As a species, we seem positively bound to cyclical, constructive inflation and reinvention of the artefacts, entities and cultural systems that quite naturally sediment in and as shared memory around such catastrophic historical episodes. The essence of history has been this headlong rush into cataclysmic violence, followed as denouement by much gentler growth and cultural […]
Context: US Military Document Admits That Risk of Nuclear War Is Growing This article kind of ruined my Sunday, right there. The rank absurdity of nuclear war is astonishing. That the worlds and words built from effective abstractions of thought and the transient emotional affectations of partisan ideological difference could ever arrive in or at […]
Today’s brief reflection on the state of humanity is brought to you by a feeling of overwhelming futility and an acute awareness of the pointless, vacuous and utterly narcissistic bullshit that consumes us all. Finding ourselves inhabiting whichever time and place we transiently occupy, and encountering the limiting cognitive language and behavioural repertoire of a […]
Science and technology cartwheel and careen past us in ways that few can convincingly argue are fully comprehended, defined or ever anything more than superficially controlled. This accelerating turbulence of complex sociotechnical recursion and self-validating necessity is a self-propagating compression wave of information, energy, technology and concepts. It ripples and oscillates like waves on a […]
Context: Bombs and the Bikini Atoll I recently saw an interview with US Gen (ret.) Colin Powell discussing this technology. His assessment seems to be accurate – these weapons are so powerful and of such vast consequence that they are effectively and completely useless. If any one side or warhead-or-sabre-rattling power were to launch a […]
Daedelus Kite 