Grand strategy and geopolitics from the perspective of the Pacific Northwest
Sunday Two Predictions about the Distribution of Life in the Universe There is a rule in software development called the zero one infinity rule, or ZOI, originally formulated by Willem van der Poel, according to which a process should be completely disallowed, or allowed only once, or no limit should be placed on the number [ ]
Thursday Taking Prisons and Schools as Case Studies If we think of institutions at all, we usually assume that they were created to serve a particular purpose, even if they are flawed in fulfilling this purpose. Carroll Quigley postulated the social process of the “institutionalization of the instrument,” according to which institutions are created as [ ]
Tuesday Science as an institution today consists of colleges and universities, which are in part funded by government money that is parceled out in the form of grants and loans, decided upon by numerous committees (themselves institutions), which money is often funneled through additional committees once it arrives at a given institution. (It is well [ ]
Saturday A Scientific Research Program That Never Happened Carl Sagan liked to characterize the Library of Alexandria as a kind of scientific research institution in classical antiquity: Here was a community of scholars, exploring physics, literature, medicine, astronomy, geography, philosophy, mathematics, biology, and engineering. Science and scholarship had come of age. Genius flourished there.…
Monday There is a list on Wikipedia of seventy European and American voyages of scientific exploration from the French Geodesic Mission of 1735-1739 to the Valdivia mission of 1898-1899. This list does not include the voyages of exploration during the Age of Discovery, but these voyages of exploration, while not organized for strictly scientific purposes, [ ]
Sunday The World Happiness Report has been published for every year since 2012 (with the exception of there being no WHR for 2014) by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. A number of influential persons are involved in the report (e.g., the economist Jeffrey Sacks), there is big money behind the effort (e.g., sponsorship from several [ ]
Thursday A Case Study of Norse Civilization And Some Reflections on the Methodology of the Study of Civilization Usually when a civilization goes into decline, its geographical extent contracts at the same time as its social and political institutions lose complexity, so that contraction and loss of complexity are correlated for causal reasons. One could [ ]
Tuesday Some time ago in a grab-bag post, Thinking about Civilization, I introduced a number of ideas I had been entertaining about civilization. One of these ideas was a distinction among what I called orders of civilization, and although I was a bit hesitant about this, I have subsequently used this idea in several posts, [ ]
Sunday Civilization between Non-Civilizations Some time ago (almost ten years ago) I wrote a post about what I call proto-civilization, which I use to indicate those social and economic institutions that were the immediate precursors of actual civilization. A proto-civilization is something less than civilization, but at the same time it is something more than [ ]
Sunday There was once a plan to carve the likeness of Alexander the Great into Mount Athos As Mount Rushmore has been carved with the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, and as the Crazy Horse Memorial is now being carved into Thunderhead Mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Dinocrates imagined carving [ ]