With Both Hands

Sign in Subscribe

Macrohistory

The Long View: The Fourth Turning

There was something magical and terrible about the end of the nineteenth century. The term coined to describe it, fin de siècle, itself accelerated the process already underway. Apocalyptic expectations can become feedback loops in certain situations. You might call it self-fulfilling prophecy, but in English this term carries a

The Long View: Constitution of the Ecumenical Empire

John was very interested in the form the future might take. He wrote a book that was his attempt to limn the future by means of a program he wrote in BASIC and the ideas of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Like myself, John felt that the idea of cycles

The Long View 2002-01-21 Crusaders

One of the reasons I wanted to look back over John's writings 12 years later, is I'm curious how well his predictions turned out. One of John's intellectual interests was what he called macrohistory or metahistory, the study of models of history. In the

The Long View

The Long View

On May 30, 2012, my friend John J. Reilly passed from this vale of tears after a sudden illness. John and I never met in person, but we exchanged emails and forum posts for nearly ten years, so I feel that I knew him in a way. John was one

After Armageddon Book Review

After Armageddon: There Will Be War Volume IX Created by Jerry Pournelle, Edited by John F. Carr 404 pages; $3.99 I really enjoy this series. It has been out of print for a long time, but you can readily find copies in used book stores or on the internet.

A golden age of engineering

In a Twitter exchange with John D. Cook, John mentioned to me that he "heard it said we live in a golden age of engineering and a dark age of science". That really got me thinking: do we live in a golden age of engineering and a dark

Has Intelligence Declined in the Modern Era?

Has Intelligence Declined in the Modern Era?

I mentioned this subject a couple of times before. Simple reaction time data from Woodley et al.Bruce Charlton is the first person I know of to discuss the implications of the change in simple reaction time data in the paper by Woodley et al. Charlton claims the data shows