Science/Tech

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Robert Zubrin, who is not an astronaut, thinks we worry excessively about safeguarding astronauts’ lives. The aerospace engineer further frets that without an aggressive space program, we have stopped pushing boundaries and exploring new frontiers. From a recent post on the Next Big Future blog:

“Between 1903 and 1933 the world was revolutionized: Cities were electrified; telephones and broadcast radio became common; talking motion pictures appeared; automobiles became practical; and aviation progressed from the Wright Flyer to the DC-3 and Hawker Hurricane. Between 1933 and 1963 the world changed again, with the introduction of color television, communication satellites and interplanetary spacecraft, computers, antibiotics, scuba gear, nuclear power, Atlas, Titan, and Saturn rockets, Boeing 727’s and SR-71’s. Compared to these changes, the technological innovations from 1963 to the present are insignificant. Immense changes should have occurred during this period, but did not. Had we been following the previous 60 years’ technological trajectory, we today would have videotelephones, solar powered cars, maglev trains, fusion reactors, hypersonic intercontinental travel, regular passenger transportation to orbit, undersea cities, open-sea mariculture and human settlements on the Moon and Mars. Instead, today we see important technological developments, such as nuclear power and biotechnology, being blocked or enmeshed in political controversy — we are slowing down.”

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From “If They Could Only Talk,” Hannah Bloch’s new National Geographic article about the elemental questions we need to ask about Easter Island:

“Easter Island covers just 63 square miles. It lies 2,150 miles west of South America and 1,300 miles east of Pitcairn, its nearest inhabited neighbor. After it was settled, it remained isolated for centuries. All the energy and resources that went into the moai—which range in height from four to 33 feet and in weight to more than 80 tons—came from the island itself. Yet when Dutch explorers landed on Easter Sunday in 1722, they met a Stone Age culture. The moai were carved with stone tools, mostly in a single quarry, then transported without draft animals or wheels to massive stone platforms, or ahu, up to 11 miles away. Tuki’s question—how did they do it?—has vexed legions of visitors in the past half century.

But lately the moai have been drawn into a larger debate, one that opposes two distinct visions of Easter Island’s past—and of humanity in general. The first, eloquently expounded by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, presents the island as a cautionary parable: the most extreme case of a society wantonly destroying itself by wrecking its environment. Can the whole planet, Diamond asks, avoid the same fate? In the other view, the ancient Rapanui are uplifting emblems of human resilience and ingenuity—one example being their ability to walk giant statues upright across miles of uneven terrain.”

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Leonard Nimoy applies his spooky gravitas to Easter Island, 1977:

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If you want an apocalypse with amenities, Survival Condo is for you. While others are dying from infections to their searing flesh, you’ll be poolside below the earth in a luxury condo development. From D.C. Stewart’s new Discover piece about the post-apocalyptic playground:

“Larry Hall, a former software engineer who bought his 174-foot-deep hole in the ground from the government for $300,000 in 2008, plans to convert it to calamity-proof condos by 2013. The silo is one of 72 built across the country to deter a Soviet attack during the Cold War. Tucked into an empty stretch of rural Kansas, it once housed an Atlas F nuclear ballistic missile that could travel more than 7,000 miles. To withstand a Soviet strike, the silo’s concrete walls are up to nine feet thick. But it’s not some ‘dreary concrete basement hideaway,’ Hall assures visitors to his website, survivalcondo.com. It’s a place to enjoy ‘the coolness of a missile base, the protection of a nuclear-hardened bunker, and the features of a luxury condo.'”

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Well meet again / Don’t know where / Don’t know when”:

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Michio Kaku holds forth on the most dangerous technology imaginable.

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From Alexis Madrigal’s new Atlantic article about Facebook’s attempt to govern its “nation” of users, a succinct description of the origins of technocracy:

“The original technocrats were a group of thinkers and engineers in the 1930s who revived Plato’s dream of the philosopher-king, but with a machine-age spin. Led by Thorstein Veblen, Howard Scott and M. King Hubbert, they advocated not rule by the people or the monarchy or the dictator, but by the engineers. The engineers and scientists would rule rationally and impartially. They would create a Technocracy that functioned like clockwork and ensured the productivity of all was efficiently distributed. They worked out a whole system by which the North American continent would be ruled with functional sequences that would allow the Continental Director to get things done.

