We'll be back to serious blogging in 2025, but for now I'm taking it easy. See you on the other side.
Today's dose of retro-future comes from George Griffith's Olga Romanoff, an 1894 sequel to his 1893 novel The Angel of the Revolution (see last Friday's post). That's a world-destroying comet in the background of the last illustration. Griffith liked a big finish.
The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893) is a science fiction novel by the English writer George Griffith. It was his first published novel and remains his most famous work.Griffith was hugely successful in his day but is now all but forgotten. I only came across him because he popped up as a featured article on Wikipedia. The modern consensus seems to be he just wasn't that good of a writer. Certainly nothing I saw made me want to read more than a few lines. I did, however, enjoy the illustrations.
Angel came out seven years after Verne's Robur the Conqueror, which was itself beaten to the punch by Frank Reade Jr., and His Queen Clipper of the Clouds. All of these were in the helicopter family though dirigibles were also a popular option. I'm sure an actual expert could come up with numerous other examples. The genre even inspired an early UFO mania in the 1890s.
A Tale of the Coming Terror
BY
GEORGE GRIFFITH
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRED. T. JANE
FIFTH EDITION
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Another YouTube recommendation.
Scott made an astounding number of entertaining and informative little videos. He recently announced he was taking a break, but with more than 700 already in the can, those new to the channel won't run out any time soon.
"Why sci-fi alien planets all look the same"
"This giant model stopped a terrible plan"
(Students of Post-War hubris will want to read more about the Reber Plan.)
"The UK's last aerial ropeway uses no power, moves 300 tonnes a day, and will be gone by 2036."
"I thought the Schmid Peoplemover was impossible"
Still taking it easy for holidays and posting more cool videos.
Created by Theo Jansen. You'll want to watch this in full screen.
We'll get back to the serious stuff Monday, I promise.
My favorite Katie Marovitch sketch.
... you have not had a cool Christmas.
The Untouchables got a lot of criticism during its original run for its depictions of violence. Can't imagine why.
[December 1, 2016]
Tom Hanks, creepy CGI Santa Clauses, and the theological canary in the coal mine
I've been making the point for a while now that the evangelical movement
that I grew up with in the Bible Belt is radically different from the
evangelical movement of today. I was aware that something was changing
for a while, but the nature and the extent of the change crystallized
for me when I read this 2004 article from Slate:
Next Stop, Bethlehem?
By David Sarno
The Polar Express is the tale of a boy's dreamlike train ride to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus. Like all stories worth knowing, it's rich enough in image and feeling to accommodate many interpretations. Chris Van Allsburg, the author of the book, calls his story a celebration of childhood wonder and imagination. William Broyles Jr., one of the screenwriters of this year's film version, calls it a kind of Odyssey in which a hero undertakes a mythic, perilous journey of self-discovery. And Paul Lauer, who is a key player in the film's marketing apparatus, sees The Polar Express as a parable for the importance of faith in Jesus Christ.
Lauer's firm, Motive Entertainment, is best known for coordinating the faith-based marketing of The Passion of the Christ. Motive helped spread early word of mouth about the filmby holding screenings for church groups and talking the movie up to religious leaders. When The Passion took in a stunning $370 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film in history, Lauer and his cohorts got a lot of the credit. Earlier this year, Motive was hired by Warner Bros. to promote The Polar Express to Christians. But wait, is The Polar Express an evangelical film?
You'd certainly think so, considering the expansive campaign of preview screenings, radio promotion, DVDs, and online resources that Lauer unfurled in the Christian media this fall. This Polar Express downloads page includes endorsements from pastors and links to church and parenting resources hosted by the Christian media outlet HomeWord. There are suggestions for faith-building activities and a family Bible-study guide that notes, for example, the Boy's Christ-like struggle to get the Girl a train ticket. "The Boy risked it all to recover the ticket," the guide observes. "Jesus gave His all to save us from the penalty of our sins."
HomeWord Radio, which claims to reach more than a million Christian parents daily, broadcast three shows promoting the film. At one point, the show's host wondered excitedly if the movie "might turn out to be one of the more effective witnessing tools in modern times." Motive also produced a promotional package that was syndicated to over 100 radio stations in which Christian recording artists like Amy Grant, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Avalon talked about the movie as they exited preview screenings.
