ideonexus

Author: ideonexus

  • Beowulf: Not Out of the Uncanny Valley Yet

    Saw Beowulf Friday night, not a classic tale I’m particularly fond of, but I was curious about this being the first attempt to make a film with as-real-as-possible human characters since Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within belly-flopped in 2001 (not counting mixture CGI/live action films like The Matrix, which also failed). The film still failed…

  • Just When I Thought I Had Enough Distractions in My Life…

    I’ve started twittering. I’m not ready to have this thing start texting my phone just yet, despite the fact that I can set it up so that my houseplants can text me when they need water. I’m sure my cats would love this service too, “Ryan! Come home and let us (in/out) of the house!…

  • Response to a PLoS One Article

    My father, former head of the Microbiology Department at ODU, responded to an e-mail my hippie brother sent out about the recent Prozac debunking: I seriously doubt that the PLOS Journal of Medicine, which I’ve never heard of in all my 35 years in the field, has any merit. If it even does exist, then…

  • MySpace is Forever

    Whenever I type “Ryan Somma” into google. There’s the bit of JavaScript code I wrote to strip characters from a string variable. There’s my Waterway 5k stats. There are court dockets from my divorce and the time I was sued for a million dollars. There’s also the “Rare Ryan Somma Sighting!” picture of me on…

  • Extinction Infringes on my Civil Rights

    You heard me. When some selfish numbnuts corporation or collusion of businesses and politics or just plain-old short-sighted human beings drive some species to extinction, that infringes on my rights. Namely, my right to eat that species. I’ve eaten bear, deer, oysters, ostrich, frogs, turtles, rabbit, pheasant, squid, alligator, octopus, fish, snails, clams, snakes, a…

  • Spitzer’s Hypocrisy

    “The lady doth protest too much.” – Queen Gertrude, Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 222–230 Eliot Spitzer was an outspoken prosecutor of prostitution, and now we know this hypocrite dirtbag is guilty of indulging in what he believes should be a crime. As I have argued before that prostitution should be legal. Sex is legal,…

  • The Sixth Mass Extinction

    Artist’s Impression of the Chicxulub Impact Image courtesy of NASA The most famous mass extinction is the Cretaceous-Tertiary, which killed the dinosaurs 65.5 million years ago. It was most likely caused by a meteorite that left a crater 150 miles in diameter off the Gulf of Mexico and a layer of iridium-rich dust all over…

  • Movie You Should See: Quest for Fire

    Rae Dawn Chong in Quest for Fire While 10,000 BC was an over-hyped, glamorized, film that simultaneously gave too much credit to primitive humans and, at the same time, not enough, Quest for Fire takes place in 80,000 BC, at a time when there are scattered tribes of humans all at different levels of cultural…

  • Movies You Can Skip: 10,000 B.C.

    10,000 B.C. tells the story of a tribe of people living in what is, to my mother’s best guess, the Himalayas. All year long, the tribe looks forward to when the mammoths come migrating through their land, so they can hold their great hunt. This is actually right about the time Mammoths went extinct due…

  • The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences: Costal North Carolina

    The most impressive thing about the Coastal NC Exhibit are all the whale skeletons hanging overhead as you walk through the exhibit, animals larger than anything Earth has ever seen before, descendents of cow-like animals that once lived on land, some of which still have their hip bones still floating inside them, serving no other…

  • The Politics of Fear VS Mathematical Perspective

    In 1964 Lyndon Johnson’s campaign ran the following ad scaring Americans in to voting for him with the idea that Barry Goldwater would start a nuclear war if elected: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/OKs-bTL-pRg] Hillary Clinton’s campaign is spinning their recent primary wins as attributable to their “3a.m. Phone Call” ad, which uses a similar tactic against Obama: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/M70emIFxETs]…

  • Programming Adventures: Revision History Humor

    I had a good chuckle while working on a Database Procedure today, when I spotted the following entry in the Revision History notes: Revision History Humor