Matt Novak's saved articles

Hugo G may have been an electricity maven, but he was very concrete-naive, apparently.
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OH I love that thing, just imagine the feeling of power when your safety razor is pulled through the roof to gather at the behest of a massive magnetic field. Read more

I am more interested to know about this savage race that comes after us. Read more

I was onboard until he said it was concrete. Read more

Let’s say we build it out in the middle of the desert to make it truly last for the ages, we bomb ourselves back to the stone age, and then our descendants stumble across this thousands of years in the future. What would they even think? I suspect they’d think it was supposed to do something, probably something very… Read more

I have to admit, it IS beautiful!

Pretty sure these will be around for a good while...

Reminds me of Medical Mechanica...

Too bad it was not built in 1922. That would have been the time to build it. Read more

“the shield will be down in moments”

Gernsback also proposed a monument to Alexander Graham Bell.

Funny that this article should appear today. I was just wondering if authors such as Orwell published their works e.g. 1984 and Animal Farm in the past few years, would they win Hugo awards?
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While his predictions seem blissfully ignorant of the political underpinnings that actually run (ruin?) society, Huxley himself was certainly not naïve. He was an idealist. Read more

With the clicking and commenting “economy”, I’m not sure Mr. Denton would give two shits about this comment:
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Huxley’s great insight was that we could ruin ourselves with self-indulgence. Or, maybe, that the powers that be will use self-indulgence to rule us.
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They weren’t far off. The US gov literally subsidized commercial air transport for most of 20th century, starting with mail service during the Curtis-Wright days. Read more

He got the robot/drone thing right, but he failed to predict the total co-opting of technology by the money/military/surveillance Beast. THink about it. What high tech gadgets do we have? Only those that facilitate our being tracked or distracted. No hover cars. No clean energy. No real medicine. Only things that are… Read more

Not germane to the discussion, but what is that drawing/illustrating style called? It seems to be everywhere in illustrations from that era. Read more

I can’t see how anyone could look at his predictions as anything close to accurate. His assumption that we would need to farm “all available land” to sustain a population that is less than half what the world population is (supposedly) today. (I say supposedly because there are huge flaws in how the population of the… Read more

How could he get his population prediction so wrong? Admittedly the population growth rate increased dramatically around the same time he was making his prediction, so you’d expect him to be very low, but his prediction doesn’t even follow the growth rate of his era: if you extend the population line from 1920-1950… Read more