Michele Pasin / Quotes

Safety of nuclear energy

Will nuclear energy be part of the future, despite the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan? The business with Fukushima is a joke. Well, it’s not a joke, it is very serious — how could we have been misled by anything like that? Twenty-six thousand people were killed by the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami [that caused the nuclear meltdown], and how many are known to have been killed by the nuclear accident? None.

[On the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Lovelock writes in A Rough Ride to the Future: “The most amazing lies were told, still are told and widely believed… Despite at least three investigations by reputable physicians, there has been no measurable increase in deaths across Eastern Europe.”]

A lot of investment in green technology has been a giant scam, if well intentioned.

Saved 17 April 2014 / www.nature.com ↗

#people #accidents #future

Essential ontological dichotomies include

Essential ontological dichotomies include: Universals and particulars Substance and accident Abstract and concrete objects Essence and existence Determinism…

Ontology #accidents #Abstract #existence #particulars

Plane crashes as chains of unlikely events

do not share Kurzweil’s faith in the reliability of even these safety-critical systems. He is correct in implying that humans are primarily responsible for…

Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) #accidents #software #risk

Rare events cluster in time

Kevin’s point was that if you know what to look for, these kinds of faults are all over the place, but they are normally just treated as “anomalies.” A series…

Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) #risk #accidents #patterns

AI and the Lamarckian evolution of our species

By engineering our own offspring, many have proposed that Artificial Intelligence can lead to the Lamarckian evolution of our species. In contrast to Darwin’s…

Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina) #evolution #artificial-intelligence #future #humanity

Dewey and going green

John Dewey supported parents at a time when the United States was transitioning from an agricultural to an industrial age. Had someone mentioned “going green”…

Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney) #education #environment #children #future

Different connections, different kinds of self

Where Greenfield gets a little more speculative is when she imagines the variations in types of selves which might emerge if different kinds of connections…

The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) #brain #self #future