Author: Justin

From A London Child Of The 1870s, by M.V. Hughes A settled income has its attractions possibly, but it can never be the fun of an unsettled one. My father was on the Stock Exchange, and wavered between great affluence and extreme poverty. Neither he nor mother had a saving or economical disposition, but lived…

From A London Child Of The 1870s, by M.V. Hughes Londoners have no neighbors. During our fifteen years in the one house we never had the slightest acqaintance with our ‘semi-detached’, nor with the people round, although we knew several by sight and gave them nicknames. A very few became known to us through the…

Earlier this month, I posted an excerpt from A London Child Of The 1870s, by M.V. Hughes. Since then, I’ve been re-reading it and enjoying it greatly. It’s a brief, rambling, and episodic little volume, sedately endearing and unpretentious. Having enjoyed it, my plan for the next few days is to share that enjoyment with…

From The Next 200 Years, by Herman Kahn It is often suggested that adequate technology assessment (TA) studies should be required for any technical innovation before proceeding with commercial applications–that the burden of proof be placed on the people who want the innovation. It sounds reasonable to say that it is up to the innovator…

From The Sydney Morning Herald, June 22, 2007 More than 100 studies have found that experts are often poor forecasters. In one survey Professor Philip Tetlock, of the University of California at Berkeley, obtained 82,361 forecasts from 284 academics, other commentators and professional advisers in the areas of politics and economics. The experts had to…

From The Next 200 Years, by Herman Kahn Man’s intellectual and physical resources must also be devoted to the task of monitoring and overcoming potentially catastrophic long-term environmental problems… To help in this effort, we would recommend the world-wide creation of a number of public and private institutions with various specific purposes, but all with…

From the comment section of Denialism Blog, a slightly abridged comment. The bolding is mine… Mark, you are simply missing the point. You take yourself very, very seriously – and no doubt the issues at stake are serious, both economically and environmentally. Blair, on the other hand, is just a joker. Everything he writes is…

From The Expert and Educated Incapacity , by Herman Kahn Educated incapacity often refers to an acquired or learned inability to understand or even perceive a problem, much less a solution. The original phrase, “trained incapacity,” comes from the economist Thorstein Veblen, who used it to refer, among other things, to the inability of those…

From 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Sir Arthur C. Clarke The great dinosaurs had long since perished when the survey ship entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand years… They were patient , but they were not yet immortal. There was so much to do in this universe of…

From A London Child Of The 1870s, by M.V. Hughes On one of my bad days I refused to finish up my rice pudding, was sent from the room, and fled in angry tears to my bedroom. Soon Aunt Lizzie came up to me with the information that ‘it says in the Bible that the…

From The Jupiter Theft, by Donald Moffitt The ritual spying had become a way of life during the year-long preparations for the joint Chinese-American Jupiter mission…The big prize in the game was the new boron fusion/fission engine that was going to power the Jupiter ship, courtesy of the United States. The Chinese didn’t have one…

From The Next 200 Years, by Herman Kahn It seems very likely that many subtle and sophisticated questions will arise as mankind–increasingly relieved of the burdens of simple sustenance and richer in technological capabilities and economic resources–continues its inexorable march across new frontiers. Indeed, some such questions are already arising. The fundamental physiological and psychological…

From 2001: A Space Odyssey by Sir Arthur C. Clarke Heywood Floyd catches up with the headlines while travelling to the moon… There was plenty to occupy his time, even if he did nothing but sit and read. When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into…

“Here it is”

From an interview at Ccnet… Benny Peiser: In a Winter Commencement Address at the University of Michigan two years ago you called yourself a heretic on global warming, the most notorious dogma of modern science. You have described global warming anxiety as grossly exaggerated and have openly voiced your doubts about the reliability of climate…

My introduction to the Bussard ramjet was Poul Anderson’s novel Tau Zero. Being an ignorant and unreflective sprat, it never occurred to me that the device wasn’t entirely fictional. I figured it was just another doubletalk drive, like “Ortega’s Torch”, or “Horst-Conrad Impellers”. Oops. When I found out that there really was a Dr. Robert…

From The Outline of History by H.G. Wells Volume I, p 367 In those days, it must be remembered, books were not in pages, but rolled like the music-rolls of the modern piano-player, and in order to refer to any particular passage, a reader had to roll back or roll forward very tediously, a process…

From Seeds of the Dusk by Raymond Z. Gallun Astounding Science Fiction, June 1938 In the distant future, in the remote desert, a highly evolved corvid confronts an unusual visitor. An invader from Mars. Unnerved, the plucky post-raven hunter-gatherer imagines the worst. But really, how dangerous could an intelligent and civilized plant be? It was…

From A Menace in Miniature by Raymond Z. Gallun, pulp science fiction writer, Astounding Stories, Oct.1937 The mechanism looked like a beetle made of metal. Its length was only about a quarter of an inch; but it had legs like a living beetle. It was provided with a tiny rocket, and a gravity screen, like…

September 14, 2006 A leading U.S. climate researcher says the world has a 10-year window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert catastrophe. NASA scientist James Hansen, widely considered the doyen of American climate researchers, said governments must adopt an alternative scenario to keep carbon dioxide emission growth in check… “I…