So I was in a bookstore browsing the new non-fiction when I came across “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley. The cover blurb was intriguing: For two hundred years the pessimists have dominated public discourse, insisting that things will soon be getting much worse. But in fact, life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. [...]
Archive for August 2011
Reading Criminal Authors
August 8, 2011The Robot Population of Deep Space
August 3, 2011In 1978 I heard Carl Sagan speak at MIT. The two most important space probes ever, Voyager 1 and 2, had just launched the year before, and Sagan had been deeply involved with them. It was his idea to do the Golden Voyager Records , the gold-plated phonograph disks that held hundreds of sounds of [...]
