Howard Aiken said "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." I have a similar feeling when I'm trying to convince VCs to invest in startups Y Combinator has funded. They're terrified of really novel ideas, unless the founders are good enough salesmen to compensate.

But it's the bold ideas that generate the biggest returns. Any really good new idea will seem bad to most people; otherwise someone would already be doing it. And yet most VCs are driven by consensus, not just within their firms, but within the VC community. The biggest factor determining how a VC will feel about your startup is how other VCs feel about it. I doubt they realize it, but this algorithm guarantees they'll miss all the very best ideas. The more people who have to like a new idea, the more outliers you lose.

Why There Aren't More Googles

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Kentucky’s method of putting criminals to death by lethal injection, not only clearing the way for Kentucky to resume executions but ending an unofficial moratorium in the 35 other states that have the death penalty.

Supreme Court Allows Lethal Injection for Execution - New York Times

On the face of it, John McCain’s proposal to offer a gasoline tax “holiday” during the summer driving season might sound like a good way to cut gas prices at the busiest time of the year.

But economists and energy analysts say it would have little impact on mitigating the rise in gasoline prices. In fact, it could lead to the opposite result.

Economists Weigh McCains Gas-Tax Plan - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog

The operations of the Cassini spacecraft, part of the international NASA/ ESA/ ASI Cassini-Huygens mission, have been extended by NASA by two years. The historic mission's stunning discoveries and images have revolutionised our knowledge of Saturn and its moons.

Cassini's grand tour of Saturn extended | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

The largest Yuri's Night celebration on the planet drew an estimated 7,000 people to the tarmac at NASA's Ames Research Center on Saturday, April 12, 2008, as young-minded people celebrated space exploration with music, dance, technology and art.

This was the second year I've attended and it's amazing. Highly recommended!

Yuri's Night Bay Area 2008 Largest of World's Celebrations | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

"The reason we put UAC into the (Vista) platform was to annoy users--I'm serious," said Cross, speaking at the RSA Conference here Thursday. "Most users had administrator privileges on previous Windows systems and most applications needed administrator privileges to install or run."

Cross claimed that annoying users had been part of a Microsoft strategy to force independent software vendors (ISVs) to make their code more secure, as insecure code would trigger a prompt, discouraging users from executing the code.

Microsoft: Vista feature designed to 'annoy users' | Tech News on ZDNet

The world has seen the first international conference on manufacturing meat. This is the process, tested so far only at laboratory scale, of growing pork, chicken, or beef through cell culture in vats instead of raising and slaughtering animals.

But when will I be able to buy Wendy Meat(tm) at Safeway?

Can People Have Meat and a Planet, Too? - Dot Earth - Climate Change and Sustainability - New York Times Blog

So Mr. Levine stood on a chair, and shouted out, “Is anyone here an ActionScript programmer? We’d like to hire you!”

“I got some nasty looks from the baristas,” Mr. Levine recalled, “but that didn’t stop three or four people from coming up to our table and inquiring.”

Cafe Capitalism, San Francisco Style - New York Times

Another theory: She recognizes that she probably will not win the nomination. But a couple of possibilities are at play here. One is that lightning will strike, and she will become the nominee. Or, perhaps more plausibly though counter-intuitively, she is actually helping the party by staying in.

That’s because her message about disenfranchisement seems to have taken hold. As Ms. Williams noted, there are still 10 contests to go, with perhaps 43 millions votes to be counted. To short-circuit the process would anger her many of her supporters, especially those who have not yet voted. Thousands of people are coming to her rallies now, and her campaign has organized events in post-Pennsylvania states where people are thrilled to be part of a process from which they are normally excluded.

Katharine Q. Seelye - On Line - The New York Times - Politics - Election 2008 - New York Times

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More - New York Times