Technocracy, as originally conceived, was explicitly not democratic. Its proponents did not want popular rule; they wanted rule by a knowledgeable elite who would make good decisions. And maybe they would have, but there was one big problem. Few people found the general vision of surrendering their political power to engineers all that appealing.” 

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Ground zero for modern personal computing was the Xerox Alto, seen here in a 1979 ad.

Buckminster Fuller agitating against customary geometry inculcation.

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Steven Pinker has an essay Edge in which he counters evolutionary scientists who support group selection theory. The opening:

“Human beings live in groups, are affected by the fortunes of their groups, and sometimes make sacrifices that benefit their groups. Does this mean that the human brain has been shaped by natural selection to promote the welfare of the group in competition with other groups, even when it damages the welfare of the person and his or her kin? If so, does the theory of natural selection have to be revamped to designate ‘groups’ as units of selection, analogous to the role played in the theory by genes?

Several scientists whom I greatly respect have said so in prominent places. And they have gone on to use the theory of group selection to make eye-opening claims about the human condition. They have claimed that human morailty, particularly our willingness to engage in acts of altruism, can be explained as an adaptation to group-against-group competition. As E. O. Wilson explains, “In a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals.” They have proposed that group selection can explain the mystery of religion, because a shared belief in supernatural beings can foster group cohesion. They suggest that evolution has equipped humans to solve tragedies of the commons (also known as collective action dilemmas and public goods games), in which actions that benefit the individual may harm the community; familiar examples include overfishing, highway congestion, tax evasion, and carbon emissions. And they have drawn normative moral and political conclusions from these scientific beliefs, such as that we should recognize the wisdom behind conservative values, like religiosity, patriotism, and puritanism, and that we should valorize a communitarian loyalty and sacrifice for the good of the group over an every-man-for-himself individualism.

I am often asked whether I agree with the new group selectionists, and the questioners are always surprised when I say I do not.”

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For its 150th anniversary, Timex sponsored “The Future of Time,” a competition that imagined timepieces 150 years from now. One entry was a thumbnail watch. From the competition copy: “TX54 is a disposable timepiece that is worn on the user’s thumbnail. While its translucency makes it blend seamlessly with the hand, a selection of text color options and a glow feature that activates on command make it easy to read.”

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Live Timex commercial for the waterproof version:

From a new Venue interview with Edward Burtynsky, the brilliant photographer of industrial landscapes, a passage about learning self-editing:

Burtynsky:  I love the tones of browns and grays—I love more neutral tones. That’s why I like going to the desert and working in the desert. I find that green trees and things like that have a tendency to lock us into a certain way of seeing. When I look at green trees on a sunny day, I don’t know how to make an interesting picture of that. We’re familiar with that already.

Instead, I like the transparency that comes when leaves are off and you can look deeper into the landscape—you can look through the landscape. When I did try to make those kind of green-tree/sunny-day pictures, I’d find myself not ever putting them up and not ever using them. Eventually, I just said, well, I’m not going to take them anymore, because they never make it past the edit.

There’s a certain point where you learn from your own editing. You just stop taking certain pictures because they never make it through. Your editing starts to inform your thinking, as far as where you want to go and what you want to look for when you’re making a photograph.

That what’s different about me after thirty years of doing this kind of work—there are a lot of pictures I don’t have to take anymore. I think that’s called wisdom—learning what not to waste your time on!”

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Manufactured Landscapes, 2006:

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A look at the Airpod prototype, a $10K alternative vehicle that runs on oxygen. I still prefer the electric, enclosed, self-balancing motorcycle, but this one is even cleaner. It’s not, however, likely to be the future of urban transportation unless, say, China decides to put its will behind the French-built engine.

“This is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.” (Image by Gerhard Boeggemann.)

From “In the Air,”‘ Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 New Yorker assault on the Great Man Theory, a thumbnail portrait of Nathan Myhrvold, a legend at Microsoft, a company that didn’t exactly have original ideas:

“Myhrvold is of Nordic extraction, and he looks every bit the bearded, fair-haired Viking—not so much the tall, ferocious kind who raped and pillaged as the impish, roly-poly kind who stayed home by the fjords trying to turn lead into gold. He is gregarious, enthusiastic, and nerdy on an epic scale. He graduated from high school at fourteen. He started Microsoft’s research division, leaving, in 1999, with hundreds of millions. He is obsessed with aperiodic tile patterns. (Imagine a floor tiled in a pattern that never repeats.) When Myhrvold built his own house, on the shores of Lake Washington, outside Seattle—a vast, silvery hypermodernist structure described by his wife as the place in the sci-fi movie where the aliens live—he embedded some sixty aperiodic patterns in the walls, floors, and ceilings. His front garden is planted entirely with vegetation from the Mesozoic era. (‘If the Jurassic Park thing happens,’ he says, ‘this is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.’) One of the scholarly achievements he is proudest of is a paper he co-wrote proving that it was theoretically possible for sauropods—his favorite kind of dinosaur—to have snapped their tails back and forth faster than the speed of sound.”

