Looking for alternatives to my current online presences. Hopefully the spam is not as bad as it once was.

Task #1: clear out friends and feeds that are no longer relevant a decade later. If you're still here and want me to know it, comment here.

Peter Birkenhead, a Salon writer, speculated about the stupidity of people who bought The Secret (mostly in the context of lambasting Oprah's endorsements of it) and an acquaintance of mine quipped, "Does the author really think that the all the millions of people who have bought The Secret are total morons?" To which I replied:
Well, "moron" used ( Read more... )

With thanks to sagemichael for the pointer.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Whitehead, Alfred North (1978-07-01). "Chapter I: Fact and Form, Section I", Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) ( ( Read more... )

If I'd been one bus earlier tonight, as originally planned, I'd've felt this one, an order of magnitude stronger than the last. I did feel my office rumble a couple times today, but that happens often enough that it's no doubt caused by large trucks heading for I-680.

( memetastic )

Ever wonder what those airbrushed models looked like before they were photoshopped into the unattainable ideal of so-called beauty?

Wonder no more.

While these are fairly Safe For Work unless your boss is really uptight, you pornhounds should be interested to note that the retoucher has worked for Cheri, Genesis, High Society, and Swank, which ( Read more... )

It was occurring to me last night, while watching The Seventh Seal at the Castro in the wake of reading Orson Scott Card's "Ender Quartet", that free will is an illusion in the same way the Buddhists describe phenomenal existence as an illusion-not that it doesn't exist, but more that it doesn't exist the way that we think it does. In the end, ( Read more... )

Magnitude 3.4 about 15 minutes ago, right where we got the aforementioned triple play.

I'm still hoping that a 3.something quake averaging once a month means the odds of 6+ "Historic Event" become vanishingly small.

A take on the Book of Genesis which I had not previously considered.
It has often been argued, in fact, that mankind lost the happiness characteristic of his fellow-animals when he acquired self-consciousness. This is in fact the meaning of the legend of "The Fall." We have become as gods, knowing good and evil, and the price is that we live by ( Read more... )

We've started a tradition in the house of having Family Dinner on Sunday nights, as a sort of bonding thing, and making sure we all manage to get together once a week, and to reduce some expenses. We cycle through the four adults, each taking a turn at making something for everyone ( Read more... )