Philosillyphizing

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 [...]

The Top 10 Intelligent Designs (or Creation Myths)

The Top 10 Intelligent Designs (or Creation Myths)
Flying Spaghetti Monsters aside, this article from Live Science presents a list of the top ten creation myths of all time, from the Norse pantheon to the Judeo/Christian/Moslem ex nihilo myth.
Y’know, as a Christian, I do believe in “intelligent design” (insofar as a human defined quality like “intelligence” [...]

Bounded In A Nut Shell

“O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space…”

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

It’s been at least twenty years since I last looked through the telescope that my grandfather gave to me for my birthday many many years ago. I still have it, and [...]

People Are Stupid Everywhere… Including Me

I’ve been traveling about Santa Clara these past couple of weeks, training surly state workers on how to use the software that was developed by the Benthic Creatures parent company. Now, I’ve spent years and years and years — since junior high school, at least, a good twenty years — playing with computers and software [...]

Thoughts from the Basement

Yesterday was a fairly productive day for me. After contacting most of the employers I’d spoken to at Wednesday’s job fair for yesterday’s round of "Nope, we don’t have anything your skills would be useful for, but we’ll keep your resume on hand just in case", I went off to the public library in Davis [...]

The Tragedy of Traditional Cooking

I’m sitting here now and actually trying to write a short story. I haven’t tried to do any serious creative writing since NaNoWriMo back in november, and I’d forgotten how difficult it can be to get started. I had the idea for "Mother Tsan-Chan" a couple of nights ago, and spent a couple of hours [...]

Truth Vs. Reason?

This morning, while walking across the UC Davis campus toward the Hydrology lab (where I’ve been filtering water samples from the Lake Tahoe region), I saw a series of strange fliers. The fliers were obviously in response to the anti-war fliers which I had seen posted on the campus last week. The fliers I saw [...]

Whose Apocalypse?

The other day, I was supposed to meet a graduate student from UC Davis’ Graduate Group in Ecology at Borders in downtown Davis. Unfortunately, the student didn’t show up, but I did get a chance to browse through a book that I found on the shelves. This book is called The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Danish [...]

Slight Comfort

For the past couple of days I have been listening almost non-stop to NPR’s coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on my computer through streaming audio from the KQED website. I’ve listened as people have poured out their pain, as denials were proferred by various groups, as politicians have postured, as [...]

Majestic

A couple of years ago, before Y2K failed to dim so much as a single light bulb at midnight, studying bizarre and wacky conspiracy theories was quite a hobby of mine. I used to spend hours reading through the more bizarre conspiracy sites, looking up black helicopters, Men In Black, the Majestic-12 group, and so [...]

In Which Richard Ponders World Conquest, and Jennifer has a Revelation

It was the second day of Dragon*Con 2001, one of the largest science fiction gatherings in the United States. Jennifer and I were taking a break from the panels and the dealer room and the art show and were sitting in the eating area of the hotel’s restaurant, people watching. Past us strolled Klingons, angels, [...]

It’s Been Quite a Ride

What follows is my last journal entry of the second millenium.

Yes, I’m one of those nit-pickers who insists that the new millenium begins on January 1, 2001, and not January 1, 2000. You begin counting at one, after all, and there was no year zero. The second millenium ends tonight, and the third [...]

Grinchin’

The thing I hate the most about being sick — and today I’ve been hit with a double whammy of a mild cold plus a mild stomach flu; nothing exciting in and of themselves, but the combination is exhausting — is that I have a tendency to feel really lonely. Lying in bed, looking forward [...]

Muggling Through

It seems that every time something good comes along, something else comes along (usually in the form of a money-hungry lout or a misinformed idiot) to try to spoil it. The great comic book Spawn, for example, might be forced to cease publication because some football player took offense at the name used as one [...]

If Only I Weren’t So Nice…

One of the most fundamental axioms of my life is this: that no matter who you are, and what you are doing, there is someone in the world right now who, for whatever reason, is pissed off at you.
Is that a depressing thought? I don’t think so. I’ve never been depressed by that particular thought, [...]