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This is the third part of a three-part series. Part one, part two are available for perusing. I finished up the last book of the year at 10:20 PM on 12/31/2011, just barely meeting my self-imposed goal of sixty books for the year. I did National Novel Writing Month for November, which slowed me ...

Alright, so I was cruising reddit the other day and found a python script that mines through your comment history and pulls all that information into a text file. I immediately did so. One small downside of this is that only the last three months of comment history are stored for access from ...

First, some definition of terms. When I talk about brain uploading, I mean making a copy of the brain with virtual neurons, virtual chemicals and virtual chemical receptors. I’m also starting with the premise that this virtual copy contains that nebulous quantity I’ll dub “youness”, though obviously that’s up for debate. I ...

Superman has always bugged me. The idea of dressing up in a special outfit and going to fight crime I can sort of understand, but it makes more sense for Batman than for Superman. Batman devotes nearly his whole life to fighting crime; even those token times spent as Bruce Wayne serve mostly ...

I’ve gotten through another twenty books since last time. This puts me about a month ahead of schedule in my reading, which means that I might just have time to read Infinite Jest after all. The Magicians by Lev Grossman – Cynical and somehow still wondrous, and offers a nice variety of emotional impacts. Bossypants by ...

Let me be upfront: this whole blog post is about how much I hate the phrase “Life begins at conception”. The problem is twofold. First, it’s incredibly ambiguous. “Life” can mean a whole bunch of things. I believe when pro-life people use the term, they mean it in the sense of “continuity of ...

Okay, so this year I’m trying to get through 60 books, which I think it a reasonable goal that will keep me reading without getting sick of it. At year-end, I’ll throw the list up along with some graphs about what my genre tendencies tend to be, authors I read, etc., but for now ...

I keep having this same dream where there’s an alternate ending of Pulp Fiction which everyone hates and I find absolutely hilarious. The actual details of this alternate ending aren’t important, because like most dream stuff, they don’t actually make sense in the context of reality. Just imagine me laughing my ass off ...

So I’ve been checking out a lot of the the videos and commentary on Adobe’s new Content-Aware Fill. I find several things about the online discussion to be fairly amusing. Firstly, there are the people who claim that this is fake. I can sort of understand this, as it was originally posted around April ...

It used to be that kings actually were better than everyone else. This was because of their diet; a prince or dauphin growing up would receive a lot more meat than a peasant child, not to mention how much more varied their diet was. So when they finally got to be king, they ...