Mike Pilewski writes about life, politics and culture in the United States
I was one of two kids at my school who entered the first grade already knowing how to read. When the teachers realized this, they excused me from reading class and allowed me to spend that hour in the library. Before long, I discovered one of its greatest treasures: a thin pictorial volume about the solar system. Each double page … >>
Imagine that the basic needs of everyone on Earth were taken care of. What would society be like? American futurist Jacque Fresco, who turned 98 last week, has spent his life thinking about this. Needs are at the root of capitalism. You have something that somebody else needs; that person has something that you need; you trade these things directly … >>
The popular culture of today’s youth has focused on witches, wizards, hobbits and comic-book superheroes long enough. It’s time for science to reclaim its role as a source of inspiration. There are signs that this is starting to happen: not just the popularity of the film Gravity, but the explosion in recent years of TV documentaries about science, and space … >>
You’ve got to love Michio Kaku. The smiling American physicist knows the answer to everything, and because he does, he appears in every single science documentary these days — at least those produced by the Discovery Channel. Kaku’s 2009–10 series Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, currently showing on German TV, underscores the extent to which science fiction inspires today’s … >>
As I mentioned last week, I learned a lot from the teachers I had at school. At home, in a neighborhood without many other kids, I had some other good teachers in the form of books. One of my favorite authors back then was Isaac Asimov (1920–1992). He’s mainly thought of as a science-fiction writer because of the lighthearted yet … >>
Suppose you wanted to send a message to someone living thousands of years in the future. How would you do it? We can forget about trying to express it in electronic form. Personal computers have been around for only 30 years, but already quite a number of file formats have become obsolete — and replaced by others that are much … >>
The 1950s were a great time for conspiracy theories. Communists had infiltrated the Senate, aliens were watching us from space, and a mysterious chemical was being added to our drinking water. The first two theories were false. The third has given three generations of Americans their famously healthy teeth. The chemical was fluoride, but to skeptics who felt it was … >>
The tiny African country of Sierra Leone recently did something that even the United States hasn’t been able to do. It stopped using the traditional English system of measurements. While the Leoneans enjoy the convenience of the metric system, Americans continue to toil with inches, feet, yards, miles, ounces, pounds, gallons, acres, barrels and bushels. “I’ve been living here for … >>
I grew up during the golden age of science fiction. Every day, my friends and I would turn on the TV and see what the world would look like in the far-off 21st century, when we’d be in the prime of our lives. There would be colonies in space, encounters with aliens (both friendly and unfriendly), robots either doing our … >>
Do you remember what you were doing back in July? I do. I was glued to the TV, watching all the documentaries about the first moon landing 40 years ago in 1969. It was the greatest technical achievement in human history. Watching recent interviews with the former Apollo astronauts — Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin in particular — helped to reawaken some … >>