Click here to support the Daily Grail for as little as $US1 per month on Patreon

Skeptical Inquirer 29:1

By Gregon

The January/February issue of Skeptical Inquirer has been released, and as usual the SI website has a number of the articles available for free:

More free content available, and of course the whole list of articles can easily be read by purchasing the magazine. See the SI website for complete details of the latest issue.

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
Related

One Comment

  1. centralized generation of energy
    This seems quite intuitive at todays scale. More obviously, centralized computing facilities are outdated, it is now easy to put lots of small, but fast computers all over the planet.

    Look at other de-centralizing successes: the big US airlines, using their hub-and-spoke routing, have been losing money; at the same time airlines using point-to-point routing (Southwest and the like) were doing well. Our cities are planned with traffic moving into the center in the morning, and away from the center in the afternoon – with the result that every major city is choking, often literally. This is silly, there is no reason everyone has to work in the same place, at the same time.

    The reason that centralized systems are preferred is usually that planning and control are simpler, up to a point. But centralized systems are more vulnerable: large scale power failures are good examples, as has heart attacks and strokes. Another nice example was the collapse of the USSR.

    Completely distributed systems, that are homegeneous everywhere, don’t work either of course: local conditions are not the same everywhere, or even close; people’s needs and capabilities (not to speak of preferences) are not uniform.

    We can hope that technological developments, which let us distribute important things like power generation, and more intelligent control of resources (by distributed computers), will in turn allow us to reverse the trend of over-centralization in other aspects of society.

    Hey, I can dream, can’t I ?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Mobile menu - fractal