The thrill is back!

Leonard David's Space Colonization: The Quiet Revolution on Space.com is the most exciting thing I've read in a long time. It reminds me of the way I used to feel about technology back in the 60's when I was a kid who was addicted to NASA launches and whose favorite TV show was Jonny Quest. Back then, the words "New and Improved!" were anything but a tired advertising gimmick to me.

David begins his article by suggesting that the "giggle factor" is gone from the general public's perception of private space efforts, thanks mainly to Burt Rutan's achievement with his SpaceShipOne. But, to me, there may be something much more profound going on, something that is usually derided as "gee-whiz", but which is, I think, actually - hopefully - a growing excitement about the possibilities of the future:

"During the last half of the 20th century, a host of technologies and disciplines which had witnessed millennia of slow or no growth…suddenly went exponential," McCullough reported at the STAIF meeting.

McCullough pointed to photography, chemistry and quantum mechanics that have combined to produce a new industrial revolution. Electrical and mechanical engineering are on courses that appear to indicate unbounded exponential improvement. Delving into the structure of DNA has spurred a better understanding of the cellular processes. The human genome has been sequenced and micro biomechanics has taken off, he said.

Furthermore, the centuries old technology of printing has been extended to three dimensions with inks of polymers, ceramics, wood and metals.

"These technologies have affected other technologies so that now at the dawn of the 21st century, one technology after another is assuming an exponential trajectory," McCullough noted. . . .

"There are so many technologies coming on," McCullough told SPACE.com. "The commercial drivers of these technologies are so massive, and the money is so large, that they they’re going to come right out of the blue," he said.

There are many more advancements that are already in the pipeline, McCullough said. "Some of the technologies that are out there are going to allow us to do some things that people are going to find incredible."

I can only hope that we see fit to provide the freedom required to keep this revolution going.

Good one!

Ran across this whilst surfing the AtomFilms blog:

Survivor starts its tenth season tonight.

Ten seasons of preening, back-stabbing, no-talent narcissists who think a month of drinking rain water and arguing with a lazy hick from Alabama over who cut down more palm fronds will make them a star.

http://blog.atomfilms.com/archives/2005/02/index.html#a000051

One more reason why I don't have a television.

Wish I could be in Berlin

Well, I'm surfing the 'net this afternoon, and since I'm curious to see more of Berlin after watching The Bourne Supremacy last weekend (I downloaded it from Movielink!), I'm discovering that there is a major exhibition on the work of Stanley Kubrick going on there right now, complete with "recreations" (at least I think that's what they are) of the HAL 9000 main memory from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Korova Milkbar from A Clockwork Orange! Artifacts on display include the fiberglass sculpture used to depict the Starchild at the end of 2001! The official exhibit website - www.stanleykubrick.de - has some of the actual Polaroid lighting tests from 2001!

WOW!

Ain't the Internet wonderful?

The Enemies of the Enlightenment

What would have been the fate of Rushdie's Satanic Verses under such a law? How would such a law not place Britain on the side of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who sentenced Rushdie to death for writing that book? How does such a law not pave the way for the reinstatement of "blasphemy" laws?

As for me, I think it is time to publicly state that I agree with Voltaire:

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

From The Intellectual Activist Daily

Commentary: The Enemies of the Enlightenment

This is a nice identification about Britain's proposed "incitement to religious hatred" law--from an author who knows a thing or two about the subject. Note that Rushdie characterizes this, accurately, as a battle to preserve the Enlightenment. But notice also who the Enlightenment's main enemies are, in this case: the supposedly secular, "politically correct" left.

http://tinyurl.com/4flx5

"Democracy Is No Polite Tea Party," Salman Rushdie, LA Times, February 7

"I recently returned from a trip to Britain, where I discovered, to my consternation, that the government is proposing a law to ban what it is calling 'incitement to religious hatred.' This measure, much beloved by liberals, is apparently designed to protect people 'targeted' because of their religious beliefs. But I see nothing to applaud. To me it is merely further evidence that in Britain, just as in the United States, we may need to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again. That battle, you may remember, was about the church's desire to place limits on thought. Diderot's novel 'La Religieuse,' with its portrayal of nuns and their behavior, was deliberately blasphemous: It challenged religious authority, with its indexes and inquisitions, on what was possible to say. Most of our contemporary ideas about freedom of speech and imagination come from the Enlightenment. But although we may have thought the battle long since won, if we aren't careful, it is about to be 'un-won.' "

Oklahoma, Tunisia, Senegal and Liberia

"If self-interest is myopic and brutal, why is it that the cultures that embrace it are prosperous and free, while the cultures that reject it are stagnant and impoverished?"

That's the question Nick Provenzo asks in The Moral Basis of Mindlessness at his Rule Of Reason blog at the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism site.