One Sentence Book Reviews, 2011, pt. 2 August 05th, 2011
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 ...
When Life Begins July 11th, 2011
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 ...
One Sentence Book Reviews, 2011 May 10th, 2011
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 ...
The Other Ending of Pulp Fiction January 01st, 2011
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 ...
Labor Implications of Content-Aware Fill April 14th, 2010
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 ...
Meritocracy is the new Aristocracy April 13th, 2010
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 ...
Videogame Meta-narratives April 06th, 2010
Alright, so I just got done with Assassin’s Creed, and while jumping across the rooftops of Damascus and stabbing people in the throat is great fun, what I found really interesting is the story.
Spoilers Follow for Assassin’s Creed and Bioshock
The story in Assassin’s Creed is about a guy wandering through the 12th century holy land ...
Cannibalism March 23rd, 2010
I’ve always said that one of the great and terrifying things about the internet is that it allows all of the niche people to find each other. This means chat rooms and message boards that 99% of the population can’t relate to, and online stores where you can buy pretty much anything.
Cannibalism, for one ...
Are people digital or analog? March 19th, 2010
So I was watching the latest episode of Caprica, which features a digitized person trapped inside of a computer chip. The computer scientists were talking about why they were unable to make a copy of the chip, and the reason that they come up with is that the chip encodes something analog instead of ...
Will Google Fiber really help? March 12th, 2010
If you’re the sort of person who reads this blog, you probably know that Duluth is in the running to become a test city for Google’s proposed ultrahighspeed bandwidth test. At first, I really liked the idea of living in a city with 1 gigabit connection speed, aside from the fact that Google has ...