Tech moron. No, I am not surprised.
As a frequent American flyer I, like Josh Trevino, look forward with great anticipation to guaranteed Alec-Baldwin-free travel.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Biases Of Risk And Reward
An interesting article on human psychology. I may think about how this plays into issues of human spaceflight safety, for both professional and recreational space travelers, for a couple papers I’m working on.
[Via Geek Press]
What Really Happened To Air France 447?
It was pilot error. As the article notes, humans will always be fallible (it’s one of the defining characteristics) and you can never build a guaranteed safe system. There are probably lessons to be learned here for the design of space transports as well. But I don’t think that “automated systems will be safer” is one of them.
What Doesn’t Kill Christopher Hitchens
…doesn’t make him stronger. A mordant and sobering essay on his cancer treatment, and mortality. It remains tragic that we can’t do better than this in the second decade of the third millennium.
Righting An Old Tragic Wrong
As his hundredth birthday approaches, there is growing demand for a pardon for Alan Turing. His treatment really was barbarous.
Poisoning Cancer Cells
…with sugar:
The approach could ultimately spell doom for several types of cancer, including liver, lung, breast and blood. In mice, the treatment made aggressive human prostate cancer tumours virtually disappear within days.
Faster, please.
Seasteading
A long but interesting article at The Economist. There are some lessons here for space settlements.
Abolishing Email?
That’s what a major IT company plans to do.
I’ve long thought that for intra-organization communications blogs are much better than email. I was very concerned a few years ago when I was consulting for a major aerospace corporation (which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) how much technical work was going on in emails that were difficult to archive or search properly.
It Was Just A Matter Of Time
They’ve cloned a Stradivarius with a 3-D printer. I don’t think we’re that far from Star Trek replicators.
The economic and market effects of this technology will be far reaching. For instance, as Eric Drexler pointed out in the eighties, what happens when there is no way, other than a chain of custody, to tell the difference between the original Mona Lisa and an exact copy?
Do Kittens Really Rule The Internets?
Asking the important questions.
The science is settled.