Two hundred years ago one of the pioneers of modern economics, Thomas Malthus, was warning that population was growing faster than food production and the only remedy, if you are willing to accept a lot of dead people as a remedy, would be that population would eventually be held in check by famine.

FORBES: Commodity Prices: Why Technology and the Price Mechanism will Prove the Scarcity Pessimists Wrong

"I can give you a number of examples of people if they had been asked to travel they would have been dead, " said retired GP Dr William Roberts.

BBC: x-ray

So far it has been impossible to decide if these arrowheads were the tools of new people from Asia who replaced their dead cousins, or of a remnant of Clovis people who changed their technology and survived.

ECONOMIST: Mass extinctions

One wonders if Sony sne (nyse: sne - news - people) has a graveyard somewhere full of dead products that will come back to haunt its executives, like something out of a Stephen King novel.

FORBES: Sony Establishes New, Obsolete CD-ROM Format

But if two people carry firearms, a confrontation that might otherwise have ended in words or blows ends instead with one man dead, and the other man on his way to prison for life.

CNN: America's gun problem is not a race problem