…
Some audience members—and a few Christian film critics—would argue that Santa Claus isn't necessarily a stand-in for Jesus Christ. Last month, Lauer told the Mobile Register that he sees The Polar Express as a parable, "not a movie about belief in God." But when Lauer speaks to a Christian audience, he tells a different story. Lauer told HomeWord Radio that when he asked Robert Zemeckis about all the biblical parallels he was seeing in the film, the director "winked and said, 'Nothing in a movie this big ends up in the script by accident.' " (Zemeckis was traveling and wasn't available for comment.)
* Being a bit loose with the definition of the term.
[Updated with cooler and longer video clip including Tonka truck as spare tire.]
As mentioned before, I always celebrate Christmas with a Toys-for-Tots haul, looking for nice toys that will stand up to lots of hard play. Metal Tonka trucks were an excellent option and I usually cleared out the store's stock.
The trucks were originally marketed as being nearly indestructible.
This year through, as I was loading my purchases into my car, I noticed that the trucks (which had been rebranded "Steel Classics") were now almost entirely made of plastic other than the bed.
I also noticed this claim on the box: MADE WITH METAL
This called to mind a passage from Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise.
“Hum!” said Parker. “Pretty extensive injuries for a fall of that kind.”
“So I thought, before I saw the staircase. To proceed. On the day after this occurrence, the sister of deceased sends to Mr. Pym a fragment of a half-finished letter which she has found on her brother's desk. It warns him that there is something of a fishy nature going on in the office. The letter is dated about ten days previous to the death, and appears to have been laid aside as though the writer wanted to think over the wording a bit more carefully. Very good. Now, Mr. Pym is a man of rigid morality—except, of course, as regards his profession, whose essence is to tell plausible lies for money—”
“How about truth in advertising?”
“Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising,” announced Lord Peter sententiously, “is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow. Which incidentally brings me to the delicate and important distinction between the words 'with' and 'from.' Suppose you are advertising lemonade, or, not to be invidious, we will say perry. If you say 'Our perry is made from fresh-plucked pears only,' then it's got to be made from pears only, or the statement is actionable; if you just say it is made 'from pears,' without the 'only,' the betting is that it is probably made chiefly of pears; but if you say, 'made with pears,' you generally mean that you use a peck of pears to a ton of turnips, and the law cannot touch you—such are the niceties of our English tongue.”
“Make a note, Mary, next time you go shopping, and buy nothing that is not 'from, only.' Proceed, Peter—and let us have a little less of your English tongue.”
And as far as I can tell, none have apologized since then.
I will have to tell him that from everything I can find, Mars One doesn’t appear to be in any way qualified to carry off the biggest, most complex, most audacious, and most dangerous exploration mission in all of human history. That they don’t have the money to do it. That 200,000 people didn’t actually apply. That, with all the good faith one can muster, I wouldn’t classify it exactly as a scam—but that it seems to be, at best, an amazingly hubristic fantasy: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media, in money, to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life’s work.I started to excerpt a few paragraphs of Keep's article but you really need to read the whole thing to grasp just how unlikely it is for this enterprise to go beyond the asking for money stage. Every single aspect collapses under scrutiny, from the unrealistic funding model to the wildly optimistic cost estimates to the nonexistent specs and contracts to the unresolved technical issues.
Could you leave everyone you love for the chance to settle on Mars? Sonia Van Meter describes herself as an "aspiring Martian" - she hopes to be one of the first humans on the planet in 10 years' time. But it would mean never seeing her husband again.There is one quick cover-your-ass 'if' buried deep in the piece ("The mission, if it goes ahead, will be dangerous, some say suicidal."), but even in that single brief sentence, the possibility of it not happening is just an aside. There is no real effort to put this in a realistic context. Instead, we're given figures like that 35-to-one chance; it's almost certainly false but it makes for a good story.
"I don't think you can apply for something like this and not be the tiniest bit insane," says Sonia Van Meter. "But this is the next great adventure, and I'm going to do absolutely anything I can to be a part of this."
The 35-year-old political consultant from Austin, Texas, is one of 705 people in the running to form a 20- to 40-strong human colony on Mars - a group whittled down from 200,000 who sent applications to Dutch not-for-profit organisation Mars One last year.
"I thought: 'Shoot, this sounds like fun!'" she says. "I didn't think there was the slightest chance that I would be selected, I just wanted to be a part of it."
