June 24, 2021
When Gadgets Fail-Tech Hubris Roundup
Icarus flew too close to the sun, his wax wings melting because he used them too ambitiously. Dr. Frankenstein created a monster that destroyed his loved ones. In reality, just as in myth, technology is often used with hubris, or is hubris itself;…
May 21, 2021
Gadget Oddities Roundup
We never seem to tire of new technology. It flows into our lives, sometimes providing solutions to problems we were very aware we had and, more often than not, creating solutions to problems we never knew we had. Over the past few months, as people…
May 21, 2021
Re-reading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine
As most people know, H.G. Wells was a utopian socialist. And, in many ways, we can legitimately call Wells’s famous novel, The Time Machine, a kind of late-steampunk, socialist fable—late steampunk because it depicts advanced technology arising from…
April 25, 2021
Strange Superpower Roundup
Consider this my meta-analysis of strange superpowers. After reading a number of posts purporting to list the weirdest, strangest, most esoteric superpowers, I’ve compiled a list of what I think are the weirdest among the actual, non-satirical…
April 25, 2021
Crime Control and Public Spending: Two Ships Passing in the Night
When it comes to policing and public safety, governments tend to “buy in bulk.” So even when resources are tight, police departments get tons of money from municipal coffers. Those municipalities must often cut other services to fund the police,…
March 21, 2021
Three Weird Retrofuture/punk Subgenres
Bruce Bethke has a wonderful post describing what led to his creation of the word “cyberpunk” and his publication of a short story of the same name, forty-one years ago in 1980. He writes, “I would have bloody well trademarked the thing” if he’d…
March 21, 2021
Quantum Phones Today, Quantum Communication Tomorrow?
Last year, Samsung developed the world’s first smartphone with quantum technology, installed as a security package. This year, Korean technology company KT launched its own “scrambler-free quantum smartphone” enabler. Quantum scrambling and quantum…
February 19, 2021
Fossil Fuel Death Count
We are on the cusp of ending our reliance on energy sources that kill us and kill the planet. But the cusp often feels like the longest part of the journey. Even as we can envision, and are materializing, a world where the majority of inputs to the…
February 18, 2021
Edgy Science Roundup
The lifeworld and deathworld meeting and overlapping; viruses evolving into unique protective bodily organs; ethical questions raised by VR communication “with the dead”; a nation’s official insistence that it isn’t building a time machine. In this…
January 27, 2021
Minecraft and Statecraft
Outschool, a supplemental class service for ambitious kids from k-12, is offering a course called Metrocraft. In it, students collectively design and build (in Minecraft) a city that they then govern. The class combines architecture, public…