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]
Category Archives: Technology and Society
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.
More America 3.0 Analogies
From Jim Bennett’s Facebook page:
Iain Stuart Murray: Hopefully America 3.0 won’t have to be patched continually like version 2. And it should outperform Europe 5.7.1.2 and probably UKX.
James C. Bennett: Well, America 1.0 was based on a cleaned-up version of England 5.0, the highly successful 1688 release. 3.0 throws out the patches created for 2.0 that had gotten cumbersome and tries to play on the strengths of the original design. Since the original code was English, some of the design could well prove useful for a new UK release.
Iain Stuart Murray: let’s see – England 5.0 was replaced by UKI in 1707, thanks to a merger with another operating system. This proved so successful that it kept adding new features, although it lost some really attractive ones in 1776 when America 1.0 was spun off. UKII in 1801 might be thought of as the first in a series of bloatware expansions. UKIII was in 1858, and UKIV in 1877 following the complete acquisition of Indian call centers that had been outsourced. There were a series of updates between 1906 and 1914, and then several features were spun off until the completely radical revision of UKVII in 1948. That looked shiny when first released, but soon became the slowest system on the market, leading to the equally radical UKVIII in 1979. UKIX (1997) was based on UKVIII but required more and more admin permissions as time went on. There is hope that UKX (2010) will make it cleaner, but there’s been little evidence of that so far.
James C. Bennett: Unfortunately, the development partnership for UK X, formed at the last minute by adverse market circumstances, has resulted in the partner’s insistence on incorporating large chunks of code from Bonaparte V, which runs on an entirely different operating system. Since Bonaparte V itself is already displaying severe problems, this was a particularly problematic choice.
Heh.