Persistent
Top Posts
-
Recent Posts
- 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
- Cool Space Stuff: VLEO and Electric Jets, Rocket Planes
- “Sapiens” and the Fifth Order of Being
-
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
Tag Archives: people-and-numbers
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
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
Take that, Eichmann
94-year old Holocaust survivor, Yitta Schwartz, leaves 2500 descendants: http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100104/NEWS/100109926 She had 17 children herself, and 170 grandchildren. By my reckoning, each of her grandchildren would have an average of 13.7 descendants, and apparently they have grandchildren themselves. It hardly … Continue reading
How Many Citizens Are There?
As noted in the last post, more than half of all Americans who ever lived are alive now. The percentage isn’t as dramatic in other countries because they haven’t had the 100X increase in population over the last 200 years … Continue reading
How Many Americans Have There Been?
If you add up all the people born in the last 220 years, plus the number who have immigrated in that time, you get 545 million of which 472M were born here and 73M immigrated. So a little over half (55%) of all the Americans who have ever lived are alive now. Continue reading
Life is long, history short
So I was reading Alan Furst’s new novel “The Spies of Warsaw” when I was struck by a particular passage. A typical Furst protagonist, the world-weary French Colonel Mercier, is attending a grand reception in Warsaw with a typical Furst … Continue reading
Are SF writers Lettuce or Whiskey?
Alexander Jablokov lists on his blog “Five reasons writers don’t improve with age”. It’s a depressing thought for an SF writer like him, although he’s one of note, but is it true? Are writers more like lettuce, best when … Continue reading
Promoting a Local Industry – Nobel Generation
So I saw a nice sign in the Raleigh Durham airport a while ago: “Congratulations to Prof Oliver Smithies of UNC Chapel Hill for the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine”. There’s something for an area to be proud of! Chapel … Continue reading
A Niche in the Library of Babel 