Monsters

This is either a very poorly constructed argument for a taxonomy of technology that forever loses the thread when it wanders into blimps, or a decent history of the folly of Zeppelins with a malformed treatise on the author's invented “pathological technologies” grafted on. Either half can't be given more than three stars, and this is not a case where there's anything gained by pairing them together.

I don't even necessarily think the author's theory is wrong or uninteresting, but the examples he chooses seem spectacularly ill-advised and not internally consistent. He also presents an extraordinarily narrow of view of how science happens and what benefits any individual project or research brings.

Written two centuries earlier, one can imagine the scorn brought onto “electricity” — imagine the immense expense of installing wires into every home simply in order to give light, which we already have with fire. How could one possibly hope to harness such a fundamental energy of the cosmos?

Extra bonus raspberries are due for attempting to sarcastically damn with faint praise a DARPA project as having an “original” way of doing things because the agency funded an outlandish idea (a 100-Year Starship program) in the hopes that something good might come out of it — in other words, every DARPA project, ever.