The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.
Secrecy is essential to the command and control of nuclear weapons. Their technology is the opposite of open-source software. The latest warhead designs can’t be freely shared on the Internet, improve...
Today the U.S. government can demand the nation-wide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contami...
The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it.
The impact of McDonald’s on the way we live today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.
The current demand for marijuana and pornography is deeply revealing. Here are two commodities that Americans publicly abhor, privately adore, and buy in astonishing amounts.
The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.
Indeed, market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name.
When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn’t. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn’t unlock,...
We have found out… that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists,’ declared Ray Krock, one of the founders of Mcdonald’s, angered by some of his franchisees. ‘We will make conformists out of...
The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a si...
Stan Spray, a Sandia engineer who burned, crushed, and routinely tortured nuclear weapon components to discover their flaws
Sides of beef suspended from an overhead trolley swing toward a group of men. Each worker has a large knife in one hand and a steel hook in the other. They grab the meat with their hooks and attack it...
No great monument has been built to honor those who served during the Cold War, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them in the name of freedom. It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats...
In the early days of the project, Teller was concerned that the intense heat of a nuclear explosion would set fire to the atmosphere and kill every living thing on earth. A
Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.
Americans not only smoke more marijuana but also imprison more people for marijuana than any other western industrialized nation.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than a quarter of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning each year.
About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more th...
About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes—the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle—until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cat...