One of the many things I enjoy about teaching my university class, Science, Feuds, Scandals and Hoaxes, is the opportunity to explore some of the most outrageous ideas ever to gain traction in the public mind. It’s easy to make fun today, but some of these ideas were grounded in reasoning that, though flawed, eventually gave rise to the right answer. Then again, there’s really no defending those doctors who thought that woman was giving birth to rabbit parts.
Pain is essential to life, and not just in a Nietzschean, what-does-not-destroy-me-makes-me-stronger sense. It alerts us to injuries and prods us to stop poking at our wounds. It’s God’s megaphone, nature’s cone of shame. Pain is so essential, in fact, that losing our capacity for it can have life-threatening consequences.
Yet we’ve really only begun to understand how pain works in the past 40 years or so, thanks in large part to technological advances. Granted, most painkillers sport a list of side effects that reads like a Tomás de Torquemada’s own torture manual, but at least we understand something of the nervous mechanisms that underpin our owies. That said, just what on Earth is a COX inhibitor? Or an NSAID? And most important of all…
Fire is frightening and dangerous – that’s why they call it fire. So it’s a little strange that we have laws requiring us to stock canister extinguishers but not regulations requiring that we learn how, if or when to operate them. If you’re like most people, you probably don’t even know what kind of fire your extinguisher is rated for, and you likely have no idea when you last serviced or inspected the device, if ever.
Recently, a few companies have begun marketing new kinds of extinguishers, updated versions of fire grenades intended to make fighting fires as worry-free as possible. Lightweight and easy to use, they rely on the most basic of human skills: throwing. Which raises the question:
As sci-fi and techno-horror flicks are fond pointing out, the future is chock-full of things that want to kill us. Yep, our own technological progeny want to consign us to the great bit-bucket in the sky but, hey, at least we were warned, right?
Well, sure, if we had any intention of heeding these cinematic Cassandras. Think about it: The Terminator warns us about Skynet, so what do we do? We set to work on autonomous drones. Christine frightens us with a possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury, so we get busy designing self-driving cars. It’s like we want to die.
And then there’s the Internet of Things: Trillions of everyday objects exchanging data, everywhere, all the time, with only the most basic human oversight. Can’t wait to see how that one turns out.
The 2014 loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 revived a perennial argument among airline safety wonks: In the age of satellites, big data and cloud storage, why do we lock away essential flight data on a box that can go down with the plane? It wasn’t simply a question of losing the device, as nearly happened with the Air France Flight 447 crash five years earlier; it was the risk that, when we finally found it, the data we needed to understand the calamity might already have been erased.
Does the black box need a 21st-century update? And, if so, is cloud storage practical, affordable, reliable and secure enough to supplement or replace the status quo? In other words…
