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Cryonics: 1
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) This man is Curtis Henderson, one of a handful of people who took the concept of cryonics seriously enough to devote his life to it forty years ago, when it seemed...
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Cryonics: 2
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Alcor Foundation, the larger of two companies that maintain people in cryopreservation, stores cryopreserved bodies, heads, and pets in beautifully made...
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Homage to Arizona: 1
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Today I’m going to include some photographs of Northern Arizona, the part of the United States which I find most visually, politically, and socially congenial. This...
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Homage to Arizona: 2
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) A friend of mine built this cabin by hand, using raw wood from a local saw mill and loose stone gathered on the 40 acres where the cabin is located at the end of a...
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Homage to Arizona: 3
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) I found these looping cacti in the botanical gardens in Phoenix, where exotic species display the most amazing attributes, all of which they developed to survive and...
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Homage to Arizona: 4
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) This brain cactus is another of the plant species found in the botanical gardens in Phoenix, one of the most peaceful environments that I know.
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Homage to Arizona: 5
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Undeveloped land is still cheaply available in Northern Arizona, for anyone willing to live off the grid. This piece which I own, consisting of nearly 20 acres on...
View ArticleStimulus Details
Charles Platt is a guest blogger Earlier today I wondered what the actual text is of H.R.1, the bill to authorize an $819 billion "stimulus package." Newspapers don't generally go into this kind of...
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Charts: 1
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) I have always enjoyed drawing charts and graphs as a means to enhance my understanding the world. The histogram above addresses the most fundamental fact of human...
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Charts: 2
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Here's another histogram which may seem a little grim but, I think, is worth contemplating. Suppose someone was born in the year 2004. If the factors which...
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Charts: 3
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) To what extent do we feel overcrowded, as a species? I’m not talking about resources; just psychological factors. To create this chart I turned to the CIA Factbook,...
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Charts: 4
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Still on the topic of population and mortality (more or less), here is some light relief. I redraw the chart from a source that I found at www.graphjam.com.
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The Strange Realm of Infra-Red: 1
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) My friend Richard Kadrey introduced me to infra-red photography. Sensors on digital cameras can detect infra-red, but normally are shielded from it by a protective...
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The Strange Realm of Infra-Red: 2
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Even this very humble shack in Louisiana looks mysteriously beautiful when the visible spectrum is blocked. If we had infra-red sunglasses, the world might appear a...
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The Strange Realm of Infra-Red: 3
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) While driving through Dallas, I stopped to visit the museum in the old Texas Book Depository building from which Lee Harvey Oswald took a shot (or two, or three) at...
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The Strange Realm of Infra-Red: 4
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Just one more sample. While agreeing that infra-red photography can be a gimmick (similar to false color, oversaturation, and many Photoshop effects) I like the way...
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Artificial Life
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Rudy Rucker, whose online zine Flurb is worth a look, introduced me to the fascinating world of cellular automata back in the 1980s. They're so easy to program, even...
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Communication with Cats
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) When I owned a pickup truck, my cat Eddie used to enjoy sitting on top of the instrument panel, under the windshield, where he watched the highway while I drove. I...
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Life at Wal-Mart
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) As I begin my second week here as a guest blogger, I'm going to risk venturing into a couple of contentious political areas. My aim is not to provoke dissent; I...
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Yesterday's Tomorrow
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Two of my favorite books are titled Modern Inventions and Our Wonderful World of Tomorrow, both written during the 1930s by A. M. Low, a British eccentric who was...
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