climate, photos, miscellany
Henry Shue has written convincingly about the moral importance of the rich giving up luxuries for the sake of fighting climate change, before the poor are asked to give up necessities. As he explains it, even in an emergency you sell the jewelry before you sell the blankets. The ultimate example of luxury emissions is [...]
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Every year, I see the militarism and nationalism that are linked to Remembrance Day, and every year I find them at least partly objectionable. The twentieth century should be taken as a comprehensive demonstration of the immorality of war, and how dangerous it is when people adopt nationalist and militarist ideologies. Putting on a poppy [...]
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I was first exposed to Sarah Vowell through her entertaining contributions to This American Life and The Daily Show. In addition to being rather charming, she comes across as expressive and very nerdy. Those qualities are also evident in her short and engaging book on Puritan settlers in North America in the 17th century. Vowell [...]
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This upcoming talk at Imperial College London looks awesome: The science of secrecy. Simon Singh will be speaking, as will Richard Aldrich. If you are a cryptology or intelligence geek in London or Oxford, you should almost definitely go.
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With the last Space Shuttle mission ongoing, people are naturally asking what the future of space exploration is going to be. It seems clear that ambitious plans like a manned mission to Mars are a non-starter in the current fiscal climate. That being said, one of the major reasons why such missions are basically off [...]
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It is encouraging whenever the ICC or ad hoc international criminal tribunals manage to get their hands on someone accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity. Such prosecutions have the promise of producing a credible record of what took place, potentially providing some comfort to surviving victims, and perhaps somewhat improving the conduct of [...]
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One of my biggest fears is that a nuclear war could start by accident, or as the result of a miscalculation. Some national leader could push a threat too far, an exercise could be misinterpreted, things during a conventional war could get out of control, and cities could suddenly get incinerated. It seems quite likely [...]
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This year, after 29 years in operation and two catastrophes, the American Space Shuttle program is shutting down. The Shuttle was always a hacked-together prototype vehicle, never the cheap and dependable satellite-launching workhorse that NASA seemed to promise Congress. Lots of effort and brilliance went into the thing – make no mistake – but trips [...]
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In the very long term, the survival of the human species depends upon developing the capability to colonize other planets. Earth is always vulnerable to major asteroid and meteor impacts, and there will come points billions of years in the future when the carbon cycle ends and when the sun becomes a red giant. As [...]
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There is an interesting passage in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate in which he argues that the Nazi and Marxist ideologies share important ideological assumptions that partly explain why each produces large-scale human suffering: The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful. Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in [...]
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Content copyright Milan Ilnyckyj (2003-2012). May be used non-commercially with attribution. For more details see this page.