Persistent
Top Posts
-
Recent Posts
- Jiahu: An Actual High-Tech Atlantis
- Actually Made in America
- Give ’em a Short, Sharp Shock and They Will Totally Do It Again
- Little Free Libraries – Boon or Blessing?
- From Creepy DARPA Concept to Useful Widget – A Long But Typical Engineering Journey
- The Odd Longevity of Pink Floyd
- MIT Under Attack
- “Whoosh” – Autonomous Gondolas vs Robo-taxis
- The Most Exciting Day in the History of Arlington MA
- Tesla-Free At Last
-
Join 33 other subscribers
Meta
Archives
Tag Cloud
- american-history
- american-revolution
- avatar-ish
- best-lists
- big-tech
- Big Dig
- book-review
- darpa
- electric-cars
- energy-ish
- evolution
- history
- homo-sapiens
- hypatia
- infrastructure
- inventing
- Libraries
- mad-science
- mit-ish
- movie-ish
- movie-ish political-ish
- obscure-creators-of-the-world
- people-and-numbers
- philosophy
- pink-floyd
- political-ish
- revolutionary-war
- samantha-harvey
- science
- sf-ish
- smart-dust
- solar inverters
- space
- space-balloons
- space-ish
- tech-culture
- tech-culture political-ish
- tech-history
- tech-life
- Tech life in New England
- transit
- travel
- wbms
Author Archives: jlredford
The Modern Alexandria?
What modern city would match Hypatia‘s Alexandria? Not in the sense of being filled with murderous mobs, of course, but in terms of being a main repository of knowledge.
More on Agora and Hypatia
The movie Agora mentioned in the previous post got me interested in the actual Hypatia, so I picked up “Hypatia of Alexandria, Mathematician and Martyr” by Michael B. Deakin (2007). It discusses the little that is actually known about her, … Continue reading
Two Recent Science Movies You Probably Didn’t Get To See
… unless you live in an ultra-blue city. They are Creation, about what made Darwin finish “On the Origin of Species”, and Agora, about the tragic end of the one of the last great intellectuals of the Classical era, Hypatia of … Continue reading
The Population of Other Hostile Places
In the last post I calculated that the current population of outer space was about five, if you added up all the person-years spent up there. What about other difficult places to live? Under the Ocean This was another of … Continue reading
The Population of Space
The SF writer Charlie Stross recently wrote on his blog about the absurdity of self-sufficient space colonies (“Insufficient Data”). He noted that it takes an extraordinary number of people to maintain a technological civilization, because even the most common artifacts … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged big-tech, people-and-numbers, sf-ish, space-ish, tech-history
2 Comments
The Dangerous Isaac Newton
Here’s an image – the world’s greatest scientist is in a grubby London dive, talking to lowlifes. Candles flicker on the table between them, and the air is close and foul. He’s interrogating them closely, sometimes smiling and handing over … Continue reading
Rejected by the American Legal System
… for jury duty. Geez. I got a series of ominous notices over the last couple of months telling me to appear at the district courthouse: So I appear at 8 AM per request. This being an important civic duty, … Continue reading
Disasters vs Development
Here in the Northeast US it’s been a damn hot summer. In Boston last month the average maximum was 85.8 deg F, 3.5 deg higher than the average from 1971 to 2000, and we had several heat records. We dealt … Continue reading
Plating the Planet With PV
So I see from this report from GreenTech Media that the worldwide production of photovoltaic (PV) cells is due to pass 10 GW this year. That’s a kind of random milestone, but to put it in perspective, that’s about 2 … Continue reading
One Catastrophe and One Annoyance
A few weeks ago there were two serious industrial accidents – the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on 4/20/2010 and the MWRA water main break in Boston on 5/1/2010: At first sight, the Boston break … Continue reading
A Niche in the Library of Babel 