Filed under: 2016, American politics, climate change, economics, livable future, Speculation, sustainability, Uncategorized
More avoidance. I was going to write about the IEA’s 2017 World Energy Outlook (Vox article). Or I could write about The Grauniad’s “seven megatrends that could beat global warming” article. Or I could write about the bright and shiny, 100% electrified future that seems to be the major global bankwagon that people like the IEA are now jumping on. But that would be avoiding the real work. Continue reading
Filed under: climate change, disasters, futurism, Speculation | Tags: disasters, future
Since I’m avoiding reading two EIRs right now (I commented on a third last week), I figure I might as well play with some ideas that floated up since the previous post, about our modern conceptions of magic being the residue of previous methods for storing and propagating information in an oral culture. Right now, my bedtime reading is Walter J Ong’s 1982 opus Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. I wanted to highlight a point that Ong makes in great detail, echoed by others (like Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein): people process data differently depending on whether they know how to read and how to write or not. Continue reading
Putting the life back in science fiction 