How Cool is Your City?

If you’re not familiar with the crowd-sourced art-funding site Kickstarter.com, go and have a look. This is a wonderful idea. People submit proposals for various kinds of cool projects to the site, which then posts them. The submitters say they’ll do the project if they can raise a certain amount of money, typically a couple [...]

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 [...]

Another local industry – political ambition

So I was looking at lists of presidential candidates from recent elections, and was struck by the number of candidates from my small and somewhat out-of-the-way state, Massachusetts.  It looks as though MA is tied with New York and California for total number of people who have run for president since WW II – they [...]

Take that, Eichmann

94-year old Holocaust survivor, Yitta Schwartz, leaves 2500 descendants: http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100104/NEWS/100109926 She had 17 children herself, and 170 grandchildren.  By my reckoning, each of her grandchildren would have an average of 13.7 descendants, and apparently they have grandchildren themselves.  It hardly seems possible.  The Guinness world record as of 2002 was 824, from one Samuel Mast [...]

How Many Citizens Are There?

As noted in the last post, more than half of all Americans who ever lived are alive now.  The percentage isn’t as dramatic in other countries because they haven’t had the 100X increase in population over the last 200 years that the US has, but the percentage is likely to be high there too. But [...]

How Many Americans Have There Been?

If you add up all the people born in the last 220 years, plus the number who have immigrated in that time, you get 545 million of which 472M were born here and 73M immigrated. So a little over half (55%) of all the Americans who have ever lived are alive now.

Life is long, history short

So I was reading Alan Furst’s new novel “The Spies of Warsaw” when I was struck by a particular passage.   A typical Furst protagonist, the world-weary French Colonel Mercier, is attending a grand reception in Warsaw with a typical Furst heroine, the luscious and mysterious Anna Szarbeck.  It’s 1937, and war is coming. She’s chatting [...]

Are SF writers Lettuce or Whiskey?

Alexander Jablokov lists on his blog “Five reasons writers don’t improve with age”.   It’s a depressing thought for an SF writer like him, although he’s one of note, but is it true?   Are writers more like lettuce, best when picked fresh off the field, or whiskey, aged for decades in their cellars? We can [...]

Promoting a Local Industry – Nobel Generation

So I saw a nice sign in the Raleigh Durham airport a while ago: “Congratulations to Prof Oliver Smithies of UNC Chapel Hill for the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine”.  There’s something for an area to be proud of!  Chapel Hill counts 7 laureates as staff or graduates, as listed here. My home town is [...]