Buy an iPod!
No just kidding. Here’s one more rainy day activity for you all: Say you were rich, like Carnegie/Thomson/Gates rich, and you wanted to get all philanthropic. What would you do?
Over at Marginal Revolution, they’ve been debating whether it is better to endow a general foundation, or to sponsor a prize for a specific result. For example, the X-Prize for getting someone into space, or Bill Gate’s malaria vaccince initiative.
Here are the winning suggestions at MR. Personally, I really like both the space elevator and cryogenics ideas. There are other prizes out there, for things like building Lt. Commander Data and a computer that could pass the Turing Test.
Ok, ThisBlog people, surely we can do better. If you could endow a prize, what would it be for?