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From “Dorothy, It’s Really Oz,” the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s 1999 essay about that stubborn foolishness Creationism, which has since morphed into the idiocy known as Intelligent Design:

“In the early 1920s, several states simply forbade the teaching of evolution outright, opening an epoch that inspired the infamous 1925 Scopes trial (leading to the conviction of a Tennessee high school teacher) and that ended only in 1968, when the Supreme Court declared such laws unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. In a second round in the late 1970s, Arkansas and Louisiana required that if evolution be taught, equal time must be given to Genesis literalism, masquerading as oxymoronic ‘creation science.’ The Supreme Court likewise rejected those laws in 1987.

The Kansas decision represents creationism’s first—and surely temporary—success with a third strategy for subverting a constitutional imperative: that by simply deleting, but not formally banning, evolution, and by not demanding instruction in a biblically literalist ‘alternative,’ their narrowly partisan religious motivations might not derail their goals.

Given this protracted struggle, Americans of goodwill might be excused for supposing that some genuine scientific or philosophical dispute motivates this issue: Is evolution speculative and ill founded? Does evolution threaten our ethical values or our sense of life’s meaning? As a paleontologist by training, and with abiding respect for religious traditions, I would raise three points to alleviate these worries:

First, no other Western nation has endured any similar movement, with any political clout, against evolution—a subject taught as fundamental, and without dispute, in all other countries that share our major sociocultural traditions.

Second, evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the earth’s revolution around the sun rather than vice versa. In this sense, we can call evolution a ‘fact.’ (Science does not deal in certainty, so ‘fact’ can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree that it would be perverse to withhold one’s provisional assent.)

The major argument advanced by the school board—that large-scale evolution must be dubious because the process has not been directly observed—smacks of absurdity and only reveals ignorance about the nature of science. Good science integrates observation with inference. No process that unfolds over such long stretches of time (mostly, in this case, before humans appeared), or at an infinitude beneath our powers of direct visualization (subatomic particles, for example), can be seen directly. If justification required eyewitness testimony, we would have no sciences of deep time—no geology, no ancient human history either. (Should I believe Julius Caesar ever existed? The hard bony evidence for human evolution, as described in the preceding pages, surely exceeds our reliable documentation of Caesar’s life.)

Third, no factual discovery of science (statements about how nature ‘is’) can, in principle, lead us to ethical conclusions (how we ‘ought’ to behave) or to convictions about intrinsic meaning (the ‘purpose’ of our lives). These last two questions—and what more important inquiries could we make?—lie firmly in the domains of religion, philosophy and humanistic study. Science and religion should be equal, mutually respecting partners, each the master of its own domain, and with each domain vital to human life in a different way.”

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Gould disccuses evolution in 2000 with that affable dinosaur Charlie Rose:

More Gould posts:

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I posted a video once about Immanuel Velikovsky, an outsider scientist whose work was impressively elaborate nonsense. A charismatic guy, he befriended some of the greatest minds of the 20th century, including Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and Freeman Dyson. In Dyson’s recent New York Review of Books piece, he remembers his friendship with Velikovsky. An excerpt:

After I came to America, I became a friend of Immanuel Velikovsky, who was my neighbor in Princeton. Velikovsky was a Russian Jew, with an intense interest in Jewish legends and ancient history. He was born into a scholarly family in 1895 and obtained a medical degree at Moscow University in 1921. During the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution he wrote a long Russian poem with the title “Thirty Days and Nights of Diego Pirez on the Sant Angelo Bridge.” It was published in Paris in 1935. Diego Pirez was a sixteenth-century Portuguese Jewish mystic who came to Rome and sat on the bridge near the Vatican, surrounded by beggars and thieves to whom he told his apocalyptic visions. He was condemned to death by the Inquisition, pardoned by the pope, and later burned as a heretic by the emperor Charles V.

