The Modern Alexandria?

What modern city would match Hypatia‘s Alexandria?  Not in the sense of being filled with murderous mobs, of course, but in terms of being a main repository of knowledge.

More on Agora and Hypatia

The movie Agora mentioned in the previous post got me interested in the actual Hypatia, so I picked up “Hypatia of Alexandria, Mathematician and Martyr” by Michael B. Deakin (2007). It discusses the little that is actually known about her, and goes into some depth on what her mathematical contributions were.  The author is an [...]

Two Recent Science Movies You Probably Didn’t Get To See

… unless you live in an ultra-blue city.  They are Creation, about what made Darwin finish “On the Origin of Species”, and Agora, about the tragic end of the one of the last great intellectuals of the Classical era, Hypatia of Alexandria. According to Variety, Creation opened on 1/22/2010 in the US, played at a peak [...]

The Population of Other Hostile Places

In the last post I calculated that the current population of outer space was about five, if you added up all the person-years spent up there.  What about other difficult places to live? Under the Ocean This was another of those 50s skiffy dreams – that there would soon be cities under the sea as [...]

The Population of Space

The SF writer Charlie Stross recently wrote on his blog about the absurdity of self-sufficient space colonies (“Insufficient Data”).  He noted that it takes an extraordinary number of people to maintain a technological civilization, because even the most common artifacts embody a vast range of skills.  There are tens of millions of lines of software [...]