links for 2011-01-05

Former delegate George Grayson makes a pitch for Virginia to enact a weight-distance tax (WDT) on commercial freight vehicles. We already track the distances travelled by these vehicles, as well as the weights of their shipments, so it's conceptually trivial to combine these two data into such a system. And it's logical, since it's these enormous trucks that do the bulk of the damage to the roadbed that we pay for in maintenance. Kentucky, New York, and New Mexico are already have this system in place.

The city of Chicago is starting to recognize the farms sprouting up throughout the city. Mayor Daley has proposed some new rules that would standardize these micro-farms, allowing them on vacant lots. Though some urban farmers aren't thrilled with the restrictions, the important bit is that this indicates that city farms have grown beyond the realm of the crap that Jeanne Moos reports on—they're being recognized and, hopefully, nourished.

This is a 24-hour timelapse animation of the movement of all airline traffic throughout the world.

Yesterday, on All Things Considered, host Melissa Block asked David Kirkpatrick (author of "The Facebook Effect," former Fortune columnist) if Goldman's $50B valuation of Facebook is realistic. His response? "I don't see any reason why it should not be." I actually shouted at the radio. "REALLY? You don't see ANY reason? Not even ONE?" William Cohan provides a few reasons why in this blog entry. As Cohan points out, this "we have a front-row seat to the process by which Wall Street creates and inflates financial bubbles."

So many people have sent this to me that I see that I must write about it. It's a dialect map of North America that is, in places, enormously detailed. It's all assiduously footnoted and clearly hand-crafted in a way that makes it charming.

It's happened slowly—maybe you haven't noticed. Google is being overrun by spam. But, hey, we got a good decade out of it. Now what?

This study found that 97% of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change, and that the remaining 3% know less and are significantly less prominent in their fields.