Steven Davis

Comment Threads

• RonaldP commented on Sometimes I don't know why I bother!
  You forget the other side of Parsons, and that's that he invented the practical modern solid fuel rocket. Godard didn't publish or share, and is a dead end. The Germans are where the liquid fuel tech come from. JPL, aka Jack Parson's Laboratory, is where the powered aluminum fuel, ammonium perchlorate oxidizer, and a synthetic rubber binder solid fuel rocket was born, and what we use today is not that different....
• John Ohno commented on Sometimes I don't know why I bother!
  How about Paul Linebarger? The son of an ambassador to China, who sent him to the USSR for a few years in order to disabuse him of a youthful interest in communism, Linebarger trained as a psychologist before literally writing the book on propaganda (a book titled Psychological Warfare); meanwhile, he was writing strange and influential science fiction as Cordwainer Smith. It's been strongly implied that Linebarger is the patient described in the anecdote that inspired the book K-Pax -- in which a highly intelligent patient convinces his shrink that he is a space alien. At age twelve, he wrote...
• Heteromeles commented on Sometimes I don't know why I bother!
  That's a much better summary than what was posted in #83. Thanks! I'd add that Psychological Warfare is still in print and still worth reading, not only for insight into current political campaign tactics (yet another instance of The Street finding its own use for things), but also for his comments on the utility of a trustworthy and independent media in counteracting propaganda attacks. In a fit of postmodernism, we've gotten away from trusting any information source, and that might not have been a completely good idea. If you believe Linebarger (who went through the 1930s and 1940s and got...
• Ivan Belkin commented on Sometimes I don't know why I bother!
  ...life milestones (graduation from school/university, your first job, your wedding day, birth of a child, death of a parent) can be encalsulated in a single parenthesized list because they're so ubiquitous that most of us have some experience of them... Dear Charlie, As I understand, for 90% of this planet's population "graduation from from school/university" is an unattainable dream (think about war zones in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq etc.) In fact, even the "birth of a child" may be quite problematic when US, UK, or RF planes are dropping cluster munitions on your village. Anyway, why are you so dismissive of...
• Dirk Bruere commented on Sometimes I don't know why I bother!
  Because people who are living reasonable lives make up more than 90% of the world's population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate https://www.iiss.org/en/about%20us/press%20room/press%20releases/press%20releases/archive/2015-4fe9/may-6219/armed-conflict-survey-2015-press-statement-a0be Bear in mind, when comparing war deaths, that 150,000 people a day die from non violent causes (mostly age related)...