"What if reality itself is rather like a computer game where what goes on inside houses has not been programmed because it was not needed in the game? What if [reality] is, in some sense, incomplete?"Rest of an interesting interview with Slavoj Zizek found her...
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Monday, 30 August 2010
As it turns out, the local self-service car wash has the new convenience of not needing quarters. You can now swipe a debit or credit card and the car wash will automatically charge your card while you wash. The process is quite simple, and only requires a few steps:1. Swipe card.2. Wash car.3. Push stop button.Apparently, two steps was all "Bradley" could remember, because Saturday when I pulled into the car wash port, and got ready to input my quarters, I saw this on the screen of the car wash card reader:"Thank you, Bradley. Current time: 11:33,...
Friday, 27 August 2010
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
So 79% of Americans are against "a mosque at Ground Zero."Question 1: Are you against "an Islamic Center a couple blocks from the site of the World Trade Center"?Question 2: Is there an Islamic prayer center inside the Pentagon building?Question 3: Can you name an event, other than the events of September 11th, in which Muslims deliberately attacked the United States of America?Question 4: Can you name a person who has personally caused you harm (outside of the events on September 11th) that is a Muslim?Question 5: Name 5 countries where Islam...
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
The more I learn about engineering, the more I dream about the possibilities for the future. And as I marvel at my Droid smartphone's abilities (I can say "navigate to nearest Taco Bell" and it does), I also realize how far we have to go before we really hit our peak. I wrote an essay long ago that argued that as the Industrial Age has ripened, the number of major innovations has tapered off, while the number of minor (incremental) innovations has exploded. You don't see flying cars, you see cars getting slightly higher gas mileage. You don't see...
Friday, 20 August 2010
One thing TAE constantly finds miraculous and frustrating is how "bucket lists" are almost always completely self indulgent. People make lists of all the things they want to do in a given period of time, and those things usually involve seeing or tasting or hearing...things that will give the person seemingly valuable personal experiences and that will give them a long and fulfilling list of accomplishments.And while self-satisfaction is a worthy and important lifelong goal, so too is doing things in the service of others. For example, a typical...
While I do find almost any new technology both interesting and appealing, programs like Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places (which essentially allow everyone to pretend like they are simultaneously both celebrities and the paparazzi that follows them) do nothing to the global intellect and serve no purpose other than to slow down the internet and waste electricity. How many watts of coal-fired energy has been spent on Twitter posts broadcasting that someone is "@Minsky's eating pizza"?Or as my brother-in-law so succinctly puts it:...
Listening to Ross Douthat (a Catholic) try to explain that the institution of marriage will be damaged by allowing gays to marry just seems so eerily familiar.Catholics On Geocentrism:"The proposition that the Earth is not the centre of the world and immovable but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false philosophically and theologically considered at least erroneous in faith "Catholics on Evolution:"Our first parents were formed immediately by God. Therefore we declare that the opinion of those who do not...
Thursday, 19 August 2010
I've had a little backlash from the previous post where I dogged on Bean Town. To those readers, I submit the following: you should hate the city too. Typically, you get posts in blogs from city-dwelling pundits who argue that the density of a city allows for better information sharing, or that cities have the advantage of making creative people live nearer each other, thereby causing a greater amount of collaboration and innovation.Phooey on that. Jonah Lehrer boils this down in his latest post:In the late 1990s, Frances Kuo, director of the...
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
Scientists find that despite regular and rigorous exercise, inhabitants of the International Space Station have massive muscle loss, both in volume as well as strength. This bodes poorly for a manned Mars mission, which would take 3 years; astronauts returning from that mission would probably suffocate in Earth's gravity upon reentry.Skipping over my usual diatribe about the ridiculousness of manned spaceflight, and ignoring that robots have been crawling on the surface of Mars quite happily for most of a decade, rendering a Mars mission pointless,...
Monday, 16 August 2010
Can a conservative Republican columnist of notoriety write that American citizens of a certain sexual persuasion should be denied Constitutional rights that are a threat to his Christianity, then argue that Muslims should be given extra help assimilating in to the United States population.Ross:There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what language you speak, what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run. An America where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America...