Velikovsky escaped from Russia and settled in Palestine with his wife and daughters. He described to me the joys of practicing medicine on the slopes of Mount Carmel above Haifa, where he rode on a donkey to visit his patients in their homes. He founded and edited a journal, Scripta Universitatis atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum, which was the official journal of the Hebrew University before the university was established. His work for the Scripta was important for the founding of the Hebrew University. But he had no wish to join the university himself. To fulfill his dreams he needed complete independence. In 1939, after sixteen years in Palestine, he moved to America, where he had no license to practice medicine. To survive in America, he needed to translate his dreams into books.

Eleven years later, Macmillan published Worlds in Collision, and it became a best seller. Like Diego Pirez, Velikovsky told his dreams to the public in language they could understand. His dreams were mythological stories of catastrophic events, gleaned from many cultures, especially from ancient Egypt and Israel. These catastrophes were interwoven with a weird history of planetary collisions. The planets Venus and Mars were supposed to have moved out of their regular orbits and collided with the Earth a few thousand years ago. Electromagnetic forces were invoked to counteract the normal effects of gravity. The human and cosmic events were tied together in a flowing narrative. Velikovsky wrote like an Old Testament prophet, calling down fire and brimstone from heaven, in a style familiar to Americans raised on the King James Bible. More best sellers followed:Ages in Chaos in 1952, Earth in Upheaval in 1955, Oedipus and Akhnaton in 1960. Velikovsky became famous as a writer and as a public speaker.

In 1977 Velikovsky asked me to write a blurb advertising his new book, Peoples of the Sea. I wrote a statement addressed to him personally:

First, as a scientist, I disagree profoundly with many of the statements in your books. Second, as your friend, I disagree even more profoundly with those scientists who have tried to silence your voice. To me, you are no reincarnation of Copernicus or Galileo. You are a prophet in the tradition of William Blake, a man reviled and ridiculed by his contemporaries but now recognized as one of the greatest of English poets. A hundred and seventy years ago, Blake wrote: “The Enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents and Genius, but whether he is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass and obedient to Noblemen’s Opinions in Art and Science. If he is, he is a Good Man. If not, he must be starved.” So you stand in good company. Blake, a buffoon to his enemies and an embarrassment to his friends, saw Earth and Heaven more clearly than any of them. Your poetic visions are as large as his and as deeply rooted in human experience. I am proud to be numbered among your friends.

I added the emphatic instruction, “This statement to be printed in its entirety or not at all.” A quick response came from Velikovsky. He said, “How would you like it if I said you were the reincarnation of Jules Verne?” He wanted to be honored as a scientist, not as a poet. My statement was not printed, and Peoples of the Sea became a best seller without my help. We remained friends, and in that same year he gave me a copy of his Diego Pirez poem, which I treasure as the truest expression of his spirit. I hope it will one day be adequately translated into English.•

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I posted something about the hologram helpers being added soon to NYC airports. They’re already hard at work in Germany. From Mashable: “One solution is already in place in a number of airports, including Dulles International in Washington, D.C, Dubai International and the Edinburgh Airport. Tensator’s Virtual Assistant communicates guidelines and information via a virtual spokesmodel.

‘Obviously airports are huge environments, and there are massive people walking through,’ says Keith Carpentier, vice president of business development at Tensator. ‘They like the idea of this holographic-type creator or ambassador — it makes people do a double-take.'”

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China, world leader in construction and cancer, is planning to build the tallest edifice on Earth in just 90 days. Pre-fabrication figures into the equation, of course. From CNNGO:

In an interview with Xinhua, BSB chief executive officer Zhang Yue (张跃) said the company plans to break ground on Sky City in November 2012, and that the tower will be completed in January 2013.

The company is confident the government will green-light the project.

BSB is renowned for its eye-opening construction efficiency. Its portfolio includes assembling a 15-story building in six days in June 2010, and erecting a 30-story hotel in 360 hours in December 2011.

The key to achieving such stunning speed is an innovative construction technique developed by BSB.

Most of the company’s buildings are pieced together with prefabricated components from its factory. In this case, 95 percent of Sky City will be completed before breaking ground.”

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30 stories in 15 days:

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The opening of “The Mind Reader,” David Cyranoski’s new Nature article about Adrian Owen, who has developed a method to communicate with patients in vegetative states:

“Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions.

