Category Archives: Technology
How to track a crisis
The following post is by my friend Matt Silberstein. Matt is deeply concerned about the events occurring in places like Darfur, and brought the following to my attention. I asked him to write a post, and here it is. Hi … Continue reading
Filed under Evolution, Freedom, Politics, Social evolution, Technology
Linkages
When God is watching – a good summary article on the effects of religion on morality. Also, clean smells improve outlook. A Christian physicist declares the end of Intelligent Design, and the comments are predictable Are mobile phones actually good … Continue reading
OK, so Ares works
I’m not proud. Well, not too proud. I admit I was wrong about the Ares 1-X – it seemed to work fine without excessive vibration and probably will work as a human rated booster. I still would have liked to … Continue reading
Filed under General Science, Technology
Apologies to Turing
The Twentieth Century was a century of geniuses, but the greatest of all, in my opinion, was Alan Turing. Turing invented, both the logic and the first hardware, the computer you are now using to read this post. More than … Continue reading
Filed under History, Philosophy, Technology
On preventive censorship versus punishment
In the last few years, there has been an increasing tendency of so-called democratic governments to increase the amount of control they have over their population, under the guise of various “emergencies”: terrorism, child pornography and of course a slightly … Continue reading
Filed under Australian stuff, Censorship, Freedom, Politics, Technology
We are natural villagers
We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became … Continue reading
Filed under Social evolution, Technology
Not Good Ideas #1
Yeah, like this isn’t going to end with Jeff Goldblum in the back of an SUV running away very quickly…
Filed under History, Technology
NIAC at NASA
Frank Sietzen at NASA Watch (a great blog, by the way) has asked if the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) should be revived. Most of his readers say yes. NIAC was where they came up with designs for wacky … Continue reading
Filed under Politics, Technology
Plagiarism, citations, and fact checking
Some interesting things in the web lately. One is a new system that purports to find cases of plagiarism. Science reports on the new Dèjá Vu database [news summary here; both behind the Science paywall; check this and this if … Continue reading
Filed under Media, Science, Technology
Creative Commons and textbooks
Anyone who has had to order textbooks for students knows how expensive they are. Here’s something that I hope may end up a trend amongst academics: Creative Commons licensed texts. P.D. Magnus wrote a logic textbook, forall x, which he … Continue reading
Filed under Education, Philosophy, Technology