For her husband Jason Stanford, her application - and the fact that she now appears to have a 35-to-one chance of leaving forever - evoked mixed emotions.
"Like any good red-blooded American male, at first I thought this was all about me. I thought: you're leaving me," he says.
Over time he changed his mind. "The more she talked about it, the more I realised she was doing this for the right reasons - she was doing this to show humanity what we can all do if we work together," he says.
From CNN:
Now an Austrian company wants to extend this opportunity for deep-dive delights to the world of superyachts, by building customized private submersibles that can descend 250 meters (820 feet) beneath the ocean surface and remain submerged for up to four weeks.
Migaloo has revealed its ambitious plans for what it claims will be the “world’s one and only private submersible superyacht,” offering “a not-yet-existing alternative to large privately owned surface vessels.”
This submarine, named M5, would measure 165.8 meters in length and 23 meters across at its widest point, with a range of around 15,000 kilometers and a speed of up to 20 knots when surfaced (or 12 knots when underwater). However, says Migaloo, “The wished dimensions of the submarine-yacht hybrid, the exterior styling and the interior design are up to the owners’ preferences.”
So, like any billionaires’ superyacht worth its salt, the default design includes a helipad, a swimming pool and spa, a gym, art gallery cinema, party area with DJ booth, along with plenty of spaces to lounge or dine. Optional extras include a hot air balloon and underwater shark-feeding station.
It's also a practical place to keep your valuables in case of pirates, solar flares, pole shifts.
Also suitable for Ice Station Zebra cosplay.
CNN had lots of competition on this story.
It took me at most ten minutes on LinkedIn to establish that this company claiming it could design and build the civilian equivalent of an Ohio class submarine was a transparent fraud. This company doesn't have the resources to design a functioning toy sub for your bathtub.
Amber DaSilva of Jalopnik had the same thought, pointing out that CEO Christian Gumpold was the only listed employee. DaSilva also went the extra mile and dug up more than anyone needed to know about the company.
Migaloo’s website dates back to 2013, according to WHOIS records, but the oldest version archived is from 2015. Back then, the company was offering “submersible superyachts” in cooperation with a company called Starkad Technologies OÜ, which provided “technical development.” Starkad does show up in Estonian business records, but the company’s 2023 annual report shows just one employee — and an annual operating budget of just under $2,700. The company’s official contact email is a Hotmail account.
...
Rather than creating actual submarines for the world’s richest few, Migaloo appears to create pictures of submarines for magazines read by those richest few (and, of course, NFTs.) It’s unclear what the company would even do if a Bezos or a Musk called them up with $2 billion in hand — it’s unlikely a single person in Estonia could actually assemble anything the company proffers.
The standard comeback is what's the harm? Some guy creates some silly images borrowed from a post-war issue of Galaxy magazine and we all have fun pretending. The trouble is our weakness for hoary sci-fi fantasies, our willingness to accept laughable pitches for obvious snake oil has created large fortunes for con artists, diverted resources from promising tech and real solutions, and distorted our sense of the future.
And the CGI really isn't that good.
*OK, maybe this is more embarrassing.
Part of my daily routine is to check the weather in my neighborhood and various nearby destinations (between its size and, more to the point, topography, LA has an extraordinary range of conditions. It's the only place I've ever lived in where people call each other up and ask other residents of the same city how's the weather where you are?).
Last Saturday, I checked Google and saw the forecast for a week from that day was a 75% chance of rain. That would have been very good news – – it's been dry in Southern California this winter – – perhaps too good to be true. I checked a couple of competing sites and saw no indications of rain in the next seven days anywhere in the vicinity. A couple of hours later I checked back in and Google was now in line with all the other forecasts with 5% or less predicted.
As of Thursday, Google is down to 0% for Saturday while the Weather Channel has 18%.
We've talked a lot about what it means for a continuously updated prediction such as election outcomes, navigation app travel time estimates, and weather forecasts to be accurate. It's a complicated question without an objectively true answer. There are many valid metrics, none of which gives us the definitive answer
Obviously, accuracy is the main objective, but there are other indicators of model quality we can and should keep an eye on. Barring big new data (a major shift in the polls, a recently reported accident on your route), we don't expect to see huge swings between updates, and if there are a number of competing models largely running off the same data, we expect a certain amount of consistency. If we have a prediction that is inaccurate, displays sudden swings, and makes forecasts wildly divergent from its competitors, that raises some questions.