Friday, 13 August 2010
Among the Multitude, by WhitmanAmong the men and women the multitude,I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs, Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am,Some are baffled, but that one is not--that one knows me. Ah lover and perfect equal,I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections,And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in yo...
Thursday, 12 August 2010
Why did I, an independent, do it? For me it wasn't that Hope or Change, really. A lot of it was thinking about which candidate would make the world a better place for my daughter.But a significant reason was that Obama was razor sharp. I like smart people, no matter how vile or egomaniacal they are. Something about high levels of creativity or intelligence compels me. John McCain has neither.This graph points out something interesting that follows...
Monday, 9 August 2010
"Senate Approves its Spaceflight Plan," the headline reads. Of course they do.TAE, however, doesn't. My hard line stance towards ending manned spaceflight for the foreseeable future has really been pushed to the limits lately, so much so that I've backed down about posting about it. After President Obama outlined his plan for NASA and American Manned Spaceflight, I sat back in jaded disillusion as astronauts and Florida Senators alike lined up and wrote letters and submitted testimonies demanding America remain in astral mediocrity as long as possible....
Friday, 6 August 2010
This entry on Tibetan Mastiffs:The Tibetan Mastiff also known as Do-khyi (variously translated as "home guard", "door guard", "dog which may be tied", "dog which may be kept"), reflects its use as a guardian of herds, flocks, tents, villages, monasteries, and palaces, much as the old English ban-dog (also meaning tied dog) was a dog tied outside the home as a guardian. However, in nomad camps and in villages, the Do-khyi is traditionally allowed to run loose at night and woe be unto the stranger who walks abroad after dark.Hark! Hear thou ever-vigilant...
Thursday, 5 August 2010
TAE holds that the reason most, if not all, diet programs fail is because nothing craves the sweetness of sugar like the human brain. Frankly, its the biggest energy hog per pound in your body. Run low on blood sugar, and you get light-headed as your brain goes into low-power mode.So the idea that you can lose weight be reducing your total calorie intake makes perfect sense except for the part where your brain is going to go "what the hell?!" and demand more calories. You might be able to eat 6 small, low-calorie meals a day and trick your stomach...
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
A minister writes me: Thanks for your devotional, which I thought was great. Like you and your once-atheist friend, I have this huge appreciation for the universe, its size, complexity, history, mystery, etc. I too find God present in all that. Your devotional resonated strongly with me.I find it paradoxical, I wrote back, that people are afraid that learning about science will diminish their faith. For me, the more science I learn, the stronger my faith. The stronger my wonde...
Once again, I write the weekly devotional for my church:I was talking to my friend Matt last week when he dropped a bomb on me: he had started considering the Almighty "plausible." This was news; Matt was a physicist and during college he'd taken pride in his atheism. I asked him what was up. "Well, you just can't ignore the absurdity of it all," he said. He went on to describe his newfound lack-of-lack-of-belief: apparently he had read that astronomers have recently updated the estimate of the number of stars in our...
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
I have been hesitant to enter the fray on Clay Shirky's new book. Part of the reason for this is because I feel most of the important points have been hit, for instance that the internet has enabled higher levels of cognitive achievement. Or that if we'd all turn off our TV's and reinvest that time in learning and sharing information the world would be a better place. Or that if we all turned off our TV's and reinvest that time in learning and sharing information with the world we'd all be really bored.Shirky points out that the 1oo million hours...
Monday, 2 August 2010
So apparently the brilliant engineering feat of the decade, the Three Gorges Dam, (regular readers know TAE loathes dams with every fiber of his being) has turned into an ad hoc trash collection system for most of southern China.Basically, all the rain that has been pouring in China has washed every bit of trash possible out into the river system. The trash then heads downstream until something blocks its path. In this case, the thing blocking its path is the single largest concrete structure in the world. Right now, an estimated 3000 tons of trash...
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