The Beverly Hillbillies’ truck. Jethro was way ahead of his time, when it came to souping things up.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Landline Problem
I’ll give up my landline when they pry the receiver from my cold dead hands, but many people are just fine going cell-only, which could cause big problems down the road for the telecom industry.
I think that we have a generation of people who have no experience with quality phone service, and think that when calls get dropped, or you have trouble hearing the other person, that’s just the way it is, so they don’t know what they’re giving up. It’s going to be interesting to see how we continue to improve broadband if there is no cross subsidization from voice.
Kodak
…seems to have weathered the transition from film to the digital world.
Every Man
“…would give up his brain for a decent size.”
That was the subject of one of the myriad spam emails I get encouraging me to enhance…something or other. I have to believe that women get them, too.
Anyone who responds to such idiocy had no brain to give up in the first place. It’s as stupid as the ones that tell me that no one can resist buying a new watch. Watch me.
Cost Effectiveness
Bjorn Lomborg says that if global warming is a problem, there are much cheaper and faster solutions than carbon reduction.
Asteroid Impact Craters
Some great pictures from space, which is the best place from which to see them.
But we still don’t seem to be taking the problem seriously:
NASA is charged with seeking out nearly all the asteroids that threaten Earth but doesn’t have the money to do the job, a federal report says.
That’s because even though Congress assigned the space agency this mission four years ago, it never gave NASA money to build the necessary telescopes, the new National Academy of Sciences report says.
Because space isn’t important. Even when it is.
More Climate Engineering Thoughts
From John Tierney.
If we really do have a climate change problem, this seems like a much better solution than a command-control economy. But it doesn’t provide the watermelon socialists with an excuse to run our lives.
Geoengineering
Could “cloud ships” solve the problem (assuming that there is a problem) with “global warming”?
I do find this both amusing and frustrating, though:
The Copenhagen Consensus Centre, which advises governments on how to spend aid money, examined the various plans and found the cloud ships to be the most cost-effective.
They would cost $9 billion (£5.3 billion) to test and launch within 25 years, compared to the $250 billion that the world’s leading nations are considering spending each year to cut CO2 emissions, and the $395 trillion it would cost to launch mirrors into space.
That’s an absolutely insane (and economically and technologically ignorant) number for the latter. The only way to get it is to assume that a) the mirrors are very massive, b) they are made entirely out of terrestrial materials and c) that launch costs would not be reduced in any way by launching that much mass. I’m not saying that “space mirrors” are the most cost effective solution, but I’d like to see their basis of estimate, because that number is nuts.
Restoring NIAC?
One of the stupidest and most criminal results of Constellation’s crowding out the rest of the NASA budget was the dismantling of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts two years ago. It was only costing a few million dollars a year, and that trivial amount of money, which was providing tremendous bang for the NASA buck, was taken to be poured down the multi-billion-dollar Ares rat hole. Now, apparently, there’s talk of resurrecting it. That would be a small, but vital step in getting the agency back on the right track, if the new administrator follows the advice.
Feeling Old
The morning anchor (a twenty-something, by the looks and behavior) on Fox 29 in Palm Beach was reporting on a Star Wars story, and pronounced C3PO “See Three Poh.” She was ribbed by her co-anchor, and defended herself by saying, “I’ve never seen the movie.”
I was too old to be influenced by Star Wars (in my early twenties when it came out) — 2001, a real SF movie, was my cultural touchstone, but this is the first time I’ve run into an adult that is too young.