The Future: Like the Past, but cooler

Making predictions about the future is a notoriously tricky business.  It is often done by extrapolating from past trends.  As often as this method fails us, its hard to imagine a better heuristic than the belief that the future will be like the past, only more so.
Extrapolating current trends in combinations that should be obvious [...]

It slices, it dices, it cures polio

“Once upon a time, there was a man who was convinced that he possessed a Great Idea.  Indeed, as the man thought upon the Great Idea more and more, he realized that it was not just a great idea, but the most wonderful idea ever. The Great Idea would unravel the mysteries of the universe, [...]

Freedom of Speech in America

Scott Adams of the Dilbert Blog wonders about this “alleged freedom”.
“In the United States, we have freedom of speech, in the sense that the government won’t arrest you for speaking your mind. Yay for freedom!
But your fellow citizens will happily ruin your economic life if you say something unpopular in public. Some might say [...]

Predestination

…it’s not just for Calvinists. I’ve been reading Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist, and remembering that there is no shortage of scientific materialists who don’t believe that we have any free will. I wouldn’t have thought they would really have anything in common; but there it is. Two communities that I mostly have [...]

String Theory

Watching the PBS documentary on Michael Greene’s The Elegant Universe. It’s fairly well done, though a bit slow and repetitive.
The most common criticism I’ve heard of string theory is that it is not really scientific at all, because it makes no testable predictions. This lack of observability and predictive power makes it [...]