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Tag Archives: people-and-numbers
2020 Is Already the 2nd Worst Year in US History
One concrete way to describe how awful something is is by how many people are killed by it. It’s a measure that all can agree on, and is relatively well quantified. There are many other ways in which things can … Continue reading
Immigration and the Nobel Science Prizes
It’s hard to take the current Administration’s stance on immigration seriously. Their policies are deliberately cruel, as in family separations, and clearly motivated by bigotry. In response, people have pointed to the 80 million US immigrants and their huge contributions … Continue reading
Who Are the Best-Selling SF Authors?
There doesn’t seem to be a direct way to answer this. Book sales data appears to be kept very private between authors and publishers, probably for the same reason that you never tell anyone your income. In any case, books … Continue reading
Is STEM Recruitment Working?
The technical world, that of math, science, and engineering, has been trying for decades to get more young people interested in it. It collectively sponsors TV programs, high school contests, and scholarships. Politicians are constantly touting the benefits of STEM … Continue reading
Who Are the World’s Leading EEs?
The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) is the world’s largest technical society, with about 420,000 members. Although founded in the US in 1884, over half its members are international. Its highest rank is Fellow, which can only be … Continue reading
Peak Tragedy Is Long Past…
… at least in the US. By peak tragedy I mean a year in which the maximum number of young people died. It’s sad when old people die, but it’s tragic when the young are taken. They lose decades of … Continue reading
How Cool is Your City?
If you’re not familiar with the crowd-sourced art-funding site Kickstarter.com, go and have a look. This is a wonderful idea. People submit proposals for various kinds of cool projects to the site, which then posts them. The submitters say they’ll … 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
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Tagged big-tech, people-and-numbers, sf-ish, space-ish, tech-history
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Another local industry – political ambition
So I was looking at lists of presidential candidates from recent elections, and was struck by the number of candidates from my small and somewhat out-of-the-way state, Massachusetts. It looks as though MA is tied with New York and California … Continue reading
A Niche in the Library of Babel 