Month: May 2008
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Lawrence Solomon Versus the “Wicked Pedians”
Lawrence Solomon of Energy Probe has an extremely whiney column in the National Post complaining about the refusal of Wikipedians (which he refers to as Wicked Pedia. Ho. Ho.) to let him edit articles based on his personal experience. The article in question was Wikipedia’s entry for Naomi Oreskes, whose very informative lecture on the…
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One of a Kind
If you are reading this, then you are a member of the human race. You are a member of Kingdom Animalia, meaning you are multicellular, but, unlike plants, your cells do not have a cell wall. You are a member of Phylum Chordata, meaning you have a central nervous system, and Subphylum Vertebrata, meaning you…
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An Invitation to Speculate: Your Clone and You
Clones Ryan Somma I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on my free creative commons e-book Clones, and I was amazed that, while everyone had their own favorite stories from the collection, the one that got best reviews was Ryan’s Clone, where I speculate on what it would be like to spend a day at the…
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Liberal Guilt
I’m at a restaurant last night, and there are leftovers. Not much in the way of leftovers, but enough to make me feel guilty about wasting food. However, I’m not too keen on asking for a doggie bag because I know this restaurant uses non-biodegradable Styrofoam containers. It’s better to send the food to the…
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North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences: Naturalist Center
I’ve always wanted a Cabinet of Curiosities, but have neither the time nor money to establish one. Luckily, we have museums, which serve as public cabinets of curiosities. Naturalist Center (Infested with Bloggers) At the NCMNS the coolest exhibit of all is a small room on the top floor, filled with taxidermy animals, skeletons, rocks,…
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Let the Phytoremediation Begin!
The Environmental Compliance Division at the Coast Guard base where I work is tasked with cleaning up decades worth of environmental problem areas on base and instituting sustainable operating procedures in the way the Coast Guard serves America. According to ARSC’s newsletter, we “recycled (kept out of landfills) 1330 pounds of toner cartridges in 2007”…
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Sitcoms are “Cognitive Heatsinks”
Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirkyon, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has an excellent post up, titled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, where he calls television sitcoms a “cognitive heat sink,” which dissipate our thought potential, preventing us from putting our over-abundance of free time to use in intellectually-productive activities.…