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Indiana Jones
I’ve always mentally grouped Raiders of the Lost Ark with another early-80’s film: Buckaroo Banzai. Both films represented a new approach to action and SF films, and they were both influential. They all had precursors, of course, but they still stand out in my memory. Raiders was less ironic and self-aware than the othe, of…
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Multithreaded Garbage Collection
Garbage collection is the traditional solution to the problem of managing memory. Multithreaded programming is the current wave of the future. I’ve written about the difficulties of multithreaded programming before, but people are going to do it regardless. In which case: how do we garbage collection in a multithreaded program? Let’s assume that we don’t…
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Make More Oil
Oil takes a long time to make, so we should start making more now. When we strip mine for coal, we will eventually want to fill those holes back in. We should fill them in with plant waste and cover with rocks. Besides starting the oil-making process, this will help sequester carbon. Later generations will…
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Suburban Oil
There are replacements for oil for use in cars, such as biofuels, or electricity generated by solar, wind, or nuclear power. However, these alternatives are currently more expensive. It seems to me that the only one which is likely to become cheaper is solar power, but the average home can’t collect enough solar power to…
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Monotheism
When I was in grade school we were taught that monotheism was a historical advance, comparable to agriculture or other notable inventions. For example, we learned that Akenhaten was a significant figure because he was the first historical figure to advocate monotheism, although it was later repudiated by his successor Tutankhaten aka Tutankhamun aka King…