One of the oft-noted problems with the Drake Equation was the many ways it assumed that alien worlds would look, not just like Earth, but mid-twentieth century earth including our proclivity for constantly pumping out radio signals...
and would continue to look that way between 1000 and 100,000,000 years.
It appears that Earth at least will fall a little short of that range.
“The search for extraterrestrial intelligence [Seti] is changing,” he said. “We have relied in the past almost exclusively on radio telescopes to detect broadcasts from alien civilisations just as our radio and TV transmissions could reveal our presence to them. However, to date, we have heard absolutely nothing.”
Nor should we be surprised, [Oxford University astrophysicist Prof Chris] Lintott argues. “Humanity has already passed its peak radio wave output because we are increasingly using narrow beam communications and fibre-optic cables, rather than beaming out TV and radio signals into the general environment.”
Humanity could become radio-quiet in about 50 years as a result – and that will probably be true for civilisations on other worlds, he added. “They will have gone radio silent after a while, like us. So Seti radio telescopes will need to be augmented with other ways of seeking aliens. We are going to have to be more creative about what we’re searching for in the data and find unusual things that reveal they are the handiwork of aliens.”
Nor is Lintott the first to make this observation.
Regarding the first point, in a 2006 Sky & Telescope article, Seth Shostak wrote, "Moreover, radio leakage from a planet is only likely to get weaker as a civilization advances and its communications technology gets better. Earth itself is increasingly switching from broadcasts to leakage-free cables and fiber optics, and from primitive but obvious carrier-wave broadcasts to subtler, hard-to-recognize spread-spectrum transmissions."
YouTube is an SEO snake pit, a place where Gresham's Law of content prevails with an abundance of intelligent, informative, and entertaining work buried by a limitless supply of derivative and often largely plagiarized rip-offs alternating with AI-generated crap. The algorithm is great at recommending videos I'm tempted to click on; it's terrible at recommending something I actually want to watch. To add insult to injury, a bad click is usually followed by more recommendations for the same channel.
This makes me reluctant to try a new YouTuber without checking them out on Google or seeing if they were followed by the right people on Twitter. People like this.
So when I recommend Patrick Boyle, you know I've checked him out first.
Boyle is a Visiting Professor of Finance at King’s Business School, London. He is also a wickedly funny deadpan commentator on hype, fraud, and general stupidity in finance, business and public policy.
The title of the post comes from Boyle's take-down of MBS's personal Xanadu (which we've also been commenting on for a while)
Neom - The Line - The Rise and Fall of Saudi Arabia's Linear City.
The video that first caught my attention was the following piece on Silicon Valley innovations, which included this addition to my tech bro messianic delusions file.
And this gem.
A good Christmas can do a lot to take the edge off of a bad year both
for children and their parents (and a lot of families are having a bad
year). It's the season to pick up a few toys, drop them by the fire
station and make some people feel good about themselves during what can
be one of the toughest times of the year.
If you're new to the Toys-for-Tots concept, here are the rules I normally use when shopping:
The gifts should be nice enough to sit alone under a tree. The child who
gets nothing else should still feel that he or she had a special
Christmas. A large stuffed animal, a big metal truck, a large can of
Legos with enough pieces to keep up with an active imagination. You can
get any of these for around twenty or thirty bucks at Wal-Mart or
Costco;*
Shop smart. The better the deals the more toys can go in your cart;
No batteries. (I'm a strong believer in kid power);**
Speaking of kid power, it's impossible to be sedentary while playing with a basketball;
No toys that need lots of accessories;
For games, you're generally better off going with a classic;
No movie or TV show tie-ins. (This one's kind of a personal quirk and I will make some exceptions like Sesame Street);
Look for something durable. These will have to last;
For smaller children, you really can't beat Fisher Price and PlaySkool.
Both companies have mastered the art of coming up with cleverly designed
toys that children love and that will stand up to generations of
energetic and creative play.
*I previously used Target here, but their selection has been dropping
over the past few years and it's gotten more difficult to find toys that
meet my criteria.
** I'd like to soften this position just bit. It's okay for a toy to use
batteries, just not to need them. Fisher Price and PlaySkool have both
gotten into the habit of adding lights and sounds to classic toys, but
when the batteries die, the toys live on, still powered by the energy of
children at play.
