10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Argonauts: Charter on Scientific Responsibility
CHARTER ON SCIENTIFIC RESPONSIBILITY
Abuse of science and technology is a major threat to the existence of humankind. Our era has seen destructive climate change, tactical use of nuclear weapons, famine, public health crises, and now, the militarization of space. Our corporate stakeholders and the governments representing them have made inhuman, unwise decisions, and show little sign of changing their behavior.
Scientists, technologists, and mathematicians can be an effective voice for resp...
1 24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Dyson VS Sagan on Nuclear Winter
I do not wish here to get into a technical argument about the details of nuclear winter. I will merely summarize my own struggles with the technical issues. I spent a few weeks in 1985 trying to make nuclear winter go away. The phrase "go away" here is used in the sense customary among scientists. To destroy a new theory, you try to find a simple situation where the theory predicts that something happens and you can prove that the same something does not happen. Then you say that the thing pr... 1 
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notes16 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
Being Happy is Punk Rock
Certainly dystopia has appeared in science fiction from the genre’s inception, but the past decade has observed an unprecedented rise in its authorship. Once a literary niche within a niche, mankind is now destroyed with clockwork regularity by nuclear weapons, computers gone rogue, nanotechnology, and man-made viruses in the pages of what was once our true north; we have plague and we have zombies and we have zombie plague.
Ever more disturbing than the critique of technology in these stori...03 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Fossil Fuels are Humanity's "Starter"
Now we have comprehended and peeled off the layers of petals
which disclosed not only that physical energy is conserved but also
that it is ever increasingly deposited as a fossil-fuel savings account
aboard our Spaceship Earth through photosynthesis and
progressive, complex, topsoil fossilization buried ever deeper
within Earth's crust by frost, wind, flood, volcanoes, and earthquake
upheavals. We have thus discovered also that we can make all of
humanity successful through science's world-e... 1 notes
notesThey are here to get the engine of sustainable energy running, we have to get the engine running before they are exhausted or the car of civilization is dead.
18 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
Suburbs are the Result of Fear of Nuclear War
The Federal Civil Defense Administration determined that the country that would win a nuclear war was the one best prepared to survive the initial attack. Achieving this required a homeland mobilization on an unprecedented scale, and our children needed to know what to do when nuclear war came. They commissioned a nine-minute film called Duck and Cover that showed Bert the turtle pulling into his shell to survive a nuclear explosion that burns everything else. The film exhorted millions of sc... 1 notes
notesThe government encouraged migration from cities to the suburbs to move people away from kill zones.
03 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Nuclear Bombs End Large-Scale Warfare
The last few centuries have seen the world freed from several scourges—slavery, for example; death by torture for heretics; and, most recently, smallpox. I am optimistic enough to believe that the next scourge to disappear will be large-scale warfare—killed by the existence and nonuse of nuclear weapons. 1 notes
notesAn accurate prediction by a physicist who worked on them.
08 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
The Need for a Common Perspective
That we need a planetary ethic is so obvious that I need but list a few key words: climate, ethnic cleansing, fossil fuels, habitat preservation, human rights, hunger, infectious disease, nuclear weapons, oceans, ozone layer, pollution, population. Our global conversations on these topics are, by definition, cacophonies of national, cultural, and religious self-interest. Without a common religious orientation, we basically don't know where to begin, nor do we know what to say or how to listen... 1 notes
notesWe need a singular vision based on reality in order to come to consensus and overcome our political and ideological differences.
17 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Logical Fallacies
In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions. Among these fallacies are:
Ad hominem - Latin for 'to the man', attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., the Reve... 1 notes
notesA list of some logical fallacies which scientists must beware.
