Psybertron Asks

Out west with Sylvia, Tom and Robbie … Vegas, Death Valley, Sierras, Tahoe, San Francisco, Sequoia, Flagstaff, Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Vegas. Highlight for me was Monument Valley (at 12F) and Sequoia for a white Christmas day – oh, and the pleasure of meeting Alice and Family. Surreal moment, eating dinner outdoors on [...]

Having noticed that the content of the “Taking Science on Faith” post below, provided to me by Gary Wegner, was also in the current edition of The Edge, I see that it is also covered in the comment thread to the Daily Kos post reviewing Paul Davies “Cosmic Jackpot” … The Edge and Paul Davies [...]

A “WiserEarth” presentation by Paul Hawken – on the power of ecodiversity to preserve humanity’s interests through naturally evolving collaboration. (via Mark Federman at McLuhan’s Next Message). Possibly overly optimistic, like Jeffery Sachs global economic message, but thought provoking and worthy of consideration.

A series of interviews by Matt Frei with journalists. bloggers and the YouTube team of under-21 Billionaires, and others across the US. The agenda is about the place of professional journalism in this media revolution … don’t worry Matt, there still is one. One interesting discussion – a traditional journalist expressing the concern with blogging [...]

Interestingly ironic thread with Dave Snowden on Euan Semple’s Obvious about this Doris Lessing comment. Referring a few posts ago, to Johnnie Moore commenting on the persistent inanity of most of what the evolving web technologies are used for. Lest we forget, 99% of the internet is inane crap, because 99% of everything is crap. The [...]

I’ve mentioned many times that “meta” is an important concept – the word itself seems to come and go with fashions. “Meta-X” equals “X concerning X” In my agenda here it is a way, in this Subject / Object oriented world, of taking that one step back from the apparent objects and focusssing on the [...]

Series of two articles and letters to the editor in the NY Times, and a SlashDot thread … Dennis Overbye “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown” Paul Davies “Taking Science on Faith” (More of the same by the same authors in the latest “Edge“) Letters to the NYT Editor “Scientific Method; Evidence not Faith” SlashDot “Where Do the Laws [...]

Did this back in 2003. Sam picked up on it recently, and I was prompted to re-do and see how my outlook has changed. Latest Result 1.  Aquinas   (100%)  Information link 2.  Aristotle   (94%)  Information link 3.  Jeremy Bentham   (72%)  Information link 4.  Plato   (71%)  Information link 5.  John Stuart Mill   (55%)  Information link 6.  St. Augustine   (53%)  Information link 7.  [...]

Shortly after Vonnegut’s death I came across this interview from June 06, but didn’t blog a link. Rectified that.

WTF. As a loyal fan of the Beeb, I have to call them out on this one. Censoring the word “faggot” out of The Pogues and Kirsty McColl’s Fairy Tale of New York. Surely the very best of that dodgy genre of Christmas singles. Response to the vote on censorship, and the “Have Your Say” comment [...]

This news story is the first time I’ve seen the sea-level rise due to global warming correctly described in popular media. Melting of ice over land, and the thermal expansion of the sea-water itself. The “melting of polar ice-caps” meme makes me cringe every time I hear it … forgetting that more than half of [...]

Ten years of blogging. As well as inspiring my own blogging style, Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom was responsible for my “timeline” view of any important subject.

Only caught part of this interview / debate involving Dawkins, but thought I’d better blog the link so I don’t lose it. Got the impression he was looking for compromise ground (?) based on what little I did hear, but reaction by those on the God side of the debate don’t seem to have made [...]

Struck by the focus of stats in this news story on the illegal drug use in baseball. Stephen Jay Gould majors on baseball stats in “Life’s Grandeur”, if I remember correctly, to illustrate on the illusion of trends, and the psychological tendency to seek such number trends in explanations. The tyranny of numbers.

Interesting little snapshot here via Johnnie Moore, originally from Marina’s Bloggariffic on the evolution of blogging. The technology changes like fashions come and go, but the evolution of use, uses that add value to humanity, is comically retarded. The ratio of nuggets to trivia is pretty static …. 90% of X is crap, because 90% [...]

Find myself surfing YouTube one full evening a week or fortnight these days, finding music video of acts I’d long forgotten were important to me (*), often prompted by a link from Rivets, who has his own musical agenda, but the lateral connections are infinite. I blogged about Rory Gallagher some weeks ago, and spent [...]

Just added “Freedom of Science” to the blogroll. Pretty whacky style, but a very similar agenda to mine, in this case aimed at “Newtonism” specifically as the problem rather than “scientific objectivism” more generally in my case. Freeing knowledge from academic categories. But very similar rationale too, about the easy option associated with the immensely [...]

An October 2007  post here from “Island” (Rick Ryals) guesting on “A Quantum Diaries Survivor” (That’s a serious physics blog … so not for the faint-hearted.) Just collecting the link because, I don’t know why, but I need to understand what Island is on about, even if he’s wrong .  I hit the link on [...]

Interesting. I guess the fact that we all post in public (like, Doh ! blogging on the web) means we expect (nay hope) to be picked-up, linked and copied, directly or from feeds, but I hadn’t though of this – people scraping feed content and “passing off” without linking or attribution. As ever, it’s the [...]

I’ve been following e-Paper / e-Ink developments, but this mainstream event almost passed me by. I see Amazon sold out their entire “Kindle” production in five days in late November. A few days later Wikipedia already records the “November 2007″ event as history. I’m interested, particularly if the subscriptions can be extended beyond the US [...]

Last night a colleague recalled the scene from “The Simpsons – The Movie” where Homer questions “Aawww, why do I have to go to church on Sundays. Why can’t I just pray like hell in the final minutes of my life, like everbody else does.” – being scarily close to the truth for some significant [...]