Category: Mediaphilism

MTV’s Kurt Loder refers to the Ang Lee’s film as “too thoughtful,” which is a bad thing for reasons I and Roger Ebert can’t understand. There are two kinds of Hulk fans. There are those who enjoy the dramatic conflict between an alienated egghead scientist and his raging psychopathic alter ego, and then there are…

The fictional religion Bokononism featured in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, describes an interesting theory of social relations. In this worldview, there are two types of organizations, granfalloons, which are artificially imposed relationships, big bureaucracies such as political parties (because they are big tents) or corporate organization, and karassi, which are naturally-emergent social networks. Here Comes…

“It came to me suddenly– and this discovery preoccupied me entirely– that here was unity, here was the eternal and primitive family, the family of the Bible: father, mother, child, beasts of burden, all composing one body with multiple heads.” – Gontran De Poncin describing the Inuit Tribes people Inuit Woman with Children Photo by…

Finally installed the World Wide Telescope (WWT) after downloading it to sit on my desktop (aka “The Place of No Return”) for a few weeks. It’s very impressive, but less impressive when you run it side-by-side with Google Earth (GE). Still, there are a few features that are going to make me keep both softwares…

Myth-Nomers and Im-Pervections A moment of silence please for fantasy/SF author, Robert Asprin, who has passed away at 62. Author of the delightful MYTH Adventures, a seemingly never-ending series of novellas, which chronicled the lovable Skeeve, Aahz, Tananda, the pet dragon Gleep, and the carnival of other characters making up the M.Y.T.H. mythos. I very…

“The dinner we have eaten tonight, was part of the sun but a few months ago.” – Weston Price When geneticists mapped out the human genome, they found a complex world of proteins that will take decades, possibly centuries, to fully decipher. Medical applications, such as gene therapy, cloning, and medications must go through years…

“Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.” – Hobbes The Stuff of Thought I once had a conversation with a girl that went like this: “Ryan, you’re a bama.” “What’s a ‘bama?’” “It’s… you know… what you are.” “That makes no sense.” “A bama’s…

Bonk The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex I was confused when I read several online criticisms of Mary Roach’s new book Bonk that described it as “oddball,” “trivia,” and “idiosyncratic.” Reviewers compared this book, which is about the history of scientific research concerning sex, to books on orchids, spelling bee contestants, or some other…

“There was a time when reading wasn’t just for fags. And neither was writing. People wrote books and movies. Movies with stories that made you care about whose ass it was and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!” – Joe Bowers, Idiocracy Channel-surfing with my siblings during a family…