ideonexus

interweaving ideas

  • Happy Summer Solstice! Yay! (Northern Solstice)

    Today, June 20th at 23:59 (one minute to midnight UTC (18:59 EST)), the sun will shine at its highest northern latitude for the year, appearing directly overhead for anyone standing at latitude 23.44° north, also known as the tropic of Cancer. Summer Solstice Credit: GI This is the longest day of the year, and from…

  • This Spaceship Earth

    Like Thomas Jefferson, I eat a plant-based diet, with occasional meat in small portions. Like most Americans, I have no idea where the food I consume comes from, or how far it had to travel before reaching my dinner plate. My pickup truck, which gets about 20 MPG. Occasionally On rare occasions, I ride my…

  • Logo Mojo

    We had a contest in our Information Services Division (ISD) of the Aircraft Repair and Supply Center (ARSC) of the United States Coast Guard (USCG) last year to design a new logo. Here was my submission, which came in second place: ISD Logo Last week, exactly one year later, we’ve got t-shirts for the division.…

  • Hulk VS Hulk

    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…

  • John Coleman, Global Warming, and the Price of a Gallon of Gas

    John Coleman, weatherman for KUSI in San Diego, has an unintentionally hilarious rant posted, Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas, where he blames Global Warming Theorists for the high cost of oil and what he seems to think is the impending destruction of civilization because of it. Mind you, it’s not…

  • NY Hall of Science: Optical Illusions

    Dancing Shadows The photo set for this exhibit is a big let down, mostly because the real life display is so dynamic. A still photo doesn’t capture what spinning geometric shapes does to your brain. A photo of a spring that isn’t there has none of the effect of actually trying to reach out and…

  • International Weblogger’s Day 2008: Change

    It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. – Charels Darwin Homo sapiens experience change throughout our lives, but when it comes to changes on the scale of our civilization or environment, we have the perspective of walking along the Earth’s surface,…

  • The Hip Hop Chess Federation and Other Variants on the Immortal Game

    In honor of the recently established Hip Hop Chess Federation, which combines the mental discipline of chess with the physical discipline of the martial arts and the intellectual strength of Hip Hop music (I’m not up on the new stuff, but am a longtime Public Enemy fan), I thought I’d post some inspirations for the…

  • Studio 360: When Particles Collide

    Large Hadron Collider Credit: US LHC Actress Marth Plimpton reads a short short story Lydia Millet was commissioned to write for Studio 360 on the idea of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) producing a black hole, and the cultural, political, and spiritual ramifications of this ludicrously remote possibility. What happens if the worst happens? is…

  • Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody

    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…

  • Alien Peeping Toms

    Space Aliens Grille & Bar Photo by dacotahsgirl I am 99.9 percent certain that the video of an alien peeking through a window is a fabrication. I am aware of the experts who have examined the video and claim its authenticity, but, to my mind, this is like having experts certify Dittoheads have hearts, no…

  • Life in Our Cosmic Backyard

    Arthur C. Clark’s book 2010 has an early scene that was left out of the movie. A Japanese spacecraft has raced to Jupiter’s moon Europa, ahead of a joint American-Russian expedition, to claim the satellite, and all its water, for Japan. Soon after the craft lands, Earth receives a radio transmission from a lone, doomed…