ideonexus

interweaving ideas

  • Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought

    “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…

  • The Top 10 Human Genes

    As the purposes for various genes are identified on a weekly basis in the news, this list will be obsolete in a few months, but I wanted to post this. There aren’t enough plain-English reviews of human genes out there. I apologize if I bullox up something. My criteria was based on the importance of…

  • Elitists Rule!

    Hillary Clinton, when recently asked if she could name one economist who thought her “Gas Tax Holiday” was a good idea, responded: I’m not going to put my lot in with economists… We’ve got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage…

  • Seeing His Holiness, Sir Mr. Pope, in NY

    My sister and I had some difficulty getting into the MoMa because the street was closed so the Pope could come down one of the adjacent roads. Luckily, my sister showed me how to get past the police barricade (you wait until their dealing with someone else and walk past them). Of course, a friend…

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art: Design and the Elastic Mind

    I was in New York recently to see this fascinating exhibit before it moved on, and I was not let down. Science, knowledge, and technological progress are cultural tools available to us all, and they grow exponentially. The more science we know, the more doors to knowledge are open to us. The more technology we…

  • Suicide Support Online

    A recent study in the BMJ Suicide and the Internet, found that results for suicide-related search terms most frequently support or encourage suicide. I like to think of the Internet as one big ecosystem of ideas, or memes, where our minds naturally select out the good ones. Obviously, if most sites are pro-suicide, then we…

  • The Joys of Windows Vista

    Microsoft has come up with a novel solution to the issue of security in Windows Vista. The basic principle is don’t let the user do anything. You see, if users are prevented from any productivity whatsoever, they can’t screw things up right? Take for instance User Account Control. This is a new “feature” (note the…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…