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Entries tagged with: Disasters

11 result(s) displayed (1 - 11 of 11):

Documentation

As powerful as the images of people dealing with the immense disaster in Sichuan's 7.9 earthquake have been, none have struck me as much as this series. It was a wedding, and the photographer was starting to do his set...

The Earth Will Be Just Fine, Thank You

The grand myth of environmentalism is that it's all about saving the Earth. It's not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves. That may seem a bit counter-intuitive; after all, the Earth is certainly central...

Long-Term Deposits

Failure happens. Strategic plans that don't take into account the possibility of failure -- and propose pathways to adaptation or recovery -- are at best irresponsible, at worst immoral. The war in Iraq offers an obvious example, but the potential...

Rehearsing the Future

Never underestimate the power of a "do-over." Video gamers know exactly what I'm talking about: the ability to face a challenge over and over again, in most cases with a "reset" of the environment to the initial conditions of the...

New Futurismic Column: Awareness Windows

My new column at Futurismic is up. "Opening the Awareness Window" uses the overlap of the Katrina and 9/11 anniversaries as a jumping off point for considering how best to respond to surprising disasters. In many ways, disasters pose the...

Friday Topsight, September 1, 2006

Lots of items backed up here. • Hype Scorecard: Author Sharon Weinberger, subbing at the Defense Tech website, offers up a checklist helping the gentle reader to figure out whether a weapon proposal is actually a stupid idea. As I...

Tuesday Topsight, August 15, 2006

Today's Topsight Tuesday is all about things that worry and frighten us: massive asteroid impacts, terrorism, and Powerpoint. • Boom: This video at YouTube apparently comes from a Japanese program on global disasters. It shows what would happen if we...

Tuesday Topsight, August 1, 2006

"The guns of August." For anyone with a background in military/political history, that phrase is redolent with sadness. It's the title of Barbara Tuchman's highly-regarded book on the first world war, but it has come to suggest the sense of...

Stephen Hawking, Global Warming, and Moving Out

Last week, at a talk in Hong Kong, Stephen Hawking made what struck me at the time as being such a reasonable and obvious observation that I didn't think it needed commentary: ''It is important for the human race to...

What's the Opposite of Triage?

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about how we make long-term decisions. The trite reply of "poorly" is perhaps correct, but only underscores the necessity of coming up with reliable (or, at least, trustable) mechanisms for thinking about the...

Climate, Cancer and Changing Minds

Can smoking cause lung cancer? Yes. Is any given case of lung cancer caused by smoking? No way to know. The complexity of cause-and-effect is such that, while we can be certain of a strong connection between smoking and lung...

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