TidBITS

Via: Marginal Revolution

Which artist has the (un)fortunate distinction of having the greatest number of their works stolen? The staff at Life’s Little Mysteries wrote:

• Picasso easily takes first place. 1,147 of his paintings are missing as of January this year.
• Picasso easily eclipses an unknown artist who takes second place with 557 pieces missing. Most of them were lost after they were moved due to a fire code violation.
• The most frequently stolen individual piece of art is likely “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” which, over 600 years, has been stolen seven times.

Read more about the hundreds of millions of dollars that these paintings could be worth and more about art heists over here.

Source: Life’s Little Mysteries

Which colleges are the top pirates of movies and music on the internet? Ernesto reported:

• Rutgers topped the list. Statistics suggest that students from that university download almost twice as much as the next biggest pirate university, NYU.
• The most downloaded files at Rutgers were:
  • Fast Five (movie)
  • Cars 2 (movie)
  • Puss in Boots (movie)
  • The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (game)
  • The Dreamer, The Believer (music)
• Productivity software such as Micorosft Office were also popular items

Find the full list and check out where your university (or Alma Matter) stands over here.

Source: TorrentFreak