Atlantis makes final touchdown
Eleventh in a series
Read moreCategory Archives: Science/Technology
Mary Shelley LIVES! (Romantics, Luddites, runaway technology, science fiction and the persistence of the Frankenstein Complex)
Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming. – Dr. Ian Malcolm Mary Shelley spent the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, Switzerland with her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their close friend Lord Byron “watching the rain come down, while they all told each other ghost stories.”
Read moreRemembering the Space Shuttle: “Something has happened…”
First in a series. A few moments ago, at 11:30am EDT, Atlantis lifted off, marking the 135th and final mission in NASA’s historic Space Shuttle program, which began in 1981. The Shuttle era was defined by glory and tragedy and perhaps even a bit of banality. After all, the first time you do something it’s exciting, but at some point
Read moreArt and music and a special Friday Night edition of the Saturday Video Roundup: let’s get the 4th of July weekend started!
Heading down to the First Friday event in the Highlands Gallery District here in a bit, and am very much looking forward to seeing mentalswitch’s eyePhone show at Sports Optical. You’ve seen some of his iPhone art here before, in fact, and tonight – lots more. Head this way, Denver folks. Meanwhile, I’m ramping up for the evening with some
Read moreSkepticism vs. Denialism and how to tell the difference
I suppose, as a general rule, the human animal is built to prefer knowing to not knowing, but I have been struck over the course of the past decade or so at how much worse our society has gotten at tolerating uncertainty. It’s as if having to say “I don’t know” triggers some kind of DNA-level existential crisis that the
Read moreWhat would a progressive society look like? The Tricentennial Manifesto
One of my lists is currently engaged in a fairly dynamic discussion about “what is a progressive?” In thinking about the issue, I realized that it might help to ask the question a slightly different way: what would a progressive society look like? Maybe I can better understand what it means to be progressive in 2010 if I reverse-engineer the
Read moreAmusing ourselves to death, circa 2010
This is the future – people, translated as data. – Bryce, Network 23 The future has always interested me, even when it scares me to death. I wrote a doctoral dissertation that spent a good deal of time examining our culture’s ideologies of technology and development, for instance (and built some discussion of William Gibson and cyberpunk into the mix).
Read moreFour Percenters Unite!: Study says some humans are four percent caveman
Hey, I’m not making this stuff up. We have met Neanderthals, and they are us – or about 1 to 4 percent of each of us. That is one implication of a four-year effort to sequence the Neanderthal genome – essentially setting out in order some 3 billion combinations of four key molecules that together represent the Neanderthals’ genetic blueprint.
Read more9/11 happened on Obama’s watch! GOP noise machine already hard at work on the history books of the future
Something wicked this way comes. Item: Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino says “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Item: GOP apologist Mary Matalin says President Bush “inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.” Item: Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani says “We had
Read morePredicting the 21st Century: Nostraslammy’s ten-year review
Ten years ago, at the turn of the millennium, Nostraslammy took a stab at predicting the 21st Century, with a promise to check back every ten years to see how the prognostications were turning out. Odds are good I won’t be able to do a review every ten years until 2100, but I figure I’m probably good through 2030, at
Read moreMassive calculus and physics hoax exposed
Oh dear: Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment ‘thinking’ It’s now clear that “Sir” Isaac Newton and a series of co-conspirators were guilty of several crimes against science, including: Conspiring to avoid public scrutiny Insulting dissenting scientists and equating them with holocaust deniers Manipulation of evidence Knowingly publishing scientific fraud Suppression of evidence Abusing the
Read moreReality is making us sick, and fantasy can’t cure us
You’re honey child to a swarm of bees Gonna blow right through you like a breeze Give me one last dance Well slide down the surface of things You’re the real thing Yeah the real thing You’re the real thing Even better than the real thing – U2 Fantasy stories, myths, legends, tall tales, fairy tales, horror, all these have
Read moreWhy American media has such a signal-to-noise problem, pt. 2
Part 2 of a series; Previously: What Bell Labs and French Intellectuals Can Tell Us About Cronkite and Couric The Signal-to-Noise Journey of American Media The 20th Century represented a Golden Age of Institutional Journalism. The Yellow Journalism wars of the late 19th Century gave way to a more responsible mode of reporting built on ethical and professional codes that
Read moreWhy American media has such a signal-to-noise problem, part 1
Part one of a two-part series. From Cronkite to Couric: the Kingdom of Signal is swallowed by the Empire of Noise The recent death of Walter Cronkite spurred the predictable outpouring of tributes, each reverencing in its own way a man who was the face and voice of journalism in America for a generation or more. The irony of all
Read moreHas a college degree become a bad investment? Better question: is conservative rhetoric the worst investment in history?
Yesterday over at Future Majority, Kevin Bondelli responded to Jack Hough’s New York Post column “Don’t Get That College Degree!” Bondelli’s take led with one of the more terrifying titles I’ve seen lately: “Has College Become a Bad Investment?” Yow. When you dig the hole so deep that you can even use that kind of question as a rhetorical device,
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lullaby pit 