Thursday 27 June 2019

Bought This Thing Today

Good thing I have an engineering degree.




The Last of Its Kind


The biologist David Sischo has a tragic assignment: keeping vigil over a species’ sole survivor, then marking its extinction in real time.


Monday 24 June 2019

Set Up For Failure


How Iran Captured 10 US Sailors at Farsi Island.


The Spirit of History


Hegel’s search for the universal patterns of history revealed a paradox: freedom is coming into being, but is never guaranteed.




The Ironic Feudalist


Kure Tomofusa’s hatred of democracy, human rights and liberalism has found an echo in the West. But has he been joking all along?


The Great Summer Read


Why do we persist in this often futile literary quest?


Morsel

Over 100 years ago, the US government commissioned 7,500 watercolor paintings of every kind of fruit in the country.


Sunday 23 June 2019

Godmother of Intelligences


Mary Shelley foresaw that artificial intelligence would be made monstrous, not by human hubris but by human cruelty.



Containing Radioactivity at Chernobyl


Holding it all in





The Remains Of Stalin’s Dead Road

In Russia’s arctic wilderness, the remnants of one of the Soviet Union’s most tragic gulag projects now lies largely forgotten.


Quote from ‘Westwood Lake Chronicles’

“We can look forward to another two years of metal-on-metal ‘improvements’. As long as we reward the misguided ethos that consumers are more important than citizens, our contempt for responsible stewardship will go on forever. For how could we ever conceive of an alternative to creating yet another place not worth caring about?” 
Lawrence Winkler, Westwood Lake Chronicles