PARTNER ( Read more... )

I've been thinking about all the science fiction stories we've told over the past century or so in which the machines rise up and overthrow mankind, and I realize that almost all of the follow the pattern Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set out in the Communist Manifesto.Think about it: Man starts out creating machines to help him perform labor. As ( Read more... )

Have any of you guys ever met/kept one of these things? I have decided I should probably get a pet, and they sound like a reasonably conservative first pet for someone who's never raised any land animals before.

Why are the Persian Immortals a mounted unit while the Japanese Samurai are an infantry unit?
Why is Chinggis Khagan's favored civic "Police State" rather than "Free Religion"?
Why is Gilgamesh of Sumeria in this game, when Sundiata Keita of Mali is not?
Why is India's special unit the Fast Worker? Is this a bad joke?

My mom has always told me, since I was really little, that I was smart and a gifted child and a luminous intelligence and stuff like that. It always confused me at that age, since I wasn't really sure how anyone else thought or felt and as such how they could figure out that I was smart when all I did was do stuff that seemed fun or satisfying all ( Read more... )

I've been reading Carl von Clausewitz's On War, a treatise on strategy and warfare, for the past few days. It's short, dense, and oftentimes a little confusing-maybe it's the translation, but he starts sounding a little like Aristotle at times. Still, he brings up a number of really important concepts which I've been thinking about myself as I ( Read more... )

The Bronx is the ugliest cocktail I have ever seen. It's also delicious. I have been wondering why sweet red vermouth really exists for a long time, and it seems it exists for this drink.

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From Sepia Mutiny comes an act of truly inspired trolling, which any Indian Americans reading this blog should get all up on.

I know many people have thought lolcats played out for a long, long time, but I declare that as of today …

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( not really a spoiler )