Years ago we did a few posts on double-talk, the type of comic improvisation where a performer mimics the sound of a foreign language with gibberish syllables. Sometimes we talked about the practice itself. In others, we used it as a metaphor. Double-talk has fallen out of fashion for the very good reason that, when done badly it usually degenerates into racist caricature and it is almost always done badly. The best known exception was Sid Caesar, whose mimicry was reasonably nuanced and generally respectful, and who gets a bit of a pass for being widely considered a comic genius.
Of course, the term "foreign language" is relative. English is a foreign language to most of the world. This raises the question what would it sound like if someone from, say, Italy were to do American double-talk? The answer in at least one case is that it will sound unnervingly American.
For those who don't know, this song is called "Prisencolinensinainciusol" by Italian singer Adriano Celentano. The lyrics are complete gibberish made to sound American.
— All About Steve (@AllAboutSteveW) October 4, 2024
Here's an audio only version.
Believe it or not, I am going to connect this to one of our threads.
Max and Ida Caesar ran a restaurant, a 24-hour luncheonette. By waiting on tables, their son learned to mimic the patois, rhythm and accents of the diverse clientele, a technique he termed double-talk, which he used throughout his career. He first tried double-talk with a group of Italians, his head barely reaching above the table. They enjoyed it so much that they sent him over to a group of Poles to repeat his native-sounding patter in Polish, and so on with Russians, Hungarians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Lithuanians, and Bulgarians.
...
Of his double-talk routines, Carl Reiner said, "His ability to doubletalk every language known to man was impeccable," and during one performance Caesar imitated four different languages but with almost no real words. Despite his apparent fluency in many languages, Caesar could actually speak only English and Yiddish. In 2008, Caesar told a USA Today reporter, "Every language has its own music ... If you listen to a language for 15 minutes, you know the rhythm and song." Having developed this mimicry skill, he could create entire monologues using gibberish in numerous languages, as he did in a skit in which he played a German general.
Didn't do a great job with this the first time. The patches are in brackets.
(This was never my area of expertise, and what little I once knew I've
mostly forgotten. Since lots of our regular readers are experts on this
sort of things, I welcome criticism but I hope you'll be gentle.)
I tried a little project of my own back in the early 2000s. One of these
days, I'd like to revisit the topic here and talk about what I had in
mind and how quixotic the whole thing was, but for now there's one
aspect of it that has become particularly relevant so here's a very
quick overview so I can get to the main point.
Imagine you have
an agent-based simulation with a fixed number of iterations and a fixed
number of runs. You randomly place the agents on a landscape with
multiple dimensions and multiple optima and have them each perform
gradient searches. Now we add one wrinkle. Each agent is aware of the
position of at least one other agent and will move toward either the
highest point in its search radius unless another searcher it is in
communication with has a higher position in which case it heads toward
that one.
[Let's explain this in a bit more detail. Say we have fifty agents, one hundred iterations, and two maxima (A with height 10 and B with height 5) and that agent 1 shares with agent 2, agent 2 shares with agents 1 and 3, and so forth. At the beginning of each iteration, each agent looks around a radius of one unit then shares the results with whatever other agents it is in communication with. Agents move toward the highest point they are aware of. If 1 found h=0.4, 2 found h=0.2 and 3 found h=0.3, 1 would move in the direction of the sharpest gradient, 2 would move in the direction of the the highest point 1 found and 3 would move in the direction of its sharpest gradient.
[After one hundred iterations, some agents will be at A, some will be at B and some will be in transit. At the end of one hundred iterations, we measure the height of each agent's endpoint and take the average. -- MP]
What happens to average height when we add lines of
communication to the matrix? At one extreme where each searcher is only
in contact with one other, you are much more likely to have one of them
find the global optimum but most will be left behind. [If we greatly increase the number of iterations, all of the agents will hit the global optimum almost all the time -- MP] At the other
extreme, if everyone is in contact with everyone, there is a far greater
chance of converging on a substandard local optimum [In other words, given enough iterations, minimal communication consistently beats maximal. -- MP]. Every time I ran a
set of simulations, I got the same [lopsided] U-shaped curve with the best results
coming from a high but not too high level of communication.
