Sustainability of Human Progress
In Sustainability of Human Progress, John McCarthy (retired computer scientist, you may have heard of him) tries to find out whether progress is sustainable. The twist - being a scientist, he can’t help sticking to facts.
An interesting read. I think that progress is sustainable (and yes, nuclear energy is going to be a bigger help than windmills), and I feel that the environmental movement is slowly reducing itself to the level of thinking best illustrated by the 19th century idea that traveling in trains at the breathtaking speed of 40mph would be lethal. Which is a pity, because boundless capitalism isn’t going to fix the world either, so there needs to be a bit of counterweight to balance it all…
Stumble it!
Post to del.icio.us
March 10th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
The twist - being a scientist, he can’t help sticking to facts.
I’m not sure if the italicized facts means your being sarcastic, but scientists are humans with political ideas and emotions, and in today’s political climate they are just as likely to disregard facts
as the next guy.
But it was a breath of fresh air to see some rational discourse from McCarthy on the subject of sustainability - rather than the usual doom-n-gloom preditions from the man-hating econuts.
Which is a pity, because boundless capitalism isn’t going to fix the world either, so there needs to be a bit of counterweight to balance it all…
Capitalism and accountability can take us a lot further than rabid anthropomorphization of “mother earth”.
And if I can go off on a tangent (since the tangent is how i found your blog anyway) I’d like to say in response to your response of Java guy and IDEs that you made back in December, that I wouldn’t go as far to say that the Lisp and Smalltalk IDEs are “lightyears” ahead of say Eclipse, IDEA or Visual Studio (they clearly aren’t), but it’s clear that it’s not out of the realm to think that a language like Ruby could have a kick-ass IDE at some point in the future. I’d like to think that around the time that Ruby’s VM comes out, someone (maybe me) will start working on something like Dolphin Smalltalk for Ruby.
P.S. I call Isaac Gouy Question Boy. He should be required to post a blog so others can rip on him since he seems to have made a profession of commenting on others.
See ya