Extrasomatic: outside of the body About 10 millennia ago… the first patches of deliberately cultivated plants as a small share of the Earth’s total photosynthesis… Read More »Technology (25): Vaclav Smil on prime movers and extrasomatic energy
When a person from a remote village moves to the city and finds themselves living in a slum, they have not become poor and marginalised.… Read More »Slums, slot-machines and self-un-marginalisation
There are three kinds of change that we hope for or fear: We spend too much of our time, energy and attention worrying about the… Read More »Three kinds of change
This week DriverlessCrocodile passed 100,000 all-time views (i.e. not including email subscribers), and is currently averaging a little over 100 views per day. Thanks for… Read More »MetaCroc: 100k
When you think you’ve done twice your share of the work, you’re probably getting close to having done your actual share. DriverlessParentodile Kant would categorically… Read More »More than your share
In warfare there are understood to be three important levels: the strategic, the operational, and the tactical. Strategy refers to the big picture, the overall… Read More »James Holland on strategy, operations and tactics
If you build it… … then they will come. You don’t have to have all that much, and they will come.
A certain sadness hangs over Harkness State Park: The estate passed to the State of Connecticut in part, one presumes, because Edward and Mary had… Read More »House of Winds: Ross Douthat on particularity and partiality in philanthropy
Hattip: Brink Lindsey Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight… Read More »Technology (24): Keynes on The Permanent Problem; or, The Dread of Abundance
In The Heretical Imperative [Peter Berger] has argued that the distinctive feature of this [‘modern’, Western] culture is that there is no generally acknowledged “plausibility… Read More »Leslie Newbigin on The Heretical Imperative