When humans finally wipe themselves out, they’ll probably do so much splash damage that they take down the entire planetary ecosystem, which means that the other animals – which had nothing to do with causing the disaster – will suffer, too.
Blogging forces your own adequacy in your face, and if you’re a skeptical blogger, you wind up examining it closely to make sure your assessment of your own mediocrity is not too full of confirmation bias. Then, you turn to the list of things in your head that you want to write about, and wonder if you can do them justice.
… By buying a cheap-crap LED flashlight that was probably made in China!
A while back, Caine posted some pictures from Vaught’s Practical Character Reader. I did what I usually do when someone posts about an interesting old book – I checked for it on Ebay.
The Unification Church (AKA: “moonies”) held a ceremony to bless ‘the rod of iron’ – AR-15s. So everyone brought guns to church (unloaded, with the triggers ziptied).
The intelligence state has not been collecting data for its own entertainment; they have to find a use for it. Remember back to when the Bush administration’s secret interception program was disclosed? Probably the most painful bit of news in it was that the NSA wasn’t (yet) capable of doing anything particularly interesting or useful with the data.
David Landes’ The Unbound Prometheus is on my recommended reading list; [amaz] it’s an account of the changes in European societies brought about by the industrial revolution. It’s a book you can pick up, open to a page at random, and learn something fascinating.
… was when he went through the mouth of Hell.”
Recent discussion in some comments brought up the nature/nurture question and Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate.
This is a counterpoint to our lesson regarding the parking pastor. [stderr] [Read more…]