Author: ideonexus
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Saturnday Consumer Awareness : Baby Einstein DVDs Turn Infant Brains into Mush
I remember a bit of conversation I had with a friend of mine who was a housewife, where I was complaining to her about my job stresses: Gina: I have a pretty stressful job too, you know. Jerkface Me: What job? Oh wait, lemme guess, you’re a mommy??? Ha! Ha! So what? I own two…
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Venusday Haiku: Dermatophagoides Pteronyssinus
Dust mites eat dead skin Drink the water we exhale We inhale their poop
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Jupiterday Diatribe: Pluto is Still a Planet (Still)
Somehow in all the incredibly complex hubbub of getting this blog set up (ie. figuring out how to post), I completely missed the fact that August 24th was the one-year anniversary of that infamous day when a bunch of dimbulbs at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to demote Pluto to non-planet status with an…
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Marsday Speculation: “the world being run by a futuristic computer geek”
So in case you haven’t heard yet, according to Dr. Nick Bostrom at Oxford University, chances are pretty good that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation. The professor puts our chances of living in a simulation at 20 percent, based on his gut feeling. I agree with the journalist, John Tierney, when he…
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Moonday Afternoon Adventuring Google Space
Google Earth: I can see my house from up here. It was a tremendous relief when Elizabeth City finally got scanned into Google Earth. Having this application installed on the Science Center’s computers, it was disheartening to zoom in on the center and find the satellite view blurry and indistinct. Even without Elizabeth City in…
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Science Fiction VS Fantasy
The ISS photographedfrom shuttle Discovery in 2006 Science Fiction kicks Fantasy’s ass. That’s the conclusion of this excruciatingly long, flippant, and ostentatious article. So if you are already aware of this fact, you can skip all that follows. If you are one of those elf-ear-wearing, sword-collecting, trilogy-reading, dipsy-doodle fantasy fanatics then please keep reading. As…
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Why I Stopped Pursuing My MBA
I have recently discontinued pursuit of my Masters in Business Administration. Accounting was fine, business law is fine, management science, IS for decision-making, and quantitative methods were all fine and dandy, but when I put all of these things together into the context of the modern business world, they suddenly stopped being fine. The business…
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Mandatory Reading: Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation”
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” – Isaac Asimov, Salvor Hardin in “Foundation” Isaac Asimov’s Foundation A scientist, Hari Seldon, is on trial for treason. His crime: Mathematically proving the Empire will collapse within five centuries. Nothing can avert this disaster, but the Seldon warns there can be either 30,000 years of anarchy…
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Great Books: Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed It took me all of 2006 to read Jared Diamond’s novel, setting it down several times. So informationally dense, such a delluge of data, an avalanche of not just facts, but where the facts came from, how layers of archeological discoveries translated into Diamond’s conclusions was too…
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Great Books: Richard Dawkin’s “The Selfish Gene”
The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins On first read, Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene seems repetitive. Dawkins continually takes asides to remind the audience that his verbage, words like “compete,” “betray,” “steal,” etc, in describing animal behaviors are not meant to imply altruism or malevolence, but describe a behavior’s effect on a gene’s ability to propigate.…
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Things are Getting Better
The Scientific Method (Bora Zivkovic has a Problem with this diagram) Something I’m often complaining about is “common sense.” Lazy people are always just throwing up their hands and saying “Duh!” when you ask them to justify some statement that sounds right and is taken for granted. It’s always important to check and recheck our…