GregEganist

10/16/12

I want the title Rogue Geoengineer on my business card.

10/13/12

How interesting! I wonder if this was the inspiration for the famous story by Jean Giono "The Man Who Planted Trees" (http://www.ftpf.org/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees.pdf) . It was adapted into an animated short that won an Academy Award in 1987. It described a shepherd who had brought back an entire desolate region…

10/12/12

I would also add public water and sewer supplies. You hardly notice it in day to day life, but no other invention has contributed as much to human health. As Abel Wolman, former president of the American Water Works Association, said "Without our work, half of you would be dead." In health terms it even beats out…

10/12/12

Linear programming is at the heart of Francis Spufford's fascinating new history "Red Plenty" (http://redplenty.com/Front_page.html). He describes the rise and fall of the Soviet economy by means of short, fictionalized stories, ones that illustrate its direct impact on people's lives. He begins and ends with the…

10/9/12

This actually sounds feasible! The world spends around $3T per year on oil already and another couple T$ on other fossil fuels, so an extra $1T is maybe a 20% price increase. There's more volatility than that in year to year oil prices. $1T is only 1 or 2% of the world GDP. Of course, investing that in supplies…

10/2/12

It's probably worth mentioning that they are NOT ready to start this project. The CNN report notes that even if they get the money, they can't start until 2019. The problem is mentioned, but not described - they have to pull the bit up after 50 hours and then hit the hole again with a new one. It sounds to me like…

9/27/12

When you use a title like "Beyond Freedom and Dignity", you're pretty much telling people to their faces that you want to destroy two values that almost everyone holds very dearly. You're saying that the things people most cherish are destroying the world, and they need to give them up in order to hand control to…

9/27/12

Yes, just because we can. There have been no technological spinoffs from any of the synthetic elements above californium (98), because their half-lives are too short. Just because something is useless, though, does not mean it's uninteresting.

9/25/12

Won't this be in the radio shadow of the moon all the time? It won't have line-of-sight communication with the earth. I suppose that they could have relay stations orbiting the moon, but that seems like a major point of failure. Was L1 not stable enough? Or do they want to be in the radio shadow for the sake of…

9/14/12

Didn't the Club of Rome say that industrial civilization would be hopelessly broken by now? It was some combination of population growth, resource exhaustion, pollution, and chaos due to over-complexity. They proved it all with Completely Accurate Computer Models.

9/14/12

He sounds exhausted! If you want to see him NOT wiped out by a book tour, find "No Maps For These Territories", which is pretty much driving around in a car with him riffing on everything that comes to mind.

9/14/12

Astonishing! I see that he did his first trial in 1833 for the London to Sydney trip. Yet Kew Gardens goes back to 1759, and already had plants from everywhere. Was the big change that they could now import whole plants instead of seeds?

9/13/12

Finally, a good use for ferrofluids! This is such a cool material, but it's been around for 30 years and the only use it's ever found is as a bearing in hard drives and as a coolant in loudspeaker coils.

9/4/12

This seems far more plausible than the notion that a story could survive for 10,000 years in an oral tradition. Every single time that a story is repeated, it's going to be modified. You can't even trust a second-hand version of an event, much less a 10,000th-hand version.

9/3/12

Ustream's CEO said "Users of our paid, ad-free Pro Broadcasting service are automatically white listed to avoid situations like this and receive hands-on client support." So I take it that Worldcon was NOT paying for this broadcast? If so, that line is a not subtle hint that the free service is worth what you pay for.

8/8/12