Most Important Inventions

This article suggests a new way to identify the most important inventions, based on language. 

There are many valid options, depending on what aspect you want to study.  These include but are not limited to:
* number of lives saved, i.e. population impact
* number of items produced, i.e. market penetration
* amount of money made, i.e. economic impact
* number of jobs created, an economic and social measure
* inspiration of other inventions / inventors, an influence measure
* historical record of memory, another influence measure

Lots of inventions are important and have an impact on life.  But when I think of the most  important inventions, I tend to look for the ones that changed everything.  These have two broad categories:
1) Inventions that profoundly alter society: antibiotics, birth control, cars, etc.
2) Inventions that alter the whole realm of technology: iron smelter, electricity, etc.

At the top of the heap are the rare things like computers that fit both of those categories.  People will argue about where things fall in the middle, but the top is pretty clear.

What kind of measures interest you in identifying the most important inventions?

Protecting Earth from Asteroids

Scientists talk about strategies. I'd like to see people actually doing things about it.

Proposal one: Deflect the asteroid with lasers.
Deflection is by far the best option when a threat is detected far enough in advance.  Because of parallax, tiny changes become big changes leading to a wide miss.  It's not hard to nudge things and you don't need a lot of energy.  The drawbacks are detecting the thing in time and reaching it at a distance.

Proposal two: Pulverize the asteroid.
While this can work, it is very difficult to achieve a sufficiently uniform destruction such that all pieces will harmlessly dissipate in the atmosphere.  Really hard.  Harder than rocket science.  Look at all the failures in rocket science.  There's a serious risk that you will simply turn a cannonball into grapeshot, which is just as deadly.  The one real advantage is it could probably  reduce a mass-exinction-sized rock into something small enough to survive better.

Of course, the first step is to map all near-Earth-orbit objects so we can spot threats before they flatten us.  Our record at this is not particularly good.  We need to invest more in detection, or else other solutions will do fuckall good.

Birdfeeding

Today is cloudy and cold.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a small flock of doves, some house sparrows, a goldfinch, and a squirrel. 

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