-
Respect--
Some of you may know that I sometimes read Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson's blog. I was glancing through his blog today and I saw that he's included in his blogroll a link to Roissy in DC. (What follows is a pretty biased summary.) Roissy is a pickup artist (as they call themselves). Pickup artists as a whole believe in the theory that women are ( Read more... ) -
Olympos and the Complexities of Definitions
I have written before about formal definitions of science fiction and fantasy, though I think the most extensive form of that discussion took place on FunWiki. In a formal sense, science fiction and fantasy are both subgenres of speculative fiction: I define speculative fiction as "Fiction that has not taken place in this universe," science ( Read more... ) -
The Ontogeny of Sciences
I have recently read on the recommendation of one of my professors. While his take on the role of librarians in particular makes good points, I wrote this essay to address something that I believe he is wrong about, the relationship between the natural and formal (e.g., mathematics) and the social sciences.
( Physics is an exemplar because it is easy ) -
(Untitled)
In a conversation last night with a friend, I mentioned that I would like to do to Ray Blanchard what Dan Savage did to Rick Santorum. He suggested that we should use "to blanchard" to mean, "To defend your hypothesis by accusing everyone who would refute it of lying or delusion."
Sample usages:
- Gregory House loves to blanchard people.
- ( Read more... )
-
(Untitled)
This will make no sense to anyone who doesn't have my morbid fascination with bad science fiction. (Note that I only know about these novels by reputation, having not read any of them; but the content, I think, is quite enough to put them in that category aside from any possible lack of literary merit.) However, this is a beautiful parody:The Cartesian Theater Lives
"Brains can have many intervening steps in the circuits mediating between stimulus and response, and still have no mind, if they do not meet an essential condition: the ability to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought ( Read more... )(Untitled)
What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The West
Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you're a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta.
The Midland
( Read more... )Book Meme
I also plagiarized the following explanation from someone else who was passing along this meme: This is a list of the 50 "most significant" science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished, and put an ( Read more... )