ideonexus

Month: August 2008

  • The American Natural History Museum: Vertebrate Origins

    Acanthostega gunnari We vertebrates might not be as numerous as the insect world, but our internal skeletons let us grow big enough to squish them. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals all owe our spinal and notochords for making us the most advanced form of life on the planet. You can check out the complete…

  • Flash Fiction: The Intergalactic Almost Hero

    Albert Martucci woke up at six AM sharp every morning. He put on his slippers and his robe and went into the kitchen to brew a fresh pot of coffee. He ate the same breakfast every morning. Two eggs lightly scrambled, three strips of bacon, and two slices of buttered toast. Albert enjoyed the routine.…

  • Required Reading: Watchmen

    But who watches the watchmen? – Juvenal To my shame, I must admit I have never read Alan Moore’s literary classic Watchmen, the graphic novel above all graphic novels, the book that is required reading in many college English classes, and the comic that made Time magazine’s 100 All-Time Novels. I totally lose nerd-points for…

  • A Reply to My Letter to the Babyboomers

    Awhile back I wrote a letter to the Babyboomer Generation, asking them to have the prescience and dignity to take responsibility for the National Debt in their lifetimes and not leave it to burden future generations. Now it appears Roger Ebert has written a letter to the younger generations as part of his review of…

  • Flash Fiction: Gods Upon Gods

    A quick, 600-words or less read you can take in here. “Is that one of those computers?” I asked gesturing at the flat, monolithic screen hanging on the far wall. “Sort of,” he replied, staring oddly at the housewarming gift I’d set on a table. “It’s more of an entertainment center, but it does a…

  • Harry K. Daghlian, Jr: First Casualty of the Atomic Age

    Harry K. Daghlian, Jr On 21 August, 1945 at 9:55 PM, young graduate student Harry K. Daghlian, Jr was working on an experiment at Los Alamos determining the critical masses of plutonium. With a 6.2 kg sphere of plutonium cradled on a table, he was placing tungsten carbide bricks around it, reflecting neutrons released from…

  • SF Short, Extraction, Published at Aphelion

    …and I didn’t even know it until I got the google alert. This short story is one that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with publishing, but the webzine “cribbed” it from somewhere on my website, where I didn’t know I had posted/uploaded it. Since everything I do is Creative Commons licensed, this is pretty darn cool.…

  • My Late Weigh-In on the Tire Gauge Controversy

    The most frustrating thing about dittoheadism (not to be confused with intelligent Conservativism), is that it takes no energy, research, or intelligence to mass-produce steaming bull-feces piles of fantastical proportions every Monday morning. While composing thoughtful accurate responses to their nonsense requires research, fact-checking, and a modicum of intelligence. So last week, when Barack Obama…

  • Logical Fallacies in the Unscientific what’s the harm? Web Site

    Numerous science and enlightenment-minded blogs have recently posted links to the What’s the Harm? website, and I finally got the opportunity to give it some study. It sounded like a great idea, a website devoted to showing the deleterious effects people suffer for believing pseudoscientic claims. We need sites like that. Unfortunately, the site immediately…

  • Flash SF: The Last Bon Voyage

    “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I muttered, “leaving me so you can die in space.” “Please don’t frame it like that,” the tremble in Phoebe’s voice exposed how traumatic this was for her too. “You know why I’m doing this. I want my children to–” “Your great great grandchidren,” I spat. “I want them…

  • The Is Google Making Us Stoopid? Debate

    Nicholas Carr’s column Is Google Making Us Stupid? in The Atlantic has opened a wonderful disputation that is drawing in great minds from all over the Web. Edge has the blow by blow account of the academic throw-down debate, which centers on the question of how the Internet is affecting the way we think. When…

  • Computer Programming as a Longterm Career

    I came across the blogpost Why a Career in Computer Programming Sucks recently, which argues that programming makes for a terrible long-term career choice because the languages and technologies are always changing: Computer programming is a job that’s heavily dependent on temporary knowledge capital. It’s temporary because the powers that be keep changing the languages…