The Way the Future Blogs

TAD says he’s tired of getting up-to-date scientific and political news from this blog, and can I recommend other sources?

I can tell you what I read every week, which is five weekly publications: Science, New Scientist, The New Yorker, the Sunday New York Times and Newsweek.

Science is mostly pretty technical. New Scientist is an English magazine and fairly expensive in the U.S., but you can read much of it online, and maybe some nearby public or college library gets it and will let you read it. (If not, get on the one most likely to listen to you and tell them they should.) If I could subscribe to just one magazine, this would be it.

The New Yorker may sound like a lightweight choice but its articles in depth can’t be beat, and often they are on scientific subjects. (They also have great cartoons and much else.)

I also read about a dozen other periodicals and miscellaneous other stuff, but far the most of what I know and keep replenishing is from these five.

 

Remember the ozone hole? The hole in the atmospheric ozone layer over Antarctica that allowed dangerous solar radiation to come through to the surface of the Earth with potentially deadly effects on life there.

Starting in 1989, international agreements began to cap and then to reduce the percentage of ozone-destroying gases liberated through the use of certain refrigerants and propellants, and scientists around the world began to check on the condition of the ozone hall at the end of every Antarctic winter. This year, meteorologist Murray Salby, with Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, announced the first signs of healing of the hole. Admittedly the changes in the ozone hole are small, and somewhat ambiguous, but they indicate that the international collaboration of many countries can in fact succeed in working together to heal an environmental crisis

Now, if we could only all get together on a program of slowing … then stopping … then reversing the flow of carbon compounds into the atmosphere, why, then we’d have some hope that our grandchildren might have a pretty decent world to live in!

 
But, Meanwhile —

The regular run of chronic bad weather news is still with us. Eastern Europe’s summer was the hottest in more than 500 years. In Russia, there were more than 55,000 deaths related to the heat wave. A quarter of the crops failed, there were vast wildfires and meteorological models suggest that somewhat less extreme heat waves will be common over the next 40 years.

(This is a new feature I’ve been wanting to add to the blog, talking about some of the most memorable meetings I’ve attended — meetings about science, science fiction, world affairs, all kinds of things.. Some of them were one-off or by invitation only, so I can’t urge you to try them for yourself. Most, though, are regularly scheduled yearly functions — for example the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Future Society and (of course!) the World Science Fiction Convention. The good part of that is that I’ll try to time the columns about the open ones for a few months before their next meeting and give details of how to register, so that if one takes your fancy you can try it for yourself.)

 
The NASA Conference on Speculative Technology

Ed Mitchell, failed telepath?

This first, and so far only, NASA conference on speculative technology was the brainchild of a NASA man named George Pezdirtz. If I ever wanted to put together a really fun scientific conference of my own would try to hire Mr. Pezdirtz to plan it. He did just about everything right.

To start with, the conference was held on an island off the coast of Georgia. I have come to believe that that is the very best kind of site for a conference that wants to explore new possibilities in its mandate. You see, the only way in or out for most of the participants was a single-engine propeller plane that commuted between the Atlanta airport and the island. In most conferences that feature a lot of high-profile participants, the superstars generally fly in just in time for their performances. Then they fly right out again as soon as they’re over. At Spec Tech they couldn’t do that. There weren’t enough seats on the plane. So nearly all of the conferees hung around for the duration, mingling with the others, to the great enrichment of the discussions that followed each paper.

Of course another factor that made that work so well was that so many of them were in fact superstars themselves.

Before we go any farther, let me make a confession. I had some personal reasons for particularly enjoying it. One was that, during a break in the proceedings, Arthur Clarke found some bicycles nobody was using, and attempted a spot of bicycle jousting — I pedaling, Arthur on the handlebars. (That was about the last time both Arthur and I were spry enough for that sort of juvenile delinquency.)

And then there was the question of Wernher von Braun. He and I had been aware of each other’s existence, but the only tangible connection was that he did keep inviting me to watch rocket launches at the Cape. This troubled some mutual friends, Willy Ley in particular, who thought that Von Braun and I could be good friends, but he never offered any one-on-one invitations, and I couldn’t get past the fact that he had been an officer in Hitler’s SS to take the initiative.

But then came an evening at Spec Tech when we had all been invited to a barbecue on the far side of the island. It was an automobile road away, and there weren’t enough cars to go around. So we doubled up. And for half an hour there I had Wernher Von Braun sitting in my lap. . . . Oh, it didn’t overtly change much, but after that I couldn’t help thinking of him less as a Nazi slave-labor driver and more as a human being who shared the same interplanetary ambitions as I did. I don’t think I would have done what he did to get there. But I wouldn’t have got as far as he, either.

Continue reading ‘Great Conferences I Have Attended, No. 1’ »

That headline, of course, is meant to be sarcastic. You see, we do have a problem. Our Ma Dell upright created it, all by itself, and all of the wizardry of our ordinarily undefeatable Guru, Dick Smith, has been unable to it restore it to civilized behavior. So please tell me (and Dick). Have you ever had this particular trouble with a computer? If so, what did you do about it?

First it goes on nicely writing down my well-chosen words. Then, when I switch to another file, it flashes a blood-red sign in my face that starts with the threats, saying something like, “You get out of this file or we’ll make you wish you had! This file is reserved for Frederik Pohl to work on, so you leave it at once. Exit this file now!”

Nothing as deranged as this has ever turned up on any of the four other computers in the house. Just on the one that I write blog material on, so tell me, please. Has anybody got any help for a seriously demented computer?

Clearly there are other factors — poverty for one, proximity to an ocean with the potential for a tsunami and imperiled nuclear plants for another, both as in Japan 2011. But political corruption —and thus inadequate requirements for inspection and construction of buildings — is a factor that people can do something about.