Monte_Davis

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• Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
  ...vessels big enough to carry a dozen first world war battleships as cargo... Damn: Three years, and random stuff out of the blue still reminds me with a jolt that Iain M. Banks is gone....
• Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
  Ru -- good note on the asteroid counterweight, which has hung around (as it were) far too long. Edwards was grossly optimistic about the near-term prospects for carbon nanotubes as bulk engineering material, but he did see what should have...
• Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
  the Space Shuttle, version 1.0 (you know, before Congress and the Air Force got ahold of it)... what NASA wanted to build I covered STS development and early operations for three science magazines from mid-70s to mid-80s, and got to...
• Commented on Reality is broken
  Um... that's not actually a heart he's doing surgery on, but it's probably best if you keep thinking so....
• Commented on What are you reading this summer?
  T,F&S is a summary of forty years of Kahneman's work with the late Amos Tversky and others. For all I know the Sveriges Rijksbank (Economic "Nobel" memorial prize), the White House (Presidential Medial of Freedom), American Academy of Arts &...
• Commented on What are you reading this summer?
  Albion's Seed: yes. I had not read much "folkways" history before it, and was startled to realize how durable regional cultures can be through multiple migrations and mixings -- that features of language or social style that I had, as...
• Commented on What are you reading this summer?
  Thinking Fast and Slow is simply brilliant. Unlike so many popularizations of the last 30 years' work in cognitive psychology / decision-making / economic psychology, it's neither snarky ("look how irrational people can be") nor self-helpish ("here's how to think...
• Commented on The unspeakable truth
  US here... I sent my brother (a connoisseur of Murdochiana) a copy of the Daily Express headline montage and he responded: "Is the Express a Pict paper?" All gone to the bow-wows since they let the bloody Jutes and Angles...
• Commented on 21st Century: a complaint
  Pigoen@158: It was a joke, son... a joke, I say....
• Commented on 21st Century: a complaint
  ...a South African dude... building electric cars ITYM "building highly mobile, networked devices loaded with hundreds of kg of an element mined in impoverished Third World countries and found in every hydrogen bomb"...