Philosillyphizing

The Future Soon

So I’m sitting here at my computer, watching Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (because I’m a horror movie buff and Freddy Kreuger is one of my favorite supernatural movie villains), and because my brain sometimes goes off on tangents I started thinking about how I’d explain this sort of technology to someone from the past. [...]

Plants with Eyes

Inspired by our recent trip to Safari West (where we got to play “Keeper for a Day”, which is why I got to hand feed a giraffe) and by watching The Mist, I’ve been amusing myself lately speculating about future directions of life on the surface of the Earth. Mostly I’ve been thinking about how [...]

Overcoming Fear

I’m sure that one of the factors that has been driving my perpetual mild depression over the years has been a perpetual, ongoing, permanent fear of risk, change, or growth.  My entire life, it sometimes seems to me, has been one long exercise in avoiding situations which make me nervous or where I could end [...]

Writerly Musings

I’ve been stalled on my writing for quite awhile now.  I haven’t worked on Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster for a few weeks, nor on any short stories.  I pulled out "Burying Uncle Albert" recently with the intention of revising it for the fifth or sixth time, but since I did so, it’s been [...]

Bees and other stingers

I’ve been following, off and on, the issue with the vanishing bees.  Colony Collapse Disorder is a pretty scary thing; while we don’t rely on bees exclusively for our crop pollination needs, they’re still crucial, and if the bees all go away, then things will be mighty tough.  I don’t believe we’ll face major famine [...]

Easter Eggs

So, I love the show Heroes, as any red-blooded American geek should.  And I recently listened to the episode of Mur Lafferty’s podcast I Should Be Writing, where she interviewed Paul Malmont, author of the Chinatown Death Cloud Peril (and Paul Malmont is on my list of "good guys" because, although I haven’t read his [...]

Pale Blue Dot

Phil Plait, over at Bad Astronomy, says that Carl Sagan’s essay, "Reflections on a Mote of Dust" (collected in Pale Blue Dot) ought to be required reading for every human being on the planet.  I agree, and add that this video, which combines Sagan’s beautiful essay with music and imagery, ought to be required viewing [...]

To hack or not to hack

I was thinking about the word “hacking” recently; not the word as it is traditionally misused in the media (they mean “crackers”), but the word as it traditionally means, as explained in the First Thesis of Geek Activism:
Reclaim the term ‘hacker’. If you tinker with electronics, you are a hacker. If you use things in [...]

Ruminations on a Zeppo

The cold I picked up in Ireland appears to have mutated into some sort of annoying permanent viral respiratory infection which has knocked me on my ass for the past couple of weeks. I’m extremely fortunate in that I can work from home while sick, which means I can stay close to my nebulizer [...]

Ruminations on a Vampire Slayer

Over the past month or so, I’ve been sick with a persistent URI (though my doctor and I are working on a different theory now — more on that some other time), and I’ve been taking advantage of the situation to rewatch all seven seasons of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel.  Of course I’m [...]

Supraluminal

I just think that the word “supraluminal” — which means “faster than light” — is cool. Isn’t it? It’s actually a really pretty word. Something you’d name your daughter, right?
The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, more or less. Nothing in our universe can travel faster than that, not if they want to [...]

Premature thoughts for 2006

New Scientist magazine on 13 Things that Do Not Make Sense.  This is a fascinating article compiling a list of thirteen apparent anomalies in our understanding of physics, chemistry, and cosmology.  The author does a good job, I think, of reporting the anomalies without much editorializing, and certainly with no fanciful forays into non-scientific speculation.  [...]

Some things are just wrong from the start

I already knew that Hollywood long ago ran out of anything even remotely resembling imagination and creativity (with a few rare notable exceptions, such as Serenity), but there really ought to be limits. They’re supposedly remaking Harvey, for example, with Tom Hanks in the lead role. Tom Hanks is a fine actor, but [...]

Perhaps I should change careers…

…and become an apocalyptic doomsayer. They’re all the rage right now, and, according to this article apparently now we’re in the highest state of “End Times Alert!” than ever before. Higher even than:

1945, when World War II engulfed pretty much the entire globe, atomic bombs were being set off, half the world was [...]

Milgram Lives

A hoax most cruel
Reading this article, I was reminded of The Milgram Experiment. It seems that people are willing to do horrific things to other people just because someone in authority — or someone they believed was in authority — told them to. Was this something that Orwell contemplated? Or Machiavelli?
If I’d [...]