Another Start
I have never been good at following through with my own projects. I've largely recapitulated the history of web CMSs in my poor management of my personal web presense. (Anglefire, a hand-coded site, a wordpress blog, briefly: a drupal site, a site of squarespace which this site is superceding.) This time I'm using Jekyll. This means it should force me to finally learn how to write markdown, do a little bit of HTML/CSS work and have total control of my own web publishing again.
I have been frustrated recently with myself: I have not been writing enough. I haven't written an essay or conducted a serious research project in years. I've also been frustrated with Wikipedia articles: they are afterall, enclyopeida articles. They summarize.
I want to write short essays here that give more depth than a wikipedia article and make me dig a little to satisfy both the itch to do some research & writing and my curisoity. I want to scratch at the earth with the toe of my boot and see what's there.
I've recently been interested in technological megafauna: rare, extrodinarly large things. In this instance I'm thinking about three deeply intertwined artifacts of the 20th Century: rockets, nuclear power plants & nuclear weapons. These are literally the most powerful objects & systems we as a species have managed to create and use. Some things I hope to touch on are:
Current Generation Capacity of Nuclear Powerplants in the Unitied States.
Balistic Missiles & Rockets
Size & Scope of cold-war Nuclear testing.
Projects from the cold war related to any of these three things that haven't or didn't get built or finished.
including:
- The soviet N1 Rocket System
- Project Ploughshare
- Thorium Nuclear reactors
There are any number of other topics I'd like to write about eventually here as well, but I will leave those for my notebook of essays ideas for the moment and get down to some actual research and writing instead of listing them here.
Tags: personal