Police are waging a futile war against camera-toting citizens. In several states, you can be arrested for filming police, even in a public place. With cameras growing ever smaller, conflicts are going to arise more and more often. There can only be one outcome. Police are just going to have to get used to it.
Human psychology being what it is, even the smartest scientists must be open to accountability and criticism. For the rest of us, it’s even more essential.
The EMP-vulnerability of our electric grid, our machines, transportation systems, tools, and homes is probably the most glaring “acute-impact” threat on our horizon.
Why are SF and Fantasy so often grouped together? Obviously, because they share readership and so are placed together in bookstores. And… heck… some of us write both! Still, there are very real differences.
There are so many levels I want to write about in responding to the horrible tragedy in Japan. I’ll offer just two that come to my stunned mind, and follow up later.
While thoughtful folks point to recent, tragic events in Arizona, appealing for Americans to tone down the horrifically polarized rhetoric of recent years, we all can see the opposite going on. It seems that we have entered what Robert Heinlein forecast as “The Crazy Years.”
The quest for individual immortality is admittedly tempting yet fundamentally irrelevant to the great project we have inherited: to build and improve the Enlightenment Civilization.
The schism over global climate change (GCC) has become an intellectual chasm, across which everyone perceives the other side as Kool-Aid drinkers. Although I have mixed views of my own about the science of GCC and have closely grilled a number of colleagues who are front-line atmospheric scientists, I’m afraid all the anecdotes and politics-drenched “questions” flying about aren’t shedding light. They are, in fact, quite beside the point. That is because science itself is the main issue: its relevance and utility as a decision-making tool.
We are in for a time of major decision-making as the Moore’s Law of Cameras (sometimes called “Brin’s Corollary to Moore’s Law”) takes hold and elites of all kinds are tempted to utilize surveillance in Orwellian/controlling ways, often with rationalized good intentions.
What if America lost its knack for making things? IEET Fellow David Brin’s new graphic novel Tinkerers is set in the year 2024, and combines art with history and tech to explore where the U.S. went wrong.
We are in for a time of major decision-making as the Moore’s Law of Cameras (sometimes called “Brin’s Corollary to Moore’s Law”) takes hold and elites of all kinds are tempted to utilize surveillance in Orwellian/controlling ways, often with rationalized good intentions.
Keith Kloor’s recent blogged description of my “Climate Skeptics and Deniers” article from Skeptic magazine (based on this earlier blog article I wrote) drew hundreds of comments.
Regarding a recent Wall Street Journal article by Russ Roberts—“Why Friedrich Hayek is Making a Comeback”—I have to react on several levels. I’ll start with one that is superficially emotional and immature… but that seems the most apropos and on-target reaction… and then follow up with added, calmer insights.
In a recently concluded reader poll, more than 40% of respondents said we don’t have enough information to know whether space aliens potentially could pose a threat to Earth.
Regarding the current mess on Wall Street, billionaire Mark Cuban and I have joined the chorus for a securities trade tax, that would both bring in needed revenue and apply incentives for investors to care, just a little, about the stocks they buy, rather than viewing them as chits in a fast-paced game that only giants can play.
Nobody knows a damned thing about aliens—but that doesn’t keep almost everyone from behaving like children, weighing in with their “of course” explanations for how advanced sapient races would “naturally” behave, or why ETs haven’t been seen, or what they would do if we encountered them.
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