Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
by
Samuel Arbesman
Published 18 Jul 2016
We find it in our ecosystems and in the chaos of technology that we rely on every day. We find it in the Greek pantheon, and in many other stories we tell ourselves. Storytelling, in fact, allows us to indulge our desires for either biological or physics thinking. Some stories are finely crafted machines with no extraneous parts; everything fits together. We see this in “Chekhov’s Gun,” dramatist Anton Chekhov’s principle that any element introduced in a story must be crucial to advancing the plot. A loaded rifle introduced early in the first act of a play must go off by the third. On the other hand, there are some stories in which color is added, creating a richness of experience without necessarily moving the plot along.
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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by
David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019
A rule change to pollution standards for coal producers, proposed by Trump’s EPA in 2018, would kill an additional 1,400 Americans annually, the agency itself acknowledged; globally, pollution kills as many as nine million each year. We live with that pollution, and with those death tolls, and hardly notice them; the curving concrete towers of nuclear plants, by contrast, stand astride the horizon like Chekhov’s proverbial gun. Today, despite a variety of projects aimed at producing cheap nuclear energy, the price of new plants remains high enough that it is hard to make a persuasive argument that more “green” investment be directed toward them rather than installations of wind and solar. But the case for decommissioning and dismantling existing plants is considerably weaker, and yet that is exactly what is happening—from the United States, where both Three Mile Island and Indian Point are being closed down, to Germany, where so much nuclear power has recently been retired that the country is growing its carbon emissions despite a state-of-the-world green energy program.
Someone comes to town, someone leaves town
by
Cory Doctorow
Published 1 Jul 2005
She plumped herself on the cushions and flapped her wings once, softly, another puff of that warm air wafting over him. She picked up the tin robot he'd given her from the coffee table and turned it over in her hands, staring up its skirts at the tuna-fish illustration and the Japanese ideograms. "I had the knife, and I felt like I had to use it. You know Chekhov? 'If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third.' I write one-act plays. Wrote. But it seemed to me that the knife had been in act one, when Krishna dragged me into the bathroom. "Or maybe act one was when he brought it home, after I showed him my wings. "And act two had been my night in the park.
Asymmetry
by
Lisa Halliday
Published 6 Feb 2018
For her part, Alice was starting to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man, when Ezra turned back to her and said: “Don’t worry about importance. Importance comes from doing it well. Just remember what Chekhov said: ‘If there’s a gun hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter it must go off.’ ” Alice wiped her hands and stood to throw her napkin away. “If there’s a defibrillator hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter must it go off?” When she’d returned to him, Gabriela was there, holding his scarf and helping him to his feet; the sun had disappeared behind the high-rises on Columbus and all around them paces quickened in the sudden shade.
Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
by
Paul Mason
Published 30 Sep 2013
Because possibly, maybe, the question should be asked: maybe they’re tired of evolution, and they are waiting for revolution.8 At the end of the broadcast Beck called for a return to civilized discourse. But he had just accused the liberal wing of US politics of contemplating armed struggle. The problem is, as Chekhov once said, if a gun appears in Act One, then before the end of the play somebody is going to get shot. On 8 January 2011, a gunman in Tucson, Arizona, maimed the Democratic senator Gabrielle Giffords and killed six bystanders. Giffords had been targeted in one of Palin’s cross hairs. The event, though essentially the action of a lunatic, was a wake-up call.
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by
Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015
It is highly likely that networks controlling vital infrastructure facilities in the USA and many other countries are already crammed with such codes). However, we should not confuse ability with motivation. Though cyber warfare introduces new means of destruction, it doesn’t necessarily add new incentives to use them. Over the last seventy years humankind has broken not only the Law of the Jungle, but also the Chekhov Law. Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. Throughout history, if kings and emperors acquired some new weapon, sooner or later they were tempted to use it. Since 1945, however, humankind has learned to resist this temptation. The gun that appeared in the first act of the Cold War was never fired.