Analyzing a survey they conducted in 2011, researchers at Harvard and Yale found that the average United States citizen was willing to pay $162 a year more to support a national policy requiring 80 percent “clean” energy by 2035. Nationwide, that would represent a 13 percent increase in electric bills.

Willingness to pay studies are always difficult size up—people are more spendthrift when they aren’t actually spending. But this study is heartening if only because it shows people haven’t given up on clean energy, even with the economy in the toilet.

On the surface, these core-and-branch systems — evident in New York City, Tokyo, London or most any large metropolitan subway — may seem intuitively optimal. But in the absence of top-down central planning, their movement over decades toward a common mathematical space may hint at universal principles of human self-organization.

I love—just love—studies like this. The peculiarities of the human brain pop up all over the place, from reading comprehension to place name density to, now, subway systems.

One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it.

So much of science and technology has been about pursuing efficiency, scale and “exponential growth” at the expense of our environment and our resources. We have rewarded those who invent technologies that control our triumph over nature in some way. This is clearly not sustainable.

We must understand that we live in a complex system where everything is interrelated and interdependent and that everything we design impacts a larger system.

My dream is that 100 years from now, we will be learning from nature, integrating with nature and using science and technology to bring nature into our lives to make human beings and our artifacts not only zero impact but a positive impact to the natural system that we live in.

Mims’s perspective is spot on, too.

The Tokyo Hotaru Festival 2012 is a modern twist on the age-old Japanese love of watching fireflies along waterways. Some 100,000 blue LED light bulbs floated down the Sumida in imitation of the insects, long celebrated in haiku and other verse.

It’s a gorgeous sight, I’m sure. But of all the coverage I’ve seen on this, not one has mentioned why Tokyo doesn’t have the real thing anymore. We should be restoring the river’s health, not merely emulating it. 

The House voted Wednesday to eliminate the detailed surveys of America that have been conducted by the Census Bureau since the nation’s earliest days. House Republicans, increasingly suspicious of the census generally, advanced a measure to cut the American Community Survey. It passed 232 to 190.

And from Nate Berg:

While the elimination of the ACS would take a slight nibble out of the roughly $3.8 trillion in government expenditures proposed in the 2013 federal budget, its negative impacts could be much greater – affecting the government’s ability to fund a wide variety of services and programs, from education to housing to transportation.

I suspect that this—not feigned horror at violated privacy—is the entire reason for this. How much longer is this nonsense going to continue?