I had a friend ask me a few days back for recommendations of works of historical fiction by more-or-less modern authors. I happen to be quite ready for this question, since I enjoy knowing things, and I find well-written historical fiction one of the easiest ways to absorb the details of history. Fiction, by definition, is made up, but fiction… Read more →
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Picking At Religion Again
And now for your intermittently recurring muttering about the extremely religious. Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was… Read more →
Geek Family
Apparently my daughter is now old enough that when I’m away on business we send each other emailsI have a suspicion that her mother may play a secretarial role here, since Sarah probably wouldn’t punctuate.. In order to illustrate for some people at my office why it was that I no longer was interested in my business travel being any… Read more →
I knew it all along!
You know, I’ve always suspected that it wasn’t just that most “nice guys” are insecure, codependent cases. And science has vindicated my suspicion: New Scientist: Bad guys really do get the most girls NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial… Read more →
The tabs, they must be closed.
You know the drill–some things that I found worthy of some comment: I quite liked Julie Rehmeyer’s short piece on the math scholars who accidentally solved an astrophysics problem. It’s got all the good stuff: pure math, astrophysics (come on, “gravity lensing” just sounds cool, even without any context), serendipity, and above all a good science journalist doing the writeup,… Read more →
Just Read, To Read
The last book I read: Lye Street by Alan Campbell. I read Scar Night earlier this year during my Australian sojurn, and thought it was quite good, especially for a first novel. This is a prequel that focuses primarily on two storylines: one that highlights the madness of the angel Carnival, the other of which deals with the reconstruction of… Read more →
Their great chicken-bone and moonshine empire will rise again
I know you’re already seen this, but it’s just too good to let go by. My favourite bit references the hobo signs stuff we were looking at earlier this month: And they devised a secret language of signs and scrawls used to alert their passing brethren to danger or opportunity. A crucifix chalked on the side of a house meant… Read more →
“Long Weekend” Bag of Links
I put it in scare quotes because I am a member of the global information economy, and apparently what that means is that I have to take some meetings on those holidays that are merely national in scope. Yes, I am a grumpy about this. Well, honestly I’m mostly grumpy about having to be up in time for an 8AM… Read more →
There’s not a lot of pop music with this inspiration
That’s the video for the World Party song Is It Like Today?. The reason it’s here: it’s explicitly inspired by, and intended to be a precis of, Bertrand Russell‘s History of Western Philosophy. Lyrics after the jump: Read more →
A late thought for May Day
During the heyday of what was billed as the Reagan Revolution, sometimes as the New American Dawn, or the “unfettered free market,” I could discover no common cause among the several degrees of of rightist separation (conservative, neoconservative, libertarian, reactionary, and evangelical) other than the moral lesson invariably found in their one and only cautionary tale: money ennobles rich people,… Read more →
Saturday Night Characters 1: The Cleaver Sleeve
When asked about my home town, I usually reply with one of two quips. Either “it’s a great place to be from” or “it may be smallish, but it has a high character ratio”. That second line which inevitably leads into discussions of the various people that are “real characters” that everyone in the conversation has known, or heard of.… Read more →
Midweek Miscellany
It is very hard for me to imagine that Guinness cupcakes could be anything but super yummy. Make me some–I’ll be your friend. While we’re talking about food, I’ve got to say that enough is enough. I consider myself at least something of an epicure, so I believe that there are such things as quality olive oils, that some vinegars… Read more →
Seriously, who would simulate me?
From time to time I run across something that just shocks me, not because of the thing itself, but because the thing is so completely something I should have known about and yet have somehow missed. How does a philosophy argument about things that interest me greatly go on for years without my hearing about it? Today’s example of this… Read more →
Hypocrisy, cynicism, and (of course) religion.
Here’s an example of the difference between someone with an optimistic outlook, and a cynic like me. It’s pretty easy to imagine someone reading this news story: Vatican recants with a statue of Galileo Four hundred years after it put Galileo on trial for heresy the Vatican is to complete its rehabilitation of the great scientist by erecting a statue… Read more →
Religion Bashing For Thursday
OK, let’s close some tabs. First off, let’s start with our old friend, the head Inquisitioner, Pope Benedict. It appears he’s been a naughty fellow. A BBC documentary has exposed that Pope Benedict XVI, aka Cardinal Ratzinger, played a leading role in a systematic cover-up of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests. In 2001, while he was a cardinal,… Read more →
