Reza Aslan's Eloquent Dismissal of Generalizations
REZA ASLAN, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE: Well, I like Bill Maher. I have been on his show a bunch of times. He's a comedian. But, you know, frankly, when it comes to the topic of religion, he's not very sophisticated in the way that he thinks. I mean, the argument about the female genital mutilation being an Islamic problem is a perfect example of that. It's not an Islamic problem. It's an African problem. (CROSSTALK) CAMEROTA: Well, wait, wait, wait. (CROSSTALK) CAMEROTA: Hol...The Northeast Megalopolis
The megalopolis encompasses the District of Columbia and part or all of 11 states: from south to north, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. It is linked by Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 1, which start in Miami and Key West, Florida, respectively, and terminate in Maine at the Canada–United States border, as well as the Northeast Corridor railway line, the busiest passenger rail line in the count...An Alien United Nations
figure out how to live with high technology, how to avoid nuclear war, then tehre are at this moment a million advanced civilizations in the Milky Way. This place was built to help get us through this dangerous time. it would be good to know if there are other civilizations out there, if their United Nations have succeeded. it's something to think about when you stare up at the stars on a clear autumn night.What would life be like for extraterrestrial civilizations that survived their infancy?
The ITER Project
Years from now—maybe in a decade, maybe sooner—if all goes according to plan, the most complex machine ever built will be switched on in an Alpine forest in the South of France. The machine, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or iter, will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons—more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower. At its core, densely packed high-precision equipment will encase a cavernous vacuum chamber, in which a s...Description of a multi-national effort to produce a fusion reactor. Something some refer to as a "non-optional" technology for the human race to survive.
Sid Myer's "Civilization" as an Educational Tool
[Kurt D.] Squire has studied middle school kids who played Civ3. He found that some students who were able to spend the hours needed to learn the game began to identify “rules” by which history progressed; rules that apply to such issues as resource allocation, the tradeoff between aggressive military expansion and diplomacy, and technological exchange among societies. Weir, who had college juniors and seniors playing every day for three weeks in a summer course, says some of the game sce...Perspectives from a selection of Professors who use the game to teach history, be it the trade-offs in growth, the way modern culture colors the portrayal of history in the game, and the way the game allows for speculation about alternative histories.
The Computer is the Solutions to Over-Specialization
Getting ready for the assumed inexorable Armageddon, each applied science and all of the great scientific specialization capabilities only toward weaponry, thus developing the ability to destroy themselves totally with no comprehensively organized oppositional thinking capability and initiative powerful enough to co-ordinate and prevent it. Thus by 1946, we were on the swift way to extinction despite the inauguration of the United Nations, to which none of the exclusive sovereign prerogatives...With computers taking over the responsibility of specializing in computational and processing tasks, human minds are freed to resume our plasticity or "comprehensivlty" as Buckminster puts it.
The ENMOD Treaty
There are also major foreign policy concerns, beginning with the international ENMOD treaty—the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use ot Environmental Modification Techniques, ratified by the United Nations in 1978 in response to the United States' use of silver iodide cloud seeding to alter the weather over the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. Operation Popeye was an effort to "make mud, not war" to slow North Vietnamese supply lines by lengthening the...Prohibits geoengineering, such as agent orange, as a tactic in war.
Should Smallpox be Made Extinct?
A few decades from now, we may make a brutal,calculated decision to totally eradicate a particular form of life. We already are 99 percent of the way along that path. Even conservationists, who publicly deplore the extinction of innumerable species of animals and plants through neglect, ignorance, or financial greed, have applauded this conscious, murderous act to be carried out by a UN agency. I speak of smallpox virus. Since 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been systematica...1978 article on the state of the smallpox virus, driven to extinction by the United Nations, asks whether it should be preserved in deep freeze for science?
Telegraph Created the United States
A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible—indeed, inevitable—the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.Satellites will create the United Nations. A quote from Arthur C. Clarke.