[Note- drafts of this have been shown to friends for the last week. THIS IS THE FINISHED VERSION! If you haven't read a draft of this essay with this header, you haven't read this essay. Thanks!]


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This whole topic began because I was talking with Dan about the autonomy of ships. Especially with nuclear power, naval vessels rarely need to see port; in fact, one class of naval ship- missile subs- are designed to outlast their country of origin in a nuclear war. They hide deep where they can't be found, then surface to launch thermonuclear ( Read more... )

I'm rewatching the X-Files. On VHS tapes, which means that instead of a complete season, have a set of selected episodes "chosen by fans" most of which have to do with the larger story arc- government collaboration with aliens to create a hybrid species (or, later, humans immune to the black oil) that can survive colonization. The house only has ( Read more... )

( Final Report on Relief Expedition in Haiti )

I mentioned the words "snowmobile" and "snowmachine" to my upstate NY grandfather. He said that snow machines were what the ski slopes used when nothing fell from the sky, the vehicles are called snowmobiles. In fact, this seems to be the consensus usage in the northern band of the US, with predictable intrusions by the preferred Canadian term (" ( Read more... )

Yesterday the Philadelphia Inquirer ran an opinion piece by former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum entitled “Challenging Scientific Dogma.” The content was exactly what you’d expect based on the title and Sen. Santorum’s exceptional record in congress- a combined indictment of both the “high priests of Darwinism” for their insistence that “free ( Read more... )

I'm rerouting my response to this comment on my last post to a new, top-level post. I can do that because its my blog, but I don't want ChipUni that I'm so annoyed I need to clear the decks ( Read more... )

Fuck You and Fuck Your Fucking Thesis

Why I Will Not Participate in Trans StudiesDear Mr. or Ms. Grad Student, I am sorry to report that I will not participate in your study as a data point. I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish. I don't trust you. I don't like you. I don't care if you succeed. In fact, I kind of think you suck ( Read more... )

It suddenly occurred to me that our culture of "preparedness" is perhaps the most sensible way to understand the government's response to swine flu. On the one hand, its a bad epidemic, and people are dying, but not in anything like the numbers of the 1918 flu and certainly not like Alex Jones was prophesying even quite recently. At the same time ( Read more... )

Although I missed the boat in terms of writing anything on the internet here before the facts were well publicized, I did do the math to confirm my initial assumption ("that's a bullshit publicity stunt") and I can share it all for you here ( Read more... )