Tag: Isaac Asimov


  • I will try not to spoil Westworld but no guarantees. So the premise of the show and movies is there is a park with androids who become dangerous. Part of the fun is determining whether this is because of an accident, systemic problems, or sabotage. Essentially this is the kind of story that motivated Isaac Asimov…

  • Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov My rating: 3 of 5 stars I enjoyed the Asimov’s essays about robots, computers, and cyborgs. They are well done. The short stories at the front of the book are the same stories published in other books. There are a few new ones. So, if you do not mind re-reading…

  • Wired Science has a post about a newly found Earth-sized planet around our closest star system neighbor: The Alpha Centauri system — composed of three stars orbiting one another — is only 4.4 light-years away, a cosmic stone’s throw from us. Though the newly discovered planet has about the same mass as our own, its…

  • Privacy and Technology

    Isaac Asimov has an interesting pre-World-Wide Web quote, “The advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.” Janov Pelorat in Foundation’s Edge (1982). Think about the word “civilization”. The root, civil, means to treat others well. In one ideal world, everyone would treat everyone else well for no reason. In hunter-gather…

  • Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers. Not trusting a single sample, I tested fifteen writing samples including stories and blog posts (excluding those with block quotes). The Cory Doctorow result was the…