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I’ve noted a time or two how some sites and personalities I follow, online, prove themselves consistently, while others are much more like Terry Crowley. That is, I may read regularly but find most of the material silly, disastrously wrongheaded or just plain dull, or I may only look occasionally when I happen to remember that the site exists, and yet… eventually something always comes along that’s not only good, but so good that I never manage to completely drift away from the source.

So it is with NPR.org’s cosmology blog, 13.7.

A lot of what ends up on 13.7 is just bafflingly abstract. The same could very possibly be said of a lot of what I write, but I can understand my own digressions into angels-on-pins ephemera, at least, even if no one else can.

Every now and then, though, 13.7 and particularly Astrophysics professor Adam Frank comes up with something which manages to speak to me while still being so high-flown and unusual as to be memorably thought-provoking. Frank’s post of yesterday, “How to Save the World by Saving Yourself,” falls into this category.

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Admittedly, getting wound up over the remarks of somebody like Dan Tapscott is probably a bit like getting wound up over the remarks of Tom Friedman, Richard Florida or Faith Popcorn. Nincompoops selling half-baked pseudo-insightful drivel; shouldn’t I just ignore them?

Perhaps, yes. I would do so more readily, however, were it not just journalistic-sweatshop hacks who have to fill space on news portal sites and in business magazines paying attention to their brand of fluff.

Unfortunately this sort of starry-eyed gosh-wow new-economy-technology-future-go dogma has seeped into conventional wisdom without anyone ever questioning it. In reading a CBC interview with Tapscott the other day, I was struck by his perfect, if obviously unintentional, summarization of this mindset and how utterly barking mad it is: (more…)

Earth, 1946: World War II is over and the Cold War looms. The result, at least for the victorious industrialized nations, is a combination of euphoria with an undercurrent of growing existential dread. And yet, in the long run these seemingly-conflicting emotions lead to the same end, economically: spend freely.

The key to this paradox is the nature of the new threat, largely unprecedented in human history: nuclear annihilation. Humanity lives under imminent threat of destruction, as often before, except now destruction is for practical purposes likely to be over in an instant. As Albert Camus wrote, in The Fall:

I could better understand that friend who had made up his mind to stop smoking and through sheer will power had succeeded. One morning he opened the paper, read that the first H-Bomb had been exploded, learned about its wonderful effects, and hastened to a tobacco shop.

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