“It’s always amusing to see people who think themselves the center of the universe. Take the recent spread of the Blight [references follow for readers not on those threads and newsgroups]. The Blight is an unprecedented change in a limited portion of the Top of the Beyond––far away from most of my readers. I’m sure […]
“Finally, a philosophical note. We of Zonographic Eidolon watch the zone boundary and the orbits of border stars. For the most part, the zone changes are very slow: 700 meters per second in the case of the long-term secular shrinkage. Yet these changes together with orbital motion affect billions of lives each year. Just as […]
Since I began listening to NPR’s Planet Money and the Slate Money podcast, I’ve hatched a significant desire to correct my deficiency in economic and financial knowledge. When I heard John Lanchester plugging his new book on the “Read These Books Edition” of Slate Money, I thought How to Speak Money would be a good starting […]
“In Ravna’s opinion, sex in zero-gee was not the experience some people bragged it up to be; but really sleeping with someone…that was much nicer in free fall. An embrace could be light and enduring and effortless.” ––A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge, loc. 5424 “When people say, ‘It can’t go on […]
“Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change. Dumb animals can change only as fast as natural evolution. Human equivalent races, once on their technological run-up, hit the limits of their zone in a matter of a few thousand years. In the Transcend, superhumanity can happen so fast that its creators are destroyed. It wasn’t […]
Max More and Natasha Vita-More’s The Transhumanist Reader is probably the single best source for readers interested in a crash course in transhumanist philosophy. It presents more than forty essays addressing myriad aspects of transhumanist theory, with a good mixture of classic (i.e. pre-21st-century) papers and contemporary ones. It is a dense text containing a […]
There are plenty of reasons why I should hate (or at least vehemently dislike) Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but I was surprised by this novel’s ability to ingratiate itself to me despite propounding a set of perspectives and values that seem anathema to mine. I am neither a military enthusiast nor a scholar of […]
“Young, Rodger W., Private, 148th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division (the Ohio Buckeyes); born Tiffin, Ohio, 28 April 1918; died 31 July 1943, on the island of New Georgia, Solomons, South Pacific, while single-handedly attacking and destroying an enemy machine-gun pillbox. His platoon had been pinned down by intense fire from this pillbox; Private Young was […]
“The root of our morale is: ‘Everybody works, everybody fights.’ An M. I. doesn’t pull strings to get a soft, safe job; there aren’t any. Oh, a trooper will get away with what he can; any private with enough savvy to mark time to music can think up reasons why he should not clean compartments […]
“‘Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. ‘And that is the one practical difference.’ ‘He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better […]