It is
always dangerous to extend these abstract ideas derived from artificial
scenarios to the real world, but there are some fairly obvious
conclusions we can draw. What if we think of the primary process in
similar terms? Each voter is doing an optimization search, bringing in
information on their own and trying to determine the best choice, but at
the same time, they are also weighing the opinions of others performing
the same search.
Given this framework, what is the optimal level
of communication between voters via the polls? At what point does the
frequency of polling reach a level where it makes it more likely for
voters to converge on a sub-optimal choice? I'm pretty sure we've passed
it.
Sometimes, when I try to take on a really big topic here at the blog, smaller related topics start popping up. These tend to be right on the line between relevance and distraction. I like to give these side topics their own little lemma posts. Case in point, I'm working my way through David Donoho's latest and, though this is a minor point, invoking von Neumann is problematic in a way that points out deeper issues with the paper. So here's a little bit of background on one of the foundational myths of the singularity.
From Donoho's paper:
[Ray] Kurzweil quotes one of the 20th century’s most prominent mathematicians, John von Neumann:
Von Neumann introduces the idea that a singularity is coming. But when?The history of technology ... gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race, beyond which, human affairs, as we know them, cannot continue. (Ulam, 1958, page 5)
At the risk of being overly precise, Kurzweil wasn't actually quoting von Neumann; he was quoting Stanisław Ulam describing a conversation with Von Neumann. That's a fine distinction but not a trivial one.
Since this quote features so prominently in these discussions, let's look at the whole passage:
Quite aware that the criteria of value in mathematical work are, to some extent, purely aesthetic, he once expressed an apprehension that the values put on abstract scientific achievement in our present civilization might diminish: "The interests of humanity may change, the present curiosities in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind in the future." One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.
All we get from this is that von Neumann once had a discussion with Ulam and possibly some of their peers about the accelerating pace of science and technology and the inevitable breaking point it seemed headed toward. Given the caliber of the intellects involved, we can safely assume it was a profound and insightful conversation. The degree to which it was original, on the other hand, we will never know. It is worth noting that scientifically literate, forward thinking people started talking about that topic a lot starting in the late 19th century and many, probably most, reached that same conclusion.
More important to our conversation, we don't know what technologies and fields of science struck them as the most imminent threats, but here we can make an educated guess. We know a great deal about these two men and we know a great deal about the period when this conversation very probably took place.
Here's more from Ulam's memoir of his friend : [emphasis added.]
I would say that his main interest after science was in the study of history. His knowledge of ancient history was unbelievably detailed. He remembered, for instance, all the anecdotical material in Gibbon's Decline and Fall and liked to engage after dinner in historical discussions. On a trip south, to a meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Duke University, passing near the battlefields of the Civil War he amazed us by his familiarity with the minutest features of the battles. This encyclopedic knowledge molded his views on the course of future events by inducing a sort of analytic continuation. I can testify that in his forecasts of political events leading to the Second World War and of military events during the war, most of his guesses were amazingly correct. After the end of the Second World War, however, his apprehensions of an almost immediate subsequent calamity, which he considered as extremely likely, proved fortunately wrong. There was perhaps an inclination to take a too exclusively rational point of view about the cases of historical events. This tendency was possibly due to an over-formalized game theory approach.
Here's another relevant detail from Ulam.
In October, 1954, he was named by presidential appointment as a member of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. He left Princeton on a leave of absence and discontinued all commitments with the exception of the chairmanship of the ICBM Committee. Admiral Strauss, chairman of the Commission and a friend of Johnny's for many years, suggested this nomination as soon as a vacancy occurred.
Of course, Ulam also gave a great deal of thought to nuclear weapons.
While these two were unusually aware of the possibility of nuclear war, the threat loomed over everyone and everything. Drills and shelters were part of the culture. When it wasn't implicitly stated in international news, it was always part of the subtext. It is almost impossible to overstate how big a role displayed in the popular imagination throughout the Cold War era, and arguably especially during the 1950s and early 60s. It even generated, not just science fiction genres, but subgenres as well.
The once-popular Phaëton hypothesis, which states that the asteroid belt consists of the remnants of the former fifth planet that existed in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter before somehow being destroyed, has been a recurring theme with various explanations for the planet's destruction proposed. This hypothetical former planet is in science fiction often called "Bodia" in reference to Johann Elert Bode, for whom the since-discredited Titius–Bode law that predicts the planet's existence is named.
