Edward Morbius

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• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  I'm liking your pre-printing press, pre-literate cultural memory concepts. For about the past year I've been digging very heavily into notions of media, information, propogation, and the cultural changes that emerge on account of them. I'd first run across Elisabeth...
• Commented on Some notes on the worst-case scenario
  So long as you're considering the fossil-fuel-ROI-maximising concept, I'll toss another element into the pot. I've been following the co-development of coal and oil extraction, geological science, corporate structures, legal doctrines, and evangelical religion over the past few years. Some...
• Commented on Eleven Tweets
  Traditional news reporting started to decline well before blogs and Twitter and Craigslist. From Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth, a truly eye-opening graph was the number of newspaper subscriptions per household in the US, beginning...
• Commented on Eleven Tweets
  There is no space (on Twitter) or time (on Facebook) to publish a well-though, researched comment A very useful technique for countering bullshit is to have a prepared set of references for rebutting specific points. That's what old Usenet, mailing...
• Commented on Eleven Tweets
  Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy - History, Theory, Analysis Thanks, noted. While we're at it, I caught wind of a report on the Rwanda massacre of the 1990s, and the role of radio in that. The maps accompanying this remind...
• Commented on Eleven Tweets
  Addenda: Content syndication can also be seen as a form of superbundling, the opposite response to micropayments antibundling. Effectively, you're aggregating sets of published materials in such a way as to reduce the costs of reputation assessment. The author, editor,...
• Commented on Eleven Tweets
  Charlie's pointed out the fundamental problem of advertising-supported media: you get what you incentivise for. The problem's not new, but certain dynamics, I like to think of them as data physics, change with electronic and online media. My proposed solution:...
• Commented on Why we're not going to see sub-orbital airliners
  On alternatives to aviation fuel: not really. Hit up Wikipedia's "Energy Density" article for a fast comparison. LiON is about 1/150th to 1/50th the per-kg energy density of jet fuel. The best metal-air batteries are about 1/10th the density. But...
• Commented on Why we're not going to see sub-orbital airliners
  Charlie: I've looked at the options for biofuels -- Boeing was claiming a halophyte (pickleweed) based biofuel feedstock was "the biggest breakthrough that there is out there". On the plus side -- it can use salt water and marginal land....
• Commented on Why we're not going to see sub-orbital airliners
  Ammonia is somewhat more than "slightly toxic" http://misc.medscape.com/pi/android/medscapeapp/html/A820298-business.html "Ammonia most commonly causes damage when anhydrous ammonia (liquid or gas) reacts with tissue water to form the strongly alkaline solution, ammonium hydroxide. ... Tissue damage from alkali is caused by liquefaction...