Hiawatha Bray has what looks to be an interesting new book
Category Archives: History
A California Earthquake
Are we overdue?
There is a lot of energy stored in the southern San Andreas, but I don’t worry about that one, as much, because it’s sixty miles away at its closest. I’m much more concerned about a seven on the Newport-Inglewood fault, which runs just few miles from our house.
Russian’s Next Conquest
Brighton Beach is in Putin’s sights.
Domesticated Cats
We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. The theory that it happened with the advent of agriculture because they were hanging out in the granaries to catch rodents makes sense to me.
Frontiers Are Settled
And often abandoned. Just like many mining towns in the West.
Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Historical Knowledge
No, not about Bruno, but about the history of exploration:
There is no nice, clean line between private “buck making” and high-minded government exploration just for the sake of it. From the Wright Brothers making the key advances in aviation to IBM funded Nobel Prize winning basic research, innumerable breakthroughs in science and technology have been led by private non-governmental ventures.
Yes. It’s the post-war government funding that’s been an anomaly, historically. Fortunately, when it comes to spaceflight, that era is ending.
Giordano Bruno
Sorry #Cosmos, he may have been a martyr for religious freedom, but for science? Not so much.
But, you know, it has that truthiness thing going for it.
The Fall Of The Software Commons
…is a myth. Eric Raymond on the history of open source, and the ahistorical knowledge of young programmers.
Like Grandfather, Like Grandson
As Joe Kennedy was an anti-Semitic Hitler fan, so is is grandson a big fan of the Venezuelan fascist Maduro, even as he is shooting down protesters in the streets. Ron Radosh has more thoughts on the Left’s otherwise lack of response to their buddy in Venezuela.
Venezuela
Chavez’s legacy and deadly end game:
As the economy has deteriorated, the government has resorted to dubious stopgaps such as price controls. The price controls have produced more shortages, leading to more stopgaps … and more political repression to control complaints about the shortages and stopgaps. People made much of the fact that Chavez won elections — but less of the fact that he won them in the context of government policies that required television stations to broadcast hours of his speeches every week. And that he silenced stations that opposed him.
This has only continued to get worse under President Nicolas Maduro. Having shrunk the space for legitimate opposition so far, its only outlet seems to be the streets.
They’re streets that the murderous Maduro should be dragged through. But the White House, and much of the media, remains silent.