...
Following the invention of the atomic bomb in 1945, stories of this planetary destruction became increasingly common, encouraged by the advent of a plausible-seeming means of disintegration.[15] Robert A. Heinlein's 1948 novel Space Cadet thus states that the fifth planet was destroyed as a result of nuclear war, and in Ray Bradbury's 1948 short story "Asleep in Armageddon" (a.k.a. "Perchance to Dream"), the ghosts of the former warring factions infect the mind of an astronaut stranded on an asteroid.[3][5][16] Several works of the 1950s reused the idea to warn of the dangers of nuclear weapons, including Lord Dunsany's 1954 Joseph Jorkens short story "The Gods of Clay" and James Blish's 1957 novel The Frozen Year (a.k.a. Fallen Star).
We don't have to fill in that much of the picture to conclude that John von Neumann was greatly concerned imminent threat of nuclear Armageddon, and that when he discussed the idea of technology outpacing our ability as humans to cope with it, he was probably focused on the immediate existential threats of the Cold War: nuclear weapons and possibly biological and chemical weapons as well, things which he believed had a very good chance of devastating the world within a matter of years and possibly months.
The connection between these ideas and the singularity of Kurzweil or Donoho is weak at best and mainly serves to borrow a little reflected credibility from von Neumann. That's not to say he wouldn't have agreed with some or all of these ideas; is just that, as far as we know, the "singularity" in that conversation had nothing to do with what we're talking about here.
To the delight of art directors everywhere, Galaxy, arguably the best science fiction magazine of the postwar era, is in the public domain (sort of) and is available on the Internet archive. The copyright situation is a bit complicated because most of the stories are very much not in the public domain, but the commissioned parts including the columns, reviews, and best of all, art are.
From Wikipedia:
Notable artists who contributed regularly to Galaxy included Ed Emshwiller, who won several Hugo Awards for his work, Hugo nominee Wallace Wood, and Jack Gaughan, who won three Hugos in the late 1960s, partly for his work in Galaxy. Gaughan was commissioned by Pohl to provide the cover and interior art for Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters in 1962; the resulting illustrations made Gaughan immediately famous in the science fiction field.
I've seen remarkably little coverage of this. [From the AP. Emphasis added.]
Men were more likely than women to support President-elect Trump, the survey showed. That gap in voting preferences has largely remained the same, even as vote choice among men and women has moved modestly.
Harris had the advantage among women, winning 53% to Trump’s 46%, but that margin was somewhat narrower than President Joe Biden’s in 2020, according to the survey. In 2020, VoteCast showed Biden won 55% of women, while 43% went for Trump.
The dominant narrative going into the election was that we would see the gender gap growing on both sides, men increasingly trending toward Trump, women increasingly trending toward Harris. I don't recall anyone predicting that in a time of Dobbs with a woman at the top of the ticket, we would see women moving toward the Republicans.
Assuming we can trust these numbers, this would seem to be one of the biggest stories of the election, in terms of magnitude, impact, and questions raised. The kind of thing that demands new hypotheses and deep dives into the data.
It also raises questions about pre-election polling, I don't recall any large segment of the population where women were moving significantly toward Trump. How did the polls do with slightly over half the population? Could Harris underperforming Biden be explained by who turned out? How did women's votes break in 2016 compared to 2008 and 2020?
Before Obama, I remember lots of Democrats asking if the country was ready for a black president. I don't recall nearly so many before Hillary asking if the country was ready for a woman president. Is it possible we were getting things backwards? This is not to say that a woman can't be elected president -- the closeness of the popular vote in 2016 and 2024 show that Clinton and Harris were competitive -- nor should we exaggerate the effect this had on the outcome. It's true that if Democrats had improved on their performance with women rather than lost ground, they might have flipped the popular vote, but lots of factors such as the shortness of the campaign, widespread misconceptions about economy, a slow and timid justice system, and godawful press coverage all arguably played a bigger role.
It is also important to remember that just as it is a bad idea to assume that conventional political logic applies to Trump, it can be just as much of a mistake to assume the lessons of Trump can be generalized.
That said, this is a big story that raises significant questions and it's joined the long list of important stories that the establishment press has shown a bizarre lack of interest in covering.
