ideonexus

Month: June 2009

  • EPA Suppresses Report Disproving Global Warming

    This is outrageous. I can’t believe that, with the house passing the Climate Change Bill on Friday, which will seek to curb CO2 emissions, it has just come out that the EPA crushed a dissenting report on the supposed dangers of “Global Warming.” The report, titled Proposed NCEE Comments on Draft Technical Support Document for…

  • Virginia’s Mountains and World of Darkness

    Eastern Newt The Virginia Living Museum, like zoos and other natural history museums, recreates many different ecological niches indoors, where visitors can get up close and admire the biology in detail. There’s a sense of wonder in admiring the uniqueness of life without it being able to run away and hide. Hermit Crab As nice…

  • CIS517 IT Project Management: Effective Project Management

    A PDF of this Paper is available here. Effective communications is the single most important attribute of successful project management. Efficient meetings are crucial to project progress and promoting a sense of membership within a team. At the same time, managing daily communications within the team is also important, as team members can be overwhelmed…

  • Questions About “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”

    The profundity of the film Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has left my mind swirling with deep, philosophical, scientific, and political questions. Maybe someone could help me with them: What was the sociological explanation for incredibly-advanced extraterrestrials adopting stereotypical “gansta” lingo as their primary means of social discourse, as we saw with the twin robots…

  • The Many Science Factions

    For better or worse, it is the nature of intellectuals to be independent in thought and action. Since the Enlightenment, when coffee-fueled intellectual discussions kicked off an age of accelerating advances in science and technology, academics and geeks have slowly fragmented from being united under the big tent of rationality into tribes that are less…

  • Chet Raymo’s When God is Gone, Everything is Holy

    I’ve been a longtime fan of Chet Raymo’s Science Musings blog, a rich, wonderful merging of classical literature references and modern scientific awe I discovered not long after seeing the inspiring film he wrote Frankie Starlight. I’m sorry to say that When God is Gone, Everything is Holy is the first book of his that…

  • Virginia Living Museum: Cypress Swamp Exhibit

    Eastern Snapping Turtle Swamps, like deserts, are a metaphor for awful things in life. We get bogged down in swamps, monsters come out of swamps, to “swamp” a person is to capture them in a quagmire of responsibilities. But this derision of swamps is very anthropocentric, and I like the old German proverb, “Where there…

  • Flash Fiction: Buying Out

    I missed a flash SF, 600-words or less story, I got published to 365Tomorrows. You can check it out here. Kheen stared out the window of his top-floor corner office, completely oblivious to the hustle and bustle of his city stretching off into the horizon below. Planes, spacecraft, gliders, unicorns, and more were cruising right…

  • Port Discover’s an Educational Bargain for Elizabeth City

    Beautiful Science Credit: Bonnie*B I am thrilled by City Council’s decision to fund the expansion of the Port Discover Science Center over the next five years. This is a wise and prescient use of public funds that will benefit the local community by further beautifying downtown, contributing to Elizabeth City’s growing intellectual character, and offering…

  • The Real Two Cultures Debate

    On May 7, 1959, Charles Percy Snow delivered The Two Cultures lecture, and academia has been debating it for the half-century following. A review of references to this famous lecture would lead someone who hadn’t read it to think it was purely about the differences between the people educated in the sciences and the humanities,…

  • CIS518 Advanced Software Engineering: Application Frameworks, Theory and Practice

    A PDF of this Paper is available here. Slides accompanying this paper available here. Introduction The evolution of programming languages over the last 70 years has shown a clear trend towards reducing complexity and improving efficiency of software development. From first generation machine languages that used binary strings representing programming instruction being replaced with assembly…

  • No More Kings: Iran and the Importance of Separating Church and State

    I’ve been glued to the Internet all weekend after riots broke out in Iran over the theocracy’s blatant disregard for the will of the people. The election results announced were so preposterously weighted in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s favor that one column I saw mocking it was titled Ahmadinejad Wins Stanley Cup. No modern event more clearly…