Tag: reviews
-
Neil Shubin’s “Your Inner Fish”
“The best road maps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals.” – Neil Shubin Your Inner Fish There’s a fascination to tearing apart an old house, tracing its history through what you find hidden behind the plaster. Electrical wires and pipes will run up to the attic and across, instead of taking…
-
Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”
The Blank Slate I love books that shake up my preconceptions, and reading Pinker’s book was like experiencing one big personal iconoclasm. The thoroughness with which he engaged gender, violence, intelligence, and other aspects of our social understandings unsettled my positions on much of the whole “Nature VS Nurture” debate. While it did not convince…
-
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…
-
Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science”
A New Kind of Science Many books I like to read with a yellow highlighter, reading Stephen Wolfram’s ANKOS I was compelled to whip out a red pen. While his 1,000-plus page field-guide to cellular automata and complexity theory is brimming with fantastic examples of all shapes, sizes, and dimensions, Wolfram’s writing and failure to…
-
What a Wonderful Trip It’s Been: Y the Last Man
Y the Last Man I would love to go back and read through all the graphic novels I’ve bought collecting this series from its beginnings, but they’ve all been loaned out to people who loaned them out to other people and so on and so on. I did recently have the time to review my…
-
Dr. Jay Hosler’s “Clan Apis”
Clan Apis Clan Apis chronicles the life and times of a single worker honey bee, Nyuki, who’s delightfully wise-ass and wholly enchanted with her life in a hive where her personal experiences are no different from those of the her thousands of neighbors. Dr. Jay Hosler’s understanding of entomology, evolution, and natural science allows him…
-
Cloverfield Creeped Me Out
Saw Clovefield this morning and the film has been haunting me all day. It’s abstractness, catching glimpses of the monster here and there, trying to figure it out, has left me distracted and scouring the Web for more information. A commenter I read at one site said to watch the ocean carefully in the background…
-
A Tale of Two Flatland Movies
Flatland the Movie VS Flatland the Film I really enjoyed and appreciated Edwin Abott’s 1884 classic book Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions, which tells the story of Square, a lawyer living in Flatland, a two-dimensional world that has height and width, but not length. It’s in the public domain and free to download at…
-
The OLPC XO-1, Shortcut to the Information Age
So I got my OLPC XO-1 in the mail about a month ago, and I’m still wrestling with my opinion of it. Personally I think it’s the bee’s knees. Everyone who comes into the comic shop fawns over it. I’m the envy of the local geek crowd. I love it when people ask me, “What’s…
-
Review: Sunshine
Scene from Sunshine Aside from the original Night of the Living Dead, I full on loathe zombie films. The plots are always the same, a virus (or magic) turns people into perpetual-motion flesh eating things. Big whoop. That was until the independent film 28 Days Later came out and reinvented zombies. Only these weren’t walking-dead,…
-
Science Gift Ideas: Lego Digital Designer
My Legoland Avatar This free software is available for download, and is a great way to introduce your child to 3-D Modeling software. It’s also free and didn’t cause my computer to explode, so you’ve got nothing to lose by trying it out. A huge selection of Lego parts are available in the application, which…