Why, when and how may we have to find another home?
Category Archives: Technology and Society
How Washington Ruined Your Washing Machine
Not to mention your toilet. And lighting. Sadly, it’s one of the more innocuous things they’ve ruined.
The Founders weep.
A Disaster-Proof Nuclear Plant
How to build one.
Don’t call them “fool proof,” though. Von Braun used to say that you can’t build something to be fool proof, because fools are too ingenious.
New Reactor Designs
Nuclear Disaster In Japan
Thoughts from Ron Bailey.
I Wish Congress Wouldn’t Make NASA Waste So Much Money
So they could afford to do things more like this.
It’s always a little unnerving to me to see them fly through the ring plane. It makes you realize that as striking they are in appearance, the mass density is very slight, and there’s plenty of open space in there. Not that they couldn’t have had a collision, but they haven’t.
OK, I know, even if they weren’t being forced to waste money, they’d still have trouble getting more funding for more planetary missions.
Nuclear Triage?
This is pretty grim news, if true.
Even still, in the context of the major catastrophe there, it’s small potatoes. It’s going to cost billions to reclaim much of the land just from the seawater inundation (perhaps including dikes, with some advice from the Dutch). This just may mean that there will be a small part of it that will never be reclaimable in the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, they can console themselves with the thought that this probably won’t happen again for a few hundred years.
Meltdown Coverage
Brave New Climate seems to be doing a good job.
The Fragility Of Complex Societies
Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:
I don’t know quite why many of our environmentalists and urban planners wish to emulate such patterns of settlement (OK, I do know), since for us in America it would be a matter of choice, rather than, as in a highly congested Japan, one of necessity. Putting us in apartments and high rises, reliant on buses and trains, and dependent on huge centralized power, water, and sewage grids are recipes not for ecological utopia, but for a level of dependence and vulnerability that could only lead to disaster. Again, I understand that in terms of efficiency of resource utilization, such densities make sense and I grant that culture sparks where people are, but in times of calamity these regimens prove enormously fragile and a fool’s bargain.
Actually, many of them do favor decentralization and “appropriate” technology. But most of them also favor depopulation. And some of those favor it by whatever means are necessary.
Fear The Media Meltdown
Yes, media meltdowns occur much more often, and we have little in the way of containment vessels for them.