Category Archives: Technology and Society
Sneering Anti-Technologists
Lileks is unimpressed:
Honestly: would you rather they hadn’t invented clothes-washing machines? Radio? Would you rather that one member of a household spend their entire day over a washtub with nothing but the sound from the street through the screen window for company?
It’s comforting for some, apparently, to think that people in the past just stared slack-jawed at flickering images and rose like zombies when the Consumption Instructions were finished, and spent their life in agitated dissatisfaction until the useless, needless object was acquired and installed. I’d like to know if these people have microwave ovens.
I’m thinking they write their ignorant snark on computers that they don’t really need.
A “Zero-Gravity Space Chamber”
No, New York Post, there’s no such thing. If they shot her b00bs in weightlessness, it was probably in a parabolic aircraft.
Cancer Deaths
A new protein that could prevent 90% of them?
“We’ve found a way to dispatch an army of killer white blood cells that cause apoptosis — the cancer cell’s own death — obliterating them from the bloodstream. When surrounded by these guys, it becomes nearly impossible for the cancer cell to escape,” said King.
Faster, please.
The Aldridge Commission
In researching a piece on tomorrow’s VSE anniversary, I just started to reread the commission report. You know what isn’t mentioned in the Executive Summary of recommendations? Heavy lift.
The Military Space Program
Should it be taken over by the Navy? Space is more like the sea than like the air, and I argue in my book that a US Space Guard would be a better organization for many things currently being done (or neglected) by NASA, the Air Force and the FAA.
The Ultimate Turing Test
Can a machine have an @rgasm?
Spain’s Solar Pullback
The rent-seeking green-energy scam continues its collapse.
[Update a few minutes later]
I love this: “‘It seemed so safe,’ he said recently. ‘It was a government guarantee.'”
Nobody Needs An AK-47
The American Energy Boom
…booms on:
As Daniel Yergin puts it, “the shale-energy revolution [provides] a new source of resilience for the US and enhances America’s position in the world.”
It’s the one bright spot in the American economy, and it’s happening despite, not because of, “progressive” policies. Of course, they’ll take credit for it, though.
And the Left just hates it. I’d like to see to what degree the anti-frackers and anti-Keystone people are being funded by the Saudis.