The Evolving View of Science and Evil

Daedalus begins with an artillery bombardment on the Western Front, the shell bursts nonchalantly annihilating the human protagonists who are supposed to be in charge of the battle. This opening scene epitomizes Haldane's hard-headed view of war. And likewise at the end, when the biologist in his laboratory, "just a poor little scrubby underpaid man groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultramicroscopic," is transfigured into the mythical figure of Daedalus, "conscious of his ghastly mission ...

 The Problem with English Teaching

Midway through her 9 a.m. Intro to American Literature course Thursday, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Professor Elizabeth Mabrey suddenly realized that her students would accept, without question, literally any words that came out of her mouth as absolute, incontrovertible fact, sources confirmed. “I could say that On the Road was an overt metaphor for the Vietnam War and they would jot it down in their notebooks without any hesitation whatsoever,” said Mabrey, adding that, come midter...

 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...

 How Science Fiction Tackles Social Issues

Now science fiction movies are mostly just shoot-‘em-ups, but back in the day sci-fi was a medium to explore social issues. SF allowed us to examine the core elements of controversial issues without all the emotional baggage that went along with them. It’s easy to dismiss the genre when you have grown-up fans walking around in costumes and silver make-up, but SF employs disarming tools to tease core arguments from their tired rhetoric. Here pundits, smoke screens, and slogans are stripped...