Incredibly, he provided answers. A change in blood flow to certain parts of the man’s injured brain convinced Owen that patient 23 was conscious and able to communicate. It was the first time that anyone had exchanged information with someone in a vegetative state.

Patients in these states have emerged from a coma and seem awake. Some parts of their brains function, and they may be able to grind their teeth, grimace or make random eye movements. They also have sleep–wake cycles. But they show no awareness of their surroundings, and doctors have assumed that the parts of the brain needed for cognition, perception, memory and intention are fundamentally damaged. They are usually written off as lost.

Owen’s discovery, reported in 2010, caused a media furor.”

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Brian Lehrer interviews Parag and Ayesha Khanna about their new e-book, Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization. In the post-Inofrmation Age, you will be on performance-enhancing drugs, you will have the implant and neuro-prosthetic interfaces will help you walk.

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Before it was synonymous with genocide, Srebrenica was a spa-centric tourist haven. People there assumed things would remain the same because they had become trained to expect it. Then dreams were replaced by nightmares. A 1970s promotional video for the town.

E.O. Wilson thinks war is our genes, though I’ve never felt like going to war with anyone. Perhaps it’s a genetic defect I possess. From the biologist’s new Discover article, “Is War Inevitable?“:

“Once a group has been split off from other groups and sufficiently dehumanized, any brutality can be justified, at any level, and at any size of the victimized group up to and including race and nation. And so it has ever been. A familiar fable is told to symbolize this pitiless dark angel of human nature. A scorpion asks a frog to ferry it across a stream. The frog at first refuses, saying that it fears the scorpion will sting it. The scorpion assures the frog it will do no such thing. After all, it says, we will both perish if I sting you. The frog consents, and halfway across the stream the scorpion stings it. Why did you do that, the frog asks as they both sink beneath the surface. It is my nature, the scorpion explains.

War, often accompanied by genocide, is not a cultural artifact of just a few societies. Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species’ maturation. Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture. Archaeological sites are strewn with the evidence of mass conflicts and burials of massacred people. Tools from the earliest Neolithic period, about 10,000 years ago, include instruments clearly designed for fighting. One might think that the influence of pacific Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, has been consistent in opposing violence. Such is not the case. Whenever Buddhism dominated and became the official ideology, war was tolerated and even pressed as part of faith-based state policy. The rationale is simple, and has its mirror image in Christianity: Peace, nonviolence, and brotherly love are core values, but a threat to Buddhist law and civilization is an evil that must be defeated.

Since the end of World War II, violent conflict between states has declined drastically, owing in part to the nuclear standoff of the major powers (two scorpions in a bottle writ large). But civil wars, insurgencies, and state-sponsored terrorism continue unabated. Overall, big wars have been replaced around the world by small wars of the kind and magnitude more typical of hunter-gatherer and primitively agricultural societies. Civilized societies have tried to eliminate torture, execution, and the murder of civilians, but those fighting little wars do not comply.”

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More E.O. Wilson posts:

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There will be no escaping RHex Rough-Terrain Robot, created by the good people at Boston Dynamics: “RHex is a six-legged robot with inherently high mobility. Powerful, independently controlled legs produce specialized gaits that devour rough terrain with minimal operator input. RHex climbs in rock fields, mud, sand, vegetation, railroad tracks, telephone poles and up slopes and stairways.”
 

The opening of “Twilight of the Trucks,” Steven Levy’s new Wired piece about Apple’s further shift from the desk and the lap into the pocket:

“Almost exactly 2 years ago, Steve Jobs outlined his view of personal computing. We used to be an agrarian nation, he explained, and as a result our vehicles were largely trucks. As the country became more urban and suburban, we moved to an era where the highways were dominated by cars, not their lumbering counterparts.

The same thing was happening in the technology world — and, with the iPhone and the iPad, the movement was accelerating. ‘PCs are going be like trucks,’ Jobs said at the 2010 All Things D Conference. ‘They are still going to be around, but only one out of x people will need them.’ Clearly, he didn’t expect the percentage to be a big number.”

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There’s an excellent interview about aviation history at the Browser with Joseph Corn, author of The Winged Gospel. An excerpt:

Material and popular culture provided plenty of support for your thesis that the world expected manned flight to magically transform humanity. Please cite some of that colourful evidence for us.

