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Rational optimism for the universe In The Rational Optimist, I argue that the human technological and economic take-off derives from the invention of exchange and specialisation some time before 100,000 years ago. When people began to trade things, ideas could meet and mate, with the result that a sort of collective brain could form, far […]

`Optimisten brauchen diesen Text nicht zu lesen. Pessimisten sollten ihn auswendig lernen.’ German language interview just published in Das Magazin, based in Zurich. It calls me `notorisch zuversichtlichen’. Includes this picture of the author looking pessmistic because about to be eaten by sabre-toothed cat, and because he has his head by the rear end of a […]

Who thinks they are in conflict? Through the letterbox drops a begging letter from the head of a university. Fair enough. The needy beg. The first sentence reads as follows. Today, the defining struggle in the world is between relentless growth and the potential for collaboration. This is very odd in all sorts of ways. […]

That damned elusive slick I noticed a curious thing recently. The BBC’s coverage of the Gulf oil spill for the last two nights was missing one thing: oil. A reporter went down in a minisubmarine and looked at a pristine coral reef. Newsnight interviewed lawyers, fishermen and politicians. But there was no sign of a […]

Whenever somebody gets nostalgic about the past, I get suspicious. In the eigth century BC, Hesiod was already moaning about how things aint like they used to be. The Wall Street Journal has a great article about how nostalgic people get for the way air travel used to be in the 1950s — with more leg […]

I have long known that there is nothing remotely `green’ about putting wind farms all over the countryside, with their eagle-slicing, bat-popping, subsidy-eating, rare-earth-demanding, steel-rich, intermittent-output characteristics. But until I read Robert Bryce’s superb and sober new book Power Hungry, I had not realised just how dreadfully bad for the environment nearly all renewable energy is. […]

On the use of straw men in scientific arguments I found this on John Hawks’s anthropology blog. He’s writing about the sometimes heated debate over whether Homo floresiensis is a species or a deformity: What I notice is that when I write about this, I have to correct a lot of false claims about what the […]

Scepticism about economic growth is a reactionary, not a radical philosophy Daniel Ben-Ami’s new book `Ferraris For All‘, published by the Policy Press, is a great read. Ben-Ami’s point is to defend the idea of economic development against the `growth sceptics’ who have emerged in various blue, green and red guises recently. What he does […]

What happens after oil spills I have written an op-ed article in The Times today. It’s behind a paywall, but here’s my last draft before editing by the newspaper, together with links. So long as the cap holds, and assuming that is the end of it, the Deepwater Horizon spill (up to 600,000 tonnes in […]

Today at TED Global in Oxford, among other great talks, I was blown away by this graph, shown by David McCandless.     It shows the media mentions of scares, all of them false alarms. Notice the huge peaks for swine flu and bird flu. Notice how video game fears peak twice a year, once in […]