LifeItself

When I talk or write, people often tell me they are depressed with what I tell them.  These people crave for a more palatable approach that belongs to Bokonon: I wanted all things To seem to make sense, So we all could be happy, yes, Instead of tense. And I made up lies So that they all  fit nice, And I made this sad world A par-a-dise Bokonon's Calypso , Kurt Vonnegut, " Cat's Cradle ," p. 127. Bokonon's true power is in imagining other people's dreams before they realize what it is that makes them happy. Bokonon's approach is commonly applied in all mass media, including advertizing and some of the major science journals. It has also been the standard operating procedure in all religions since times immemorial and in politics. In short, Bokonon's Calypso reflects human nature and my creations do not. Therein lies my problem in communicating with the public.

Here is the best reflection I could find of how humans thought about science, technology and complexity in the year 2011.  On March 19th, Mr. Jeff Sommer wrote his masterful piece, A Crisis That Markets Can’t Grasp , which was published by NYT on the front page of the Sunday Business Section.  Here are the salient quotations: The details of this catastrophe [of the Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant] were unforeseeable, leading some to conclude this was a black swan event — something so wildly unexpected, so enormous in its impact, that it seems to defy our understanding and expose the fragility of our knowledge of the world. How could anyone have predicted this ? ... So perhaps a bigger question is whether the markets — in which we have come to place so much trust — can put a true price on outsize risks like this. Many have compared the events unfolding in Japan with 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009, t...