Joseph Corn: ‘An Airplane in Every Garage’ was the name of an article that appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1930, a publication for the intellectual elite. During the wind-down of World War II, as the defeat of the Germans and Japanese became obvious in late 1944 and early 1945, Ladies’ Home Journal asked its readers whether they expected to own an airplane and an amazing percentage said yes – 30-odd percent, as I recall, and this was at a time when a far smaller percentage of people had cars. The percentage of people who actually got airplanes was less than 1% at its peak. Planes per population peaked in 1946 and basically it’s been going down ever since.

Remember, America rapidly moved from the development of the Model T to mass automobility by 1915. England didn’t reach the level of car ownership that California had in 1906 until 1956. So people thought, first we had horses and carriages and then we had bicycles and then we had cars and next, soon, it’ll be airplanes. And there was a brief moment after the war when the evidence suggested that the dream of owning an airplane would be within reach of almost anyone. Macy’s Department Store in New York sold airplanes in 1946. One newspaper article reported that the elevator men would call out, ‘Furniture, bed settings and airplanes 5th floor.’. Another bit of evidence of ‘the winged gospel’ – there was a movement, centred at Columbia University Teachers College to push ‘air-age education’ into all schools. Textbooks were written on subjects like ‘air-age English,’ ‘air-age geography’ and ‘air-age mathematics.’ Geography made some sense because the airplane seemed to be shrinking the globe. 

Perhaps the best evidence were the ritualistic observances that went along with ‘the winged gospel.’ People would go up in airplanes to get married and at least in one case a couple parachuted out to start their honeymoon. One woman in Florida took off with her husband piloting when she was in labour and her obstetrician delivered her baby at 5,000 feet – she named the girl Aero Jean. These little observances are all testimony to the tremendous excitement people had for flight and their tremendous optimism as to how flight was changing the world.”

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The opening of Frank Tobe’s Singularity Hub article about roboticists aiming to take their creations from automatons to multi-taskers:

“The robotics industry is on the cusp of a major transformation. Today’s factory robots are solitary precision instruments, mimicking the repertoire of capabilities of skilled craftsmen while repeating a handful of tasks thousands of times over. But future factory robots will likely have to be capable of thousands of tasks, performing each only several times, and they will work in collaboration with humans.

Furthermore, interest in nonindustrial robots is emerging at an even quicker pace, and new and larger marketplaces are opening up as never before. But that means some pretty significant shifts in design from caged robots to adjacent workers, from stationary position to portable motion, from programming intensive to easily trainable, and from connected to autonomous robots. Even as they work to improve upon their current industrial offerings, robotics companies are closely watching demand for co-robots, which are the safe, flexible, vision-enabled and easily trainable robotic assistants that science fiction movies made culturally popular.

Thus the reinvention of robotics is fundamentally a transition from industrial robotics to service robotics, and one that is demanding flexibility and versatility beyond what is presently available.”

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Rules for remaking society from “The Coming Eco-Industrial Complex” by the late Ernest Callenbach:

* We must create a new renewable-energy system to end our costly need to control the world’s oil militarily. Wind and solar-thermal have become the cheapest new-power-generating technologies, and are also labor-intensive; photovoltaic and battery storage technologies are improving rapidly; geothermal is an enormous resource—and oil companies happen to know how to drill wells. The U.S. is rich in renewable energy resources, and should aim at total energy independence, which will save us vast sums in the long run.

* We must rebuild our cities in the proven, compact forms of the world’s great cities, to reduce our dependence on petroleum-fueled cars. Our sprawling suburbs need to be transformed from cultural wastelands into communities with healthy centers and the creative cultural richness that cities have traditionally offered. A lot of tracks need to be laid and urban and suburban concrete poured. If we walk to transit stops, like New Yorkers, we will even lose weight and live longer. If Bechtel can build mega-airports, civil and military, it can certainly build eco-cities.

* We must develop a universal recycling system, so that all major materials (steel, paper, glass, aluminum, wood, plastic, even water) will be in steady and predictable supply without sabotaging our support system, the natural order. A giant job-intensive industry must be created here.

* We must restore our forests, fisheries, and agriculture to stable, net positive productivity. At present, we are cutting more timber than we grow and catching more fish than can reproduce. We are even putting far more petroleum-based calories into agriculture than we get out in food calories—in essence, we are eating oil, a non-renewable resource. And if we eat lower on the food chain and cut down on livestock, we will reduce our climate impacts even more than by getting rid of private cars.

* We must put people to work restoring our rivers, waterfronts, and wetlands—trashed by generations of engineers, dumpers, and developers. Carry on with what the New Deal started!

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