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Tag Archives: big-tech
Nothing Has Ever Been Manufactured in Space
I happen to own something that has been to space – a laptop bag made partly from the orange nylon of Soyuz re-entry parachute: A Montreal company, Everquest Design, went out to Kazahkstan in 2003 and recovered the parachute from … Continue reading
Mad Science #4: Geo-Engineering With Nukes
Nuclear devices, what are they good for? Almost nothing, it turns out. They’re close to useless as weapons, since the goal of war is domination, not destruction. The nuclear powers have been in dozens of wars since 1945, and have … Continue reading
Mad Science #2 – Zapping ICBMs with Nuke-Induced Radiation Belts
Another great recent source of crazed science stories is Sharon Weinberger’s thorough and refreshingly skeptical history of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, The Imagineers of War. DARPA has been all the rage for the last few years because … Continue reading
The Engineering of Biology at MIT
One of the big reunion activities at MIT is Technology Day, a series of lectures from faculty done shortly after commencement. This year the theme was Synthetic Life, and the talks were just as creepy and interesting as you might … Continue reading
How Did Wind Get So Cheap?
Rather surprisingly, wind power is now the cheapest form of electricity in the US: This comes from the tree-hugging socialists at Lazard Asset Management. Unsubsidized wind comes in at $32 to $62 per MWh, depending on the site. Natural gas … Continue reading
When Modeling Goes Bad – “Weapons of Math Destruction”
The political modeling that I talked about in the last post now affects most decisions that institutions make with respect to individuals. This is nicely described in in the recent book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. She has … Continue reading
Weaponized Psychology Helped Elect Trump
The US has just elected a president who is an outright criminal – a man who cheats contractors, steals from investors, and assaults women. What on earth happened? Everyone has a theory, but let me add one more – his … Continue reading
Airborne LIDAR: Cool or Creepy?
The Guardian recently published a fascinating story, Revealed: Cambodia’s vast medieval cities hidden beneath the jungle, about the discovery of huge city complexes near Angkor Wat. The temples of Angkor are built of stone, but these structures are roadways or … Continue reading
How Space Science Might Have Gone
But for an accident of history, this is how space science would have been done: This is the launch a few days ago of the Compton Spectrometer and Imager, a soft gamma-ray (0.2 to 10 MeV) telescope designed to look … Continue reading
The Human Population of Space
… is currently about six. That is, if one adds up all the person-years spent in space by various crews, it comes to about six for recent years. In a previous post from 2010, “The Population of Space”, I had … Continue reading
A Niche